"Less is the new more", the future of engineering - Episode 1

This post is part of a series related to the future of engineering as I see it.
This sequence of daily Swarn’s blog post will last a week, from october 12th to october 16th.
Enjoy!

Episode 1: Setting the scene

The uncomfortable and heartbreaking sequence depicts extenuated chimpanzees looking desperately for shelter in a devastated Amazon-like rainforest.
It appears at the end of the “Planet of the humans” documentary from Michael Moore and is meant to illustrate what will happen if humanity doesn’t change.
Just before that striking sequence, the narrator explains over a rising moon clip that “infinite growth in a finite planet is suicide” and that “less must be the new more”.

The tone used and the conclusion message were rather unusual for me and certainly polemical for others. I’ve always been well aware of the climate crisis and sensitive to my own ecological impact. But I have to admit the approach proposed in the documentary conclusion was quite new to me.
I was looking for a way to increase my positive impact on the climate crisis at professional level. What if, to fight climate change, “less had to be the new more” and I was unaware of it?

At the time of this discovery, I was getting more and more concerned about my children’s future because of our planet’s condition getting worse¹. I believed my experience as an engineer in the aerospace industry could be useful in some way but didn’t figure out yet how.
It took me several months to build myself an opinion on that “less is the new more” concept and understand what engineers like me could get out of it.

In the end, I discovered how to maximize my positive impact on the ecological crisis at professional level. I also discovered how engineering has to evolve to enable our societal transition to a more sustainable world.

The summary of my journey continues in Episode 2!