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There is an old saying that doctors save lives one at a time and civil engineers save them a thousand at a time. The newspapers today are full of stories of civil engineering. They include massive cranes being towed to New York to build a new bridge, a tunnel boring machine stuck in Seattle, a water crisis in Iran, and droughts in Southern California.

While a lot of high-tech consumer gadgets garner a lot of attention, the fundamental things of life are more essential. If you can’t get to where you’re going, the products will never get to you. While we can live without the gadgets, we can’t live without water for more than a couple of days. And the future these days is about those fundamental kinds of things.

Civil engineering is the oldest engineering profession – all you have to do is look at the Roman aqueducts in Europe. The evolution of this practice has changed enormously in the last century.

Civil engineers 100 years ago were charged with opening up the country, and in our case a forest-covered state, to the influx of migration from Europe. The engineers of that day, such as Conde McCullough, took on that task and built the first phase of our infrastructure. But those engineers had a different view of the world than we have today. Their view was to quickly construct the projects to allow for economic development of the state.

Today’s challenges are different. We can get almost everywhere we need to, so the critical fundamentals have been pretty much taken care of. The challenge for today’s engineers is how to continue to provide for the needs of today’s society while taking into account the much more significant impact that we have on our environment.

The dramatic changes in the civil engineering profession are evident in both the projects that are built as well as the tools that are used to engineer these projects. From high-precision mechanical devices such as the theodolites and chains, the profession has evolved into a sophisticated computer-based practice that requires a high level of knowledge. The Oregon Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers is celebrating its 100th anniversary and is holding a reception on April 25 to note this milestone.

But it’s not just Oregon engineers who are critical to our future. Civil engineers in the Middle East, Asia and Africa will make a bigger difference in this planet’s future. For it is there that a population is exploding and evolving from a subsistence to a 21st century lifestyle in just a generation. These people lack a grasp of their impact on the environment. They are concerned with their own material advancement, just as we were 100 years ago.

We in Oregon had our challenges in the last century. People in developing regions have their challenges in this century – and our world inextricably ties us to what they choose to do.

Christian Steinbrecher is president of Columbia River Port Engineers Inc. and the immediate past president of the Oregon Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He is the editor of ASCE Oregon’s Report Card on Oregon’s Infrastructure.