“Unethical conduct and practices are increasing within the geoscience and other scientific communities. Such unethical practices include, but are not limited to, falsification of data, deliberate misrepresentation of qualifications and/or professional registrations, plagiarism, and willful misrepresentation of scientific knowledge in research or to accommodate a client or legal position.”

Stating that ”Ethics in the Geosciences” is an issue that geoscientists need to address and debate in order to create an effective interface between geology and the public, the Geological Society of America and co-sponsor American Association of Petroleum Geologists. held a GSA Presidential Conference, “Ethics in the Geosciences,” on July 16–21, 1997, at Mount Hood in Oregon.

Victor John Yannacone, jr. was invited to partipate and on the last full day of the Conference, Sunday, July 20, following an ecumenical service by the renowned geologist, James W. Skeehan, who was also a Jesuit priest and theologian, Yannacone was asked to give the final luncheon address.

Professional Ethics…
Geoscientists as Professionals…
Geoscience as a Profession

A Parable for Our Time:
Keepers of the Springs

Shortly after the conclusion of World War II, Peter Marshall preached a sermon which contained a parable that today may illuminate the way toward the ethical management of the land, landscape, and natural resources of this wondrous planet.

Once upon a time, a certain town grew up at the foot of a mountain range. It was sheltered in the lee of the protecting heights, so that the wind that shuddered at the doors and flung handfuls of sleet against the window panes was a wind whose fury was spent. High up in the hills, a strange and quiet forest dweller took it upon himself to be the Keeper of the Springs.
He patrolled the hills and wherever he found a spring, he cleaned its brown pool of silt and fallen leaves, of mud and mold and took away from the spring all foreign matter, so that the water which bubbled up through the sand ran down clean and cold and pure. It leaped sparkling over rock and dropped joyously in crystal cascades until, swollen by other streams, it became a river of life to the busy town. Millwheels whirled in its rush. Gardens were refreshed by its waters. Fountains threw it like diamonds into the air and children laughed as they played on its banks in the sunshine.
But the City Council was a group of hard-headed, hard-boiled businessmen. They scanned the civic budget and found in it the salary of a Keeper of the Springs. Said the Keeper of the Purse: “Why should we pay this romance ranger? We never see him; he is not necessary to our town’s work. If we build a reservoir just above the town, we can dispense with his services and save his sala¬ry.” The City Council voted to dispense with the unnecessary cost of a Keeper of the Springs, and to build a reservoir.
The Keeper of the Springs no longer visited the brown pools but watched from the heights while they built the reservoir. When it was finished, it soon filled up with water, to be sure, but the water did not seem to be the same. It did not seem to be as clean and a green scum soon befouled its stagnant surface.
There were constant troubles with the delicate machinery of the mills, for it was often clogged with slime, and the children no longer played along the banks of the stream. Eventually, the clammy, yellow fingers of sickness reached into every home in every street and lane. An epidemic raged.
The City Council met again. Sorrowfully, it faced the city’s plight, and frankly acknowledged its mistake in dismissing the Keeper of the Springs. They set out for his hermit hut high in the hills to beg him to return to his former labor.

Arable land & potable water

Arable land and potable water are gifts of God through the agency of nature. Arable land and potable water are the fundamen¬tal capital assets of civilization. Natural bio¬geo¬chemical processes brought those gifts from the Almighty to the human race with the unspoken admonition to use them wisely for the benefit of life on this planet until the end of time.
Those who earnestly tend the land, husband our natural resources and manage the processes of nature, whether in the fields or in the forests or even in the marble halls of government and academe are the stewards of society and the conservators of civilization. They must be fairly compensated for their unique efforts with the goods and services produced by the rest of humanity.
World merchant powers decry the loss of tropical rain forests but they continue to trash the economies of tropical nations under the crushing yoke of international bank debt.
Leading economists of the Mercantile World have yet to discover that air clean enough to breathe, water pure enough to drink, and a rich and varied gene pool of plants and animals are as valuable as the minerals gouged from the earth and the soybeans harvested where once there were forests. Our economists and political leaders seem to have forgotten that all of the mineral resources in the world will not buy food from lands where there is no rain.
All the genetic engineering from all the laboratories of the World will not provide four or five billion human beings with sufficient food, clothing, shelter, and medicines to prevent war, pestilence, and famine from riding roughshod over the peoples of the Earth. Human beings cannot eat gold or silver, coal or oil and they cannot breathe natural gas.
None of the world leaders among our trading partners in Japan or the European Community or even our own elected leaders yet offer to provide the goods and services necessary to improve living conditions in the Third and Fourth Worlds in return for the people of those Worlds protecting the atmosphere and climate for all of us by preserving and maintaining their tropical rain forests as well as the other natural resource treasures of this planet of which they are the custodians.

