Civil Engineers

"The role of Canada’s nuclear regulator is to protect people from risk, not get in the way of progress."

"It’s certainly been a topic of interest – including at COP26. There is a growing understanding that to meet net zero goals, nuclear will need to play a larger role."

"We know the challenges we face. But we also know that we are up to the task – and that, together, we can achieve real progress. It is up to us to lead by example. It is up to us to seize this opportunity. It is up to us not only to ask – but to help answer – the question: “What can we do better?"

"It's probably the most sophisticated fuel cycle in the world that will cover all aspects of nuclear power, and we do each part of it to world standards, where the world looks towards us"

"In Uganda people used to think that construction, civil engineering and mechanical work were for men. I wanted to break this stereotype that certain jobs are for men and others are for women. I also wanted to show people that women can do the same things that men can do."

"Across the world, poor children are at higher risk of dying. Unless we urgently get more money into the hands of women, who spend more on the wellbeing of their families, children will continue to die. The economic marginalisation of women, too, is a lingering epidemic; and it threatens the growth and stability of the global economy. Unlike AIDS, this epidemic remains at its peak; funding remains flat and indicators deteriorate. Where is the comprehensive action?"

"Men were amazed when they saw us working on site, so I think that’s something really good. At first they thought I was challenging them and didn’t believe (I would succeed), but then they said “good, you’ve done it”."

"It wasn’t easy because people were telling me I couldn’t do it (pursue a career in engineering) and were suggesting that I should take a different course such as electrical or business. But then, when I came second in the class during practical exams, everyone was very surprised and they couldn’t believe (I could achieve it). I proved them wrong and then things changed. People now look at me as a role model, someone who is different. Many young people are following in my footsteps and many are starting to think that women really can do men’s jobs."

"I studied engineering because my father and I agreed that my aim to be a singer/dancer/actress could come after I had one degree under my belt."

"As a believer in hard hats and lipstick, I hope that everyone will realise that from an early age, we should allow our children (boys and girls) to be the best they can be and not put anyone, especially our girls, in a box."

"My parents are both one of eight children, which tells you how many aunts and uncles and cousins I have, and who, by virtue of their link to me through family, have a "right" over me!"

"Working with young girls from all walks of life, I try to use their own environment to show them how they can start to identify problems and find solutions in their homes, communities and ultimately our country, through engineering."

"Yes, we are mothers, wives, nurses and teachers, but we're also engineers, rocket scientists and neurophysicists."

"Suffice to say, I finished my engineering degree and started working as an engineer in London in 1989, and have done so ever since."

"Fast forward to 2011 and I moved back to Sierra Leone to build the first five-star hotel in the country, with funding raised by Sierra Leoneans and a company, IDEA UK, owned by Sierra Leoneans."

"We have stayed committed to the Party's decision to establish Comrade Xi Jinping's core position on the Party Central Committee and in the Party as a whole."

"I am also looking forward to making impact on the lives of women."

"I think that the needs of the people, that is, the majority of the people – healthcare, education, security, and water."

"It is not very difficult to exclude the women and they do not exclude us; we get involved in as many things as we like to."

"The nation that wishes to defend its land and its honour must spare no effort, refuse no sacrifice to make itself so formidable that no enemy will dare to assail it. A may be an instrument for the preservation of peace, but an efficient Army is a far more potent one."

""Feed your troops on victory," is a maxim which does not appear in any text-book, but it is nevertheless true."

"This achievement is, above everything else, an illustration, which should become classic, of the maxim that in war the moral is to the material as three to one."

"I had formed the theory that the true rôle of the Infantry was not to expend itself upon heroic physical effort, nor to wither away under merciless machine-gun fire, nor to impale itself on hostile bayonets, nor to tear itself to pieces in hostile entanglements — (I am thinking of Pozières and Stormy Trench and Bullecourt, and other bloody fields) — but, on the contrary, to advance under the maximum possible protection of the maximum possible array of mechanical resources, in the form of guns, machine guns, tanks, mortars and aeroplanes; to advance with as little impediment as possible; to be relieved as far as possible of the obligation to fight their way forward; to march, resolutely, regardless of the din and tumult of battle, to the appointed goal; and there to hold and defend the territory gained; and to gather in the form of prisoners, guns and stores, the fruits of victory."

"Your work goes a long way in telling what kind of person you are. If you’re a sloppy person, it will manifest itself in your presentation."

