I opted for the "Other" option.
My Job (or Science in the community).
In case you’re wondering what my job has to do with science, well, it’s science that pays my salary, my understanding of science (specifically chemistry) that means that my salary is what it is. I work in applied chemistry. It’s ironic really (at least it seems that way in some vague form to me anyway) that I’m an applied chemist, in a law enforcement role, within a political organization.
In the country I live in, we have a piece of legislation called the Resource Management Act, that act of parliament essentially lays out what people can and can’t do to the environment (under the act, discharging water into a water way can be an offense). So far I’ve been in two prosecutions, and been involved in generating and examining evidence in a third. The first two were pretty mundane, dairy farmers discharging dairy effluent or milk into creeks and waterways. That’s straight forward, I show up, take some photos, take some samples, if possible take water quality samples upstream and downstream of where the discharge is getting into the water, and a sample of the discharge itself, get the results analyzed for the right things, and then interpret the results. I put emphasis on analyzing the samples for the right things, because if you don’t understand what you’re dealing with it’s possible to analyze for the wrong things, and the results will say that there was no contamination occurring (for example, if somebody spills milk into a water way, that milk probably isn’t going to have boron in it, so there’s probably not a lot of point in testing for it).
The third case, the one that I generated evidence for, is for a municipal waste water treatment plant – a poo pond, if you will. Essentially, what happened here was there was an emergency pipe that had been forgotten about, that resulted in a discharge of partially treated human effluent into a waterway. As it happened, the operators of the pond did have a permit for a discharge at a site downstream from the emergency discharge pipe, and as part of the conditions on the permit, they are required to monitor water quality upstream and downstream of the point of discharge, however as it turned out the upstream sampling point was between the permitted discharge and the non-permitted discharge. So, I was asked, on the strength of previous statistical analyses I had done, to examine the data and try and determine when the discharge had started, I did, and I was able to.
In the unit that I work in, there’s an ex-police officer, a guy who’s been doing the job for a number of years, and everybody else has at least a Bachelors degree, and I know two of my coworkers have Masters degrees, and we all work in local government, carrying out law enforcement, to protect the environment from people who think that it’s okay to pump untreated cow effluent, or human effluent into streams and the ocean, or fill the air with smoke and sulfurous fumes. Needless to say, people aren’t always happy to see us, I’ve received my fair share of abuse over the phone, or to my face, and some of my coworkers have found themselves in potentially dangerous situations, and I can think of at least one that we’re going to have to deal with in the near future that is going to have to involve the police because of the mental state of the individual involved. I myself recently attended an MVA (not something I had considered when I applied for the job) that was a car versus truck, head on collision. I had to attend the scene because the trucks 300-500l diesel tanks had been ruptured, and it was in an area where the roadside storm water drained straight into the harbor. Fortunately there were no fatalities, or serious injuries, but it was sobering to realize I would have still gone regardless, and equally sobering to be mopping up diesel on the side of a major arterial route.
The point I’m wanting to drive home with this essay though is this: The next time you’re at the beach enjoying the sunlight, the fresh clean air, and the fresh clean surf, or the fresh safe shellfish, or the next time you’re fishing, enjoying the pristine stream, and the clean air remember this. Somewhere, there is a scientist who has protected that for you and been abused for it.
As for my list (in no particular order):
Mick Derry
Quatermass
TheFairy
*** Merry (but not whoever’s sock puppet he is).