People who work for the environment

This lesson asks you to identify and describe careers related to the science you are studying, with the education and training they need, and to describe what scientists have contributed to it. The museum offers three people from agriculture, chemistry and law, none of them Canadian; your class adds other careers and the Canadian scientists the curriculum names. ¹

For each person, ask what they studied, where they worked and what changed because of their work. Then ask which careers your class could add from its own region.

Follow one career step by step, as English Wikipedia gives it in the record of Mubarak Ahmad Khan. He took his bachelor's and master's degrees at Jahangirnagar University and a PhD in polymer and radiation chemistry in 1991, followed by postdoctoral work in Germany, Japan and the United States ². He began at the Atomic Energy Commission in 1984 as a scientific officer in the Radiation and Polymer Chemistry Laboratory, rose to senior and then principal scientific officer, chief scientific officer and director of the Institute of Radiation and Polymer Technology, and served as the Commission's director general from 2015 to 2017 ². He has taught at several Bangladeshi universities and since 2012 has been an adjunct professor of the University of Dhaka ². Since 2017 he has been scientific adviser to the Bangladesh Jute Mills Corporation ^{2 3}.

None of the three records quotes its subject saying why they chose their work, and these records supply no motive for them. What they show is where they worked and what they did. Ozel connects Ibn Bassal with Toledo, al-Mamun's service, Ibn Wafid's milieu and the ruler's garden by the Tagus ^{4 5}. Khan began at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission in 1984 ². Rizwana Hasan became involved in the shipbreaking industry by suing the breaking yards in Chittagong in 2003 ⁶. These are reports of place and work, not of motive.

The records of the two living people are built from the English Wikipedia article on each, and each notes that revisions of its article must be dated and must name the source that changed each fact. No article read for Khan's record gives him a birth date; the year 1958 in the museum's data is carried from Wikidata alone, at year precision ^{2 3}. Ibn Bassal's record cites an encyclopaedia article, a project page and the Arabic text of his book, and it is just as plain about its limits: the sources supply no certain birth or death dates, since Ozel explicitly calls them unknown and the project offers approximations, and they differ about a move before or after 1085 ^{7 5}.

Ibn Bassal's record draws on Ozel's encyclopaedia article, the Filaha Texts Project and the Arabic text of his book; Khan's record draws on English Wikipedia and Wikidata. Which of the two careers do the records let you describe with more confidence, and why? Answer the strongest objection to your answer, that one article may still be accurate: why does your answer still stand?

• Ibn Bassal: the author on agriculture in Toledo and Seville, and the limits of what the sources know of his life.
• Mubarak Ahmad Khan: his education and his career at the Bangladesh Atomic Energy Commission.
• Rizwana Hasan: her legal education and her environmental court campaigns.

Read the records on Ibn Bassal, Mubarak Ahmad Khan and Rizwana Hasan. For each, write one line on the career and one on the education the record mentions, using only what the records say.