"“I love giving. I’ve trained over 100 kids, and I don’t know 99.9 per cent of them. I pay school fees for indigent children in my mother’s and father’s villages and I’ve been doing it since I was in my thirties,”"

"More importantly, I think one’s attitude towards work also matters. If you’re hard-working and people find that you put in all your efforts into your work, you will get patronized to a large degree. All through my 41 years in the industry, I’ve always been busy with work. There’s never been a time I have no job to do."

"I feel a woman is first and foremost a human being before being a woman."

"Women are good at multi-tasking, parents should bring up their kids properly today so they can have a peaceful tomorrow."

"I believe that Nigerian engineers are as good as engineers anywhere in the world because we are trained properly. But the problem we have is this Re‐training, Continuous Professional Development activity which I know that Tech Grade Consulting tries as much as possible to carry out. But you see the problem is with us. We do not believe in going back to school. We don’t believe in up grading our knowledge. We don’t believe in improving on whatever we had had before. Most of us forget that engineering is not static. That is our problems. So we end up haviing very old and obsolete information and knowledge which we use in doing our work. I am as guilty as everybody and again, I think it is the society. The environment is not being created to take care of this problem. Edition.pdf"

"When you pick up anything to do, do it very well; don’t be shoddy. Put in your best always and make sure your best is good enough. If you work hard, God will bless you except there is something very wrong."

"“You’ll always stand out if you aren’t sloppy”"

"The money system is bad for social and environmental sustainability. But this Report also proves – perhaps more surprisingly – that the money system is bad for the money system itself. Unless we fundamentally restructure it, we cannot achieve monetary stability. Indeed, this Report also demonstrates that monetary stability itself is possible if, and only if, we apply systemic biomimicry – that is to say, if we complement the prevailing monetary monopoly with what we call a ‘monetary ecosystem’."

"This Report shows that the current money system is both a crucial part of the overall sustainability ‘problem’ and a vital part of any solution. It makes clear that awareness of this ‘Missing Link’ is an absolute imperative for economists, environmentalists and anyone else trying to address sustainability at a national, regional or global level. Aiming for sustainability without restructuring our money system is a naive approach, doomed to failure."

"Dealing with the Eurozone Crisis... Another Way? As we go to press, the Greek electorate – after two years of drastic austerity measures – has voted clearly against the cuts, the bailout and the political mainstream. Chaos in the eurozone seems one step closer. So we take this opportunity to outline how just one of the proposals from this book can be applied now, in Greece, Spain or any other country facing this kind of crisis. It’s a solution that mainstream financiers and media avoid discussing, but it’s elegant and simple. It would work, and the necessary (Open Source) software is available now. Current monetary orthodoxy says that 100% of the Greek (or any other) economy must be either ‘in’ or ‘out’ of the eurozone. Everybody knows that either option will entail even higher unemployment and yet more misery. But it doesn’t have to be that way! The core principle of complementary currencies, as set out here, is that they run alongside the main currency, increasing resilience and flexibility for the entire socio-economic system."

"Money is like an iron ring we've put through our noses. We've forgotten that we designed it, and it's now leading us around. I think it's time to figure out where we want to go--in my opinion toward sustainability and community--and then design a money system that gets us there."

"Here’s our systemic solution in a nutshell:"

"While economic textbooks claim that people and corporations are competing for markets and resources... in reality they are competing for money - using markets and resources to do so. So designing new money systems really amounts to redesigning the target that orients much human effort."

"Greece continues to use the euro for all international business: tourism, shipping, exports and imports, etc. Taxes are levied in euros on profits made in these activities, and used to service the country’s national debt."

"Bernard was an international expert in the design and implementation of currency systems. He studied and worked in the field of money for more than 30 years in an unusually broad range of capacities including as a Central Banker, a fund manager, a university professor, and a consultant to governments in numerous countries, multinational corporations, and community organizations. He co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism to the single European currency system (the Euro) and served as president of the Electronic Payment System at the National Bank of Belgium (the Belgian Central Bank). He co-founded and managed GaiaCorp, a top performing currency fund whose profits funded investments in environmental projects. A former professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain, he has also taught at Sonoma State University and Naropa University. He was currently a Research Fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resources of the University of California at Berkeley. He was also a member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, the World Business Academy, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts."

