“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake,” the 19th-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson . The quote has a pithy resonance as we grapple with the fallout of our inaction on so many fronts, from pandemic prevention to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.
Applied to geology itself, it is a case of “if only”. These days, hardly anyone learns the subject. In the UK, just over 1000 pupils a year gain an A level in geology, .
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There are many reasons for that squeeze, not least the narrowing of the school curriculum to subjects deemed more “relevant”. That perhaps can be traced back to geology’s core image problem: it is seen as just a load of dusty old rocks.
A glance at a computer or smartphone – their components cocktails of chemical elements, from silicon in the processor to lithium in the battery, derived from dusty old rocks – should be enough to convince that this is no sustainable objection.
“It is time for geology to embrace a new future focused on sustainability”
But it speaks to another part of geology’s modern image problem: its long history in service of the mining and fossil-fuel industries. Our rapacious consumption of Earth’s mineral resources, enabled by geologists’ nous, is why we are now debating the definition of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.
Geology is, and should be, about so much more. As Christopher Jackson points out, it is a window on past climate change and so the best tool we have for understanding our future. And its potential in creating a more sustainable world is huge, be it in learning more about soils to allow farmers to get the most out of their land, in tracing how contaminants affect the provision of safe water supplies or, of course, in helping us to predict and mitigate the effects of earthquakes and other natural disasters that disproportionately hit the world’s poorest.
It is time for geology to embrace a new future focused on sustainability and, in turn, be accorded the respect it deserves as a discipline crucial to our understanding of the world and our relationship to it. That way, metaphorically at least, learning geology can become a way to help stop the earthquakes before they happen.