The Three Warnings

There is a legend in the folk history of most cultures about the young man who made a pact with Death who agreed to give him three warnings before finally coming to take the man away.
After many years, as the man lay dying, he demanded that Death honor the bargain and give him a warning. Death explained to the dying man that he had kept the bargain, but that the man had ignored the warnings represented by the miraculous recovery, the narrow escape, and the inexorable passage of time.
We have been warned—¬as individuals, as a people, as a nation, as a civilization, and as a species!
We, the human species, have been given an unprece¬dent¬ed choice at this point in the economic evolution of our civilization.
We, the human species, have been given the unique opportunity to choose our end—drowning in sewage; buried by garbage; interred in trash; choking on air too foul to breathe; and perishing from thirst while looking at “water, water, everywhere,” yet none of it fit to drink. We might end our lives even sooner through homicide, suicide, or war brought on by the hopeless despair that results from the loss of quality in our lives.
We also have the unique opportunity to choose Life and opt for survival—Not merely the biological survival of human beings as just another animal species, but the survival of those uniquely human characteristics which transcend our mere biological heri¬tage.
Poverty, chronic disease, and social injustice act synergistically with degradation of environmental quality to encourage social disorder. Our core cities, if they are to survive, demand the most sophisti¬cated environmental engineering of which human beings are capable.
Primitive societies moved away from their waste according to the seasons. Today, we must live with it, and, if our present waste management policies continue, in it. Primitive societies could flee the results of their failure to prudently manage the limited natural resources of their birthplace. Today we can run, but we cannot hide from the effects of our wanton, reckless disregard of Nature’s warnings.
Oceans and seas, lakes and ponds are just like any other sink—they have a finite capacity for waste, after which they back up. Moreover, they fight back. Algae blooms quickly decay into sulfurous miasmas, and the seas return our waste to the beaches.
The atmosphere is not limitless space which can hold endless volumes of noxious gases and countless tons of poisonous particulates. The atmosphere, too, has a finite capacity for waste. The “gentle rain that falls upon the place beneath” now has a pH lower than many laboratory acid reagents. Our profligate use of fossil fuel has begun to alter weather patterns and climatological cycles. Drought is making a desert of the “fruited plain.”
The fallout of lead and other heavy metals, halogenated compounds, and other toxicants continues at an alarming rate. The latent effects of these environmental toxicants are only beginning to be noticed, while the magnitude of their social, political and economic impact increases.

For years. . . men have known, or with the exercise of reasonable prudence should have known, that at some point in time, all our fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas would eventually be consumed. Nevertheless, during those same years, the public has been led to believe that when coal and natural gas were no longer available. . . other sources of cheap, convenient energy would be available. Plucked from the aether, perhaps, by the nimble technological fingers of our scientists and engineers. Satisfied, [however,] mankind dozed—warmed and cozened by the petrochemical fire in the basement and illuminated by the electrical fire in the lamp—fat-headed in fossil fueldom. (Cerchione, Angelo J.)

Our apparent dominion over the environment is but a license from nature with the fee yet to be paid.

Geoscientists

Geoscientists of the world look upon yourselves as what you really are. For better or worse, you are the members of a learned profession. You are no longer free of professional obligations, professional responsibilities and duties to society and civilization.
You were once free. During those golden years in school you could have turned away from the profession. You could have remained amateurs. You could have left school with just the information you acquired and without any real responsibility except to yourself and your immediate circle of family and friends. You could have chosen an idyllic life of happy hedonism. But you didn’t.
When you freely chose to become a professional geo¬scientist, you assumed a burden you may not have fully comprehended at the time. However, you assumed a burden you must carry forever if you are to be true to the essential elements of your own humanity. To become the “authentic person” that Jim Skeehan suggests you can be, you will have to assume multiple responsibilities and substantial obligations.
You who are geoscientists are the intellectual stewards of the planet earth as a dynamic system. You can run from your obligations, but you cannot hide from your responsibilities. You are independent professionals with unique skills and talents who share some understanding of and insight into a priceless body of knowledge that must be used to protect society and advance civilization.
As professional geo¬scientists you are more than mere employees. You are more than pedagogical exercise boys and girls, any of whom can be replaced by any other— interchangeable in a statistical sense; fungible as the lawyers would say.
You have responsibilities first and foremost to the subject matter of your profession, the source of your esoteric knowledge. The reason you are scientists is you derive your body of knowledge from observation and investigation. That is what science is all about. The source of your knowledge is the whole earth as a dynamic planetary system: the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, and the uniquely human noo¬sphere or psycho¬sphere, together with all the elements of those “spheres” both biotic and abiotic and all the processes which link all of those elements and establish the dynamic interactive systems which sustain the planet as a habitat for humanity and a cradle for our fragile human civilization—such as it is and such as it may become—better through your efforts or worse because of your neglect.
Professional geo¬scientists are the keepers of the arcane knowledge of planet earth as a dynamic system. No one else is, and no one else can be, in our immediate lifetime. You cannot ignore, or overlook, or fail to fully appreciate your responsibilities, your non-delegable duties to use the words of the Law.

