Unrealized Mineral Deposit

Unexpected benefits of living in Fort McMurray

One brief follow-up to the ducks debacle, and I’ll let it fade into the sunset as it already seems to have done: only a few days earlier, an employee was crushed by a haul truck at an oil sands operation. It never even made the news.

Also, a disclaimer: this entry is rather rambling and incoherent. I apologize for this - I’m afraid I’m out of practice and still adjusting to my new shift schedule. It’s better than the 12:30AM-12:30PM shift I worked for 6 months a few years ago as a security guard, but graveyard turnarounds always take me a couple weeks to adjust to.

Short of crushing somebody or getting hopelessly lost, I have so far managed to make nearly every possible mistake a haul truck driver can make over the course of my training. Especially amusing was switching the digital speedometer to metric from imperial and failing to realize that the load measurement also switched, resulting in a 10-ton overload. Especially stupid was getting stuck axle-deep for over an hour and a half on a dump, and needing two bulldozers to pull me out.

Despite being across town from most of the other students, I’m actually restarting some old habits I’ve lost: most going to the gym, cooking, and reading. Of the three, reading is the one I’m happiest about. Back in highschool I hardly spent a night without reading a book before going to sleep, but I unfortunately lost it in late highschool and early university as there were too many demands on my time and I didn’t have any clear idea of what I wanted to read. Partially that was a result of trying to read War and Peace well before I was ready to understand or even enjoy it. There are actually two libraries nearby, the Fort McMurray public library at city hall, and the Keyano College library right across the street. I’ve just finished a fairly interesting, and actually kinda relevant book, Hitler’s Scientists, and now I’m starting on something I’ve wanted to read for a few years: The Feynman Lectures on Physics.

The story of science under the Nazis is interesting for several reasons. Firstly there is the general mismanagement. Secondly there are the startling levels of inhumanity. Thirdly, and most interestingly, there are the arguments about the role of science in society, the amount of freedom accorded to science and scientists, and the ethical responsibilities of scientists. Given that engineering is also known as applied science, these considerations are just as important if not being even more relevant.

Obviously we are no longer dealing with the extreme consternation felt by those physicists who were involved in bringing nuclear power and weapons into the world. But we are still dealing with new uses for nuclear weapons, and other, far more terrifying, possibilities. The “patenting of nature,” referring to the patenting of certain genes by scientists and companies, is an especially disturbing trend. One of the worst effects of this behaviour, in my opinion, is the stifling of free information and research.

A dangerous analogy to draw would be that we have replaced the Nazi regime’s ideological tyranny, into which party members and ordinary scientists attempted to pigeonhole their work and indeed their entire disciplines, with the tyranny of commercialization. Dangerous because, like most analogies, it is hardly completely accurate. Also, I’m generally leery of making comparisons to the Nazis - it’s an unfortunate consequence of the material I just finished reading. It is interesting to note that one criticism of string theory is the lack of any concrete results achieved under its auspices - or in other words, it’s produced nothing anybody can sell.

The only clear lesson to be taken from this is that the regime under which we work, democratic or otherwise, cannot absolve us of our responsibility to consider the possible consequences of our research and actions. There is no justification for the theory that atrocities of science are not possible under “civilized” forms of government. But where does this put me, the engineer-in-training working for an oil sands operation?

Is it my ethical duty to not work in the oil sands, knowing of the various environmental impacts that are involved not only in the production but subsequent use of the crude oil product? Or is this duty satisfied by acknowledging those impacts and working to mitigate them? Given that I am hardly working in an engineering capacity at the moment (student haul truck driver ranks about the bottom of the totem pole), does this even warrant a pause for thought? Heck, what if I put aspects of the Canadian economy ahead of environmental damage for whatever reason?

I’m certainly glad I haven’t had to take an ethics course yet - seems like it’d be a ton of back-and-forth arguments designed to justify whatever we’re already doing. We’re forced at school to take courses which may, briefly, touch on the impact of engineering on society, but unfortunately they rarely seem to work out the way that might be expected due to the huge quantity of complete and utter misinformation perpetrated upon us by our erstwhile classmates. However, the overall point was not lost: through the application of technology by engineers, the world has been shaped into the form it is today, and our daily decisions will determine the form it will take tomorrow.

Perhaps that gives me the simplest answer to the question of my ethical responsibility: would I want to be alive in the world my decisions create? Would I want to raise children in it? Until I take that ethics course, that’ll be my litmus test.