EDITORIAL PAGE — Engineering some respect

Except for the period of the Industrial Revolution, mining through the ages has seldom been in the good books of society as a whole.

The Roman poet Ovid around the time of Christ wrote of those “wicked men” who “descended into the entrails of the earth, and … dug up riches, those incentives to vice, which the earth had hidden and removed to the Stygian shades.”

Pliny, another ancient Roman thinker, regarded iron as “the most deadly fruit of human ingenuity.”

By the Middle Ages, mining still hadn’t received much good press. (Image buffers, like P.R. firm Hill & Knowlton, were to appear only several centuries later.) Georgius Agricola, a Saxon medical practitioner, noted the world regarded the occupation of mining as “one of sordid toil, and altogether a kind of business requiring not so much skill as labor.” Agricola didn’t share that view. In fact, he studied the state-of-the-art in mining, such as it was, and produced De Re Metallica, published in 1556. This first comprehensive tome brought together everything that was known at the time about mining techniques, metallurgy, geology and industrial chemistry. In spite of Agricola’s efforts, mining was still stigmatized, according to A.J. Wilson in The Professionals, a history of the Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.

“(M)ining never enjoyed much social acceptance,” Wilson wrote. “Saxon miners did not help the cause by cloaking certain of their activities in a secrecy known only to families and guilds, or to other closely knit societies.” (To a limited extent, that secrecy is still with us today. Consider the Ritual of the Calling of the Engineer, known as the Kipling Ritual, in which every graduating engineer participates. No one outside the profession is to know what words pass during the initiation ceremony. This should not be construed as a criticism, however. The ritual itself, we would imagine, serves the purpose of instilling a sense of pride and kinship among budding engineers. Only if it leads to a sense of elitism and insularity, is it the wrong tack today.)

Engineers today must broaden their outlook and communicate to a larger, often non-professional audience. Just such an admonition was delivered late last year at a semi-annual meeting of the Canadian Council of Professional Engineers by Hector Jacques, president of engineering firm Jacques Whitford Group of Nova Scotia. He said engineers must broaden their traditional role as merely “executors of projects.

“It is only by getting more involved in the political processes behind major projects that engineers can fully meet the pledge of all engineers to protect and maintain public health and safety,” he told the gathering. “If the public is to maintain its positive view of the profession, then we must be seen as taking a larger chunk of responsibility vis-a-vis the projects we bring to life,” he said.

He made the point that engineers are positioned to provide solutions because they understand intimately the technologies and processes which have brought on many of the problems in the first place.

Jacques’ call for a more activist engineering fraternity are particularly relevant today, as the Canadian mining industry reaches out with its “Keep Mining in Canada” campaign and the Whitehorse Inititative. It might also silence modern-day Ovids.