Engineers for Social Responsibility – Offering lifetimes of professional wisdom
It’s an unusual interview when the infamous movie character Hannibal Lector – from the cult horror film Silence of the Lambs – gets mentioned in a conversation about professional ethics alongside Aristotle and an 18th century German philosopher, but engineers are a special breed and recently retired electrical engineer and company co-director Jeff Foley is no exception.
For the past two years Jeff has been the president and a passionate proponent of the not-for-profit organisation Engineers for Social Responsibility. The independent group, established in 1983, advocates – both within the profession and beyond – for social benefit and the humane and ethical use of technology.
“Engineers will always have the role of taking what scientists have discovered and engineering it into something useful,” he says.
Jeff believes society is looking for trustworthy leadership on climate change and other long-term issues and that, collectively, engineers can make a unique contribution.
“While scientists are more backroom sort of people and don’t really interface with the public, we engineers have always had to interface with the public,” he says.
Although engineers are traditionally thought of as “conservative and quiet”, he believes they are well placed to help society navigate through the environmental challenges we face. He says the industry uses clear reasoning, is used to making ‘hard’ decisions, and is trained to avoid design pitfalls and construction flaws.
“It’s time that we worked out what the most reasonable thing to do is and then come out and say ‘ look we’re not having any more arguments on climate change and this is what we have to do’. Reason is key,” he says.
Jeff spent a large part of his professional career installing software for electricity transmission companies, through a business he originally set up with his father. Now retired to the coastal town of Orewa, 40 north of Auckland, he has the time and inclination to help the engineering sector tackle climate change and other pressing issues. (And talk philosophy).
It’s something that busy young grads, the time poor, and young engineers with huge home mortgages haven’t the ability to do, he says. Most of ESR’s 150 members are in the more mature age range: those who have the experience and discretionary time to contribute to its goals.
ESR offers the profession and associated disciplines decades of engineering wisdom through online resources, discussion documents, webinars, submissions and conference presentations. It has functional relationships with a range of academics and has a positive working relationship with Engineering New Zealand, the country’s professional engineering body of 20,000 members.
Newly planned initiatives, such as ‘hot-takes’ – online resources that provide peer reviews and distilled summaries of decisions on topical issues – are intended to appeal to busy professionals in the younger age bracket. Inspiration for the idea came from a similar initiative by a group of American lawyers for their legal profession.
By reinvigorating itself and appealing to a younger demographic, ESR is proof that engineers can think outside the box as well as design one.
Footnote:
The Faculty of Engineering at the University of Canterbury has 9665 enrolments for 2024. Nine engineering disciplines are on offer: chemical and process engineering, civil, computer, electrical and electronic, forest, mechanical, mechatronics and software engineering.
Its website states: “Engineers design the future”.
(August 2023)
Photos L to R:
Jeff Foley, president of ESR (x2); Engineers at work (courtesy of ThisisEngineering on Unsplash; climate change modelling (courtesy of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
