EDITOR’S CORNER
Student Issue: Developing Professional Behavior; Climate Change; Threats to Licensure
John L. Berry, CPG-04032
We have received a gratifying flood of well-written sub- missions for this Student Issue: two papers coauthored by students for peer review, and three other technical papers by students, three student essays, six reports by students on their field course experiences, and twelve articles by CPGs wishing to pass on their experience and advice to students and young professionals. One of these (Mathews) is a very instructive short story about how a little corruption leads into a vortex of more and more corruption, ending up with career and personal destruction. There is an enormous fund of information about the value of keeping an open mind to all experience, technical and interpersonal (Herbert, Elliott), the importance of net- working (Dail, Burton), of thinking “outside the box”(Elliott), and of developing an interesting resume and a winning inter- viewing style (May and Brackman, Adler) contained in these articles. Two of them (Ridgely and Stinson, both based on personal experiences in the field, deal with the importance of professional behavior in the face of the unprofessional, even exploitative, behavior of others: Stinson, in particular, deals with issues of diversity.
It is eight years since The Professional Geologist has printed any articles discussing climate change: the emotions provoked at the time were very divisive. However, in this issue I have decided to gently reopen the topic, partly as a consequence of receiving a Letter to the Editor (Diefendorf) pointing out that, if we appear to have a closed mind on the subject, we will potentially turn away many of the younger generation who could otherwise benefit immensely from our focus on ethical and professional behavior and from the national and international acceptance of CPG status as a guarantee of competence. As threats to State Licensure mount in intensity, the CPG is likely to become more important, not less so, and the benefits of membership in AIPG more apparent. A report on the fate of licensure in Texas, and the role of AIPG in successfully defending it, appears in this issue.
We all have our views on the subject of climate change, but I hope that we can discuss it without becoming carried away by personal rancor. My own view is col- ored by having grown up on the outwash plain of the Weichselian (Wisconsin) max- imum advance, and my earliest hunting expeditions for left-handed gastropods in the gravels of a Plio-Pleistocene course of the Thames laid down under tropical conditions and now 100 feet above sea- level. I spent an early holiday cruising on the Norfolk Broads, which are lakes that were originally medieval (12th to 14th centuries) peat diggings supplying fuel to Norwich and Great Yarmouth – Norwich Cathedral took 320,000 tons of peat per
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year! A rise in sea level during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries then flooded the Broads to a depth of up to 13 feet. Amusingly, when I wrote a term paper in college on the history of the Broads, using as one source a book called “The Making of the Broads”1, I had trouble taking the book out of the library as it was shelved under ‘Pornography’! I spent the summer of 1963 working for the US Navy on a tabular iceberg drifting 300 miles from the North Pole, followed by a career in the oil industry. We should all realize that our views on this topic are colored, if not determined, by our social environment, our personal experiences and, in particular, by the ways in which we make our living: we should therefore respect the personal experiences and views of those with whom we disagree.
Accordingly, in this issue we have a review (Greenslade) of a book on climate change that has been reviled on the inter- net, as being biased one way or the other, by people on both sides of the debate, and the subject is also discussed in David Abbott’s column. David includes a discussion by Past-Young Professional member of the Executive Committee, Brandy Barnes, on how to deal with the differing views of Members and colleagues on climate change. She emphasizes that AIPG as an organization does not support any particular view. She stresses the art of listening respectfully and understanding where the other person is coming from, and sums up these skills as a prime example of Professional behavior. So many other articles in this issue, such as those by Stinson, Mathews, Ridgely, Elliott and Owens, discuss different aspects of profes- sional behavior that one could say that an underlying theme of the whole Student Issue is the development of professionalism in all aspects of one’s life and career.
1. Lambert, J.M., 1960. The Making of the Broads. Royal Geographical Society.
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