For many years now I have been teaching a tree risk assessment course. It’s a structured course with modules and sections laid out in a logical teaching order that is not my own. It’s a great course and I have fun teaching it. Each time I start, I give the class a job. I tell them that at any moment I may veer off-track or jump into a rabbit hole. I tell them not to let me go there, I tell them if I do it’s their job to drag me out. Phones off, fire exits identified and the course starts. The slides match the page numbers and momentum starts to build. Then there is a squirrel and out the window I dive. They follow, they always follow, and then it’s 10 o’clock.

In my last course, I almost came unstuck on a question of ethics. Unstuck only because nobody has ever questioned the exercise. The section is one that is so obvious that I can speed through it to make up time or play the devil’s advocate to lose any time that I have gained. I seldom get to play devil’s advocate. The exercise is to read a report and determine if it is an unbiased summation of fact or unashamed advocacy. The example that they are given is advocacy. The term sell-out is often used, and it’s an intentionally clear-cut case. I don’t have an issue with advocacy, it is what it is, and if you’re being paid to support or recommend a particular cause then that is what you should do. But the course I teach is not about advocacy, it’s about how to assess risk. As a tree risk assessor, I’m not being paid to support my client, I’m being paid to identify the situation to the best of my ability and provide advice on what is there. I assess and explain the risk. My clients don’t need me to write what they want because they can do that themselves. I am not an advocate, I don’t represent their point of view, I don’t represent an alternate point of view, I don’t represent the tree. My job is to gather all the relevant facts and present them. Whatever position I have is irrelevant. As far as my job is concerned, I represent fact. As a teaching moment, we discuss what ‘fact’ is; risk is probability and likelihood, fact is… fact. The session is on professional integrity more so than morality, although I would hope that the two are fundamentally the same. The session was going to plan, and then I blinked and found myself in an Ethics 101 class. But it wasn’t just me, the rest of the room was in there with me.

My man, the one that almost caused me to become unstuck had added another layer; he stressed the importance of feeding his family. If not advocating for his client meant not putting food on the table, then he was always going to advocate for his client. Eek I was being accosted by the old ‘Would you steal a loaf of bread to feed your family’ question. The hypothetical textbook answer was required; Because stealing a loaf of bread would cause relatively little harm, and preventing his family from starving would be a great good, the action of stealing the bread would be morally justified, but I didn’t have the textbook and I wasn’t sure who he would be stealing from. I took the scripted position, that the loss of professional creditability would ultimately limit his ability to secure work and feed his family, therefore risk assessors should always stick to the facts and put their personal opinions aside. I agree with that, so it was easy to say. What I didn’t do was point out that if risk assessors became advocators of fear society would suffer. The class resumed, and no squirrels were sighted for the rest of the module. Then I came home and found that unashamed advocacy was in my inbox.

Again, I don’t have an issue with advocacy but call it like it is. The document that I was reading was called a report, but the author was supporting his client’s wishes, if not supporting then leading them. The report was not a summation of fact it was unashamed advocacy. The document was so poorly written that the conclusion contradicted the assessment, he refuted his own work, and his recommendations were divorced from his conclusion and his assessment. On any other day I would have had a laugh and moved on but in this particular ‘report’, the author was scaring the neighbours. He used inflated numbers and irrelevant details to exaggerate risk. He had dramatized and catastrophized the unlikely to the point where people were scared of living in their own homes. He had become an advocate of fear, and his actions were not morally justified.

I have and will continue to point out the inconsistencies of this ‘document’, and I hope that the loss of professional creditability will ultimately limit his ability to secure work. But at the same time, I want him to be able to feed his family. My moral outrage has ethical implications and I find myself looking for a squirrel to distract me, but I cannot see one.