Your primary duty is to yourself.
What truly drives and motivates a professional? Think about it. It is pride! Not the kind of pride that is a capital sin. Not the pride that leads to overweening arrogance and inevitable destruction through hubris. But the pride that illuminates the human spirit—the personal pride which we call self-respect.
It is self-respect—respect for self—that is at the basis of what we call honor among human beings. The driving force and dynamo that energizes ethical conduct among human beings is their individual personal sense of honor.

You each have a non-delegable duty to your profession as well.
A geoscience professional standing alone is nothing more than a voice crying out in the wilderness. History has taught us that any professional standing alone on a major issue which has become the subject of public controversy almost always eventually ends their career as a martyr.
A community of professionals, however, can become a force for good or evil in society. Stand together as a profession or intellectually die alone.

Positive law and legal positivism

For a positive law to effect justice it must conform to the natural law.
As geo¬scientists, you are all familiar with the natural laws that are manifest throughout the physical world. Natural laws such as gravity. The power of a natural law like gravity is that it exists and it commands obedience whether we like or not. You can disobey a fundamental natural law like that of gravity, but you do so only at your own peril.
In the moral sphere and in the Law there are also natural laws.
Much of the difficulty in recognizing the natural law as an acceptable element of Anglo-American jurisprudence can be attributed to the rise of logical positivism as a philosophical system during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The positivists insisted that the only source of human rights was positive law, and that the positive law was independent of any natural law or universal law influence.
The positivist view of law leaves no room for equity, much less a philosophy of law which must concern itself with right, wrong, justice, and injustice. For if, as the legal positivists contend, just or unjust are identical with what is permitted or forbidden by positive law, there remains no room for any consideration of a philosophy of law, since it has all been stated by the positive law of the moment in any particular state or principality.
Positivism dominated the philosophy of law until the end of World War II, providing the philosophical support for the position that the judge and jurist must disregard their sense of justice and obey the command of the law as written by the state. Thus instructed, the jurists of Nazi Germany established the “justice” of the Third Reich. The power¬lessness of the German judiciary to resist the implementation of unjust laws made those judges agents policies such as genocide.

However — after Nuremburg, the German philosopher Radbruch wrote:

“The traditional conception of the law, [t]he positivism that for decades dominated German jurists, and its teaching that “the law is the law” were defenseless and powerless in the face of such an injustice [the Holocost] clothed in the form of the law. The followers of [judicial positivism] were forced to recognize as ‘just’ even that iniquitous law.
The science of the law must again reflect upon the millennial common wisdom of Antiquity, the Christian Middle Ages, and the Age of Illumination, that there exists a higher justice than [positive law—] a natural law, a divine law, a law of reason—briefly a justice that transcends the [positive] law. As measured [against] this higher justice, injustice remains injustice, even when it is given in the form of a law. Before this higher justice also the judgment pronounced on the basis of such an unjust law is not the administration of justice but rather injustice.”

It appears that legal positivism, as a justification for ignoring the natural law, was a hypothesis wrecked by the gruesome reality of history.

Communications

During this morning’s service was a quotation from the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah for those who may have forgotten your Bible history was an insensitive, bellicose, belligerent, pugnacious prophet of the Old Testament, singularly lacking in a sense of humor. His mission was basically to irritate his fellow men. In this endeavor he was singularly successful. We do not record much in the way of applause for his message. His message, however, should ring out to everyone in this room.
“Woe unto the shepherds who mislead and scatter the flock. You who have not cared for the flock will be punished for your evil deeds.”
The practice of any profession is a constant effort to communicate. Communicate with those who make up the constituency for your profession. Communicate with those who need your profession immediately for help and those who may need it but don’t know about it yet.
There is also the concomitant need to communicate to the society of which your profession is a part. The fabric of Society—the very coherence of Society—depends on the maintenance of geoscience as profession, as a community of dedicated individuals sharing custody of, and responsible as stewards for, the unique and special body of knowledge about the earth as a dynamic system and an element of a greater universe. Those who do not share your knowledge depend upon you. Those who are not of your profession must, of necessity, rely on your inherent intellectual integrity and personal honor as professionals.
Everyone of you who has a student, an intern, a young employee, a post doc or a new professional employee has a non-delegable duty to convey the concept of honor as a professional to that less experienced colleague. Yours is a non-delegable duty. Only you can do it. Only you know what is “right” conduct or ethical behavior for a professional geo¬scientist. You know it in your hearts. Almost all of you live it. You are the role model for everyone coming up. Everything you do irrevocably guides their future.
We are all teachers in our own way, whether we merely serve as examples or role models or we actively teach. Your duty however goes further—one step beyond. You cannot limit your obligation to communicate the essence of the professional component of your honor and integrity which is based on your unique personal knowledge of our earth as a living dynamic system.
You must share your extensive scientific knowledge and your profound personal insights. You must go forth and teach every other human being the essence of what you know about the earth we live on. And while you teach and yes, preach, you will convey to them your own personal sense of commitment to honorable stewardship of the body of knowledge and insights that you have acquired as professionals. And they will understand and believe.
May God bless all of you and God help all of us.