"In his book The Future of Money, Lietaer points out - as the government did yesterday - that in situations like ours everything grinds to a halt for want of money. But he also explains that there is no reason why this money should take the form of sterling or be issued by the banks. Money consists only of "an agreement within a community to use something as a medium of exchange." The medium of exchange could be anything, as long as everyone who uses it trusts that everyone else will recognize its value. During the Great Depression, businesses in the United States issued rabbit tails, seashells and wooden discs as currency, as well as all manner of papers and metal tokens. In 1971, Jaime Lerner, the mayor of Curitiba in Brazil, kick-started the economy of the city and solved two major social problems by issuing currency in the form of bus tokens. People earned them by picking and sorting litter: thus cleaning the streets and acquiring the means to commute to work. Schemes like this helped Curitiba become one of the most prosperous cities in Brazil."

"We will never create sustainability while immersed in the present financial system. There is no tax, or interest rate, or disclosure requirement that can overcome the many ways the current money system blocks sustainability. I used not to think this. Indeed, I did not think about the money system at all. I took it for granted as a neutral and inevitable aspect of human society. But since beginning to read Bernard’s analyses I have a very different view. He is not alone. For example Thomas Greco has written on this topic. But the depth of Bernard’s practical experience, theoretical understanding, and historical perspectives on the financial system leave him without peer."

"This is not a book on economics or economic theory. I am not an economist. My expertise lies in international finance and money systems. This is why I have adopted here a whole systems approach to money. Whole systems take into account a broader, more comprehensive arena than economics does; it integrates not only economic interactions but also their most important side effects. This includes specifically in our case the effects of different money systems on the quality of human interactions, on society at large, and on ecological systems. In essence, money is a lifeblood flowing through ourselves, our society, our global human community, and should be acknowledged and treated consciously."

"Part One of The Future of Money elucidates the mysteries of the current official currency system. Part Two widens the view to encompass and feature newly emerging money systems. Therefore, this book deals with money in the world outside of us, describing how different money systems shape society."

"I have been reading the literature on sustainability for 40 years. I have attended hundreds of conferences on the same theme over that period. However, before I first encountered Bernard’s work, I had never heard anyone describe the financial system as a cause of our society’s headlong rush to collapse. Quite the contrary: there is a widespread effort to identify how minor changes in the financial system could move global society over to a path that leads to sustainability..."

"Dr. Bernard Lietaer, Co-creator of the Euro and a pioneer in community currencies, joined the Bancor Protocol Foundation last year and will advise the project. Both he and the Bancor team have been outspoken on the potential of community currencies to combat global poverty using a bottom-up approach to sustainable economic development. The efforts come as a number of groups aim to use blockchain and smart contracts to build the next generation of aid and impact investing tools."

"Today we mourn the passing of Bernard Lietaer, one of the greatest monetary innovators of our time & President of the Bancor Foundation. Bernard was a financial justice warrior. He will be truly missed... A student at MIT in the late 1960s, Lietaer conducted an in-depth study on floating exchange rates. While working in the central banking sector, he was involved with the development of the European Currency Unit, which was a precursor to the Euro. His innovative ideas about money and how it could be changed to work for people were developed well before the blockchain was invented. He had long seen the potential in decentralized financial systems and how they could tackle issues with fiat currency monopolies."

"In addition, any Greek city/region wanting to participate can issue its own local currency (generically called ‘Civics’ in the case study in chapter VIII). Civics are used to pay for important local, social and environmental programs. In our example, 1 Civic is issued to anyone who completes 1 hour of approved service to the community. Projects for which Civics are paid should be decided democratically and locally."

"Part One brings our hidden assumptions about money to the surface. In doing so, it also brings to light new potentials for our interactions with money. It is not about how to make, invest or spend money. There are already plenty of books about all of that. It is about the concept of money, and how different money systems shape different societies."

"When we think about money, we tend to take for granted its basic characteristics, which have remained unchanged for centuries. We are not likely to visit the hidden assumptions embedded in our familiar money system, and we are even less likely to re-examine them in search of solutions."

"People concerned with sustainability in general – with issues like climate change, environmental degradation, food and water shortages, population growth and energy use – tend not to worry about the money system. Nor do they tend to look for solutions that involve monetary innovations. Even those economists who are also concerned about sustainability in principle are seldom aware that our money system systematically encourages unsustainable behaviour patterns that may end up threatening human survival on this planet."