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Ernie Hasler started working as an apprentice engineer with the Ministry of Defence at Royal Ordnance in Bishopton, Scotland, at the age of sixteen. He retired as a health and safety advisor after more than a half century of work on some big jobs, also becoming the first advisor in Scotland to gain the specialist NEBOSH diploma in environmental management.
Hasler became active in the trade union early in his career and saw many improvements in health and safety during his time. These improvements stemmed from the Health and Safety at Work Act in 1974, which led to slow but significant improvement in worker welfare.
In his spare time, he ran a small charity, Plant Tree Save Planet, starting women's tree nurseries in poor countries, mostly funded by him and his two sisters. However, he closed it when, because of poor health and age, he could not effectively check out recipients. He continues to fund tree planting through Trees for the Future, and in 2016 he funded the planting of 20,400 seedlings, as he continues to do year after year.
He has been a voluntary trustee with Emmaus Glasgow for twenty-one years, helping take it from an aspirational concept to a functioning community of up to twenty-seven previously homeless people. Emmaus Glasgow now also matches his tree planting funding.
Seventy-five years of experience has taught Ernie Hasler that supporting people with needs on positive pathways is much more productive than punitive sanctions.
The photo is of Hasler steering some friends' boat past the lair of the nuclear monster's base on the river Clyde. He is opposed to nuclear weapons and the concept of MAD (mutually assured destruction), which he sees as a denial of Yahweh, our Creator Elohim, and our intellectual progress.
A far better policy would be to dig strong defensive positions all over the Highlands and make Scotland hard to invade.
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