Only a Little Planet...

I'm kind of hesitant about writing about Earth Day, 2012. There are many things I could talk about concerning our occupancy on planet Earth and what we a doing to ourselves and the ecosystem to which we belong. But I feel a certain sense of hopelessness, like I am trapped in a bus hurtling towards an abyss, and I am not in the driver's seat. In fact I am sitting way in the back, and no one seated up front is aware of what is happening. They're not paying attention, and wouldn't believe their peril if they were. The drivers of the bus have different priorities. I don't know if it is ignorance, or recklessness, but they are driving ever faster and faster, sure in themselves that they can make the turn before going over the edge.

The original Earth Day in 1970 caught businesses and politicians off-guard. Before they knew what was happening, Congress much to their own surprise had passed the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and formed the Environmental Protection Agency. They passed the Endangered Species Act. And it made a difference. Our air and water are cleaner, despite vast numbers of more people and cars on the road. Dams and power plants and other mass developments have to consider their affect on the environment before they can proceed. It made a difference, and the enemies of this progress have been counter-attacking with a vengeance. 

Today, we face some of the greatest challenges ever faced by our species: the deeply intertwined problems of energy use and global climate change. Unfortunately, instead of facing the crisis head on, we instead have to listen to politicians deny the very existence of a problem. Despite the clear record of sea level rise, loss of glaciers worldwide, and direct measurements of worldwide temperatures, the politicians listen to their corporate lobbyists who pay for their re-election campaigns and then impugn the motives of climate scientists and environmental groups. The Supreme Court is complicit in this, with their recent Citizens United ruling that allows unlimited donations by corporations to political candidates. Our politicians represent their corporate sponsors, not their constituents.

We don't have many tools to fight back with. There is education, but political support for education is also disappearing. For all their words about competing in a global economy, politicians are letting our universities, colleges and high schools wither on the vine.

We still have the right to vote, but politicians are attempting to restrict that right to those who will vote they way the politicians want. Not enough people vote these days anyway, and many who do are "low-information" voters who are ignorant of the issues, and are easily swayed by sophisticated and well funded media campaigns.

So here I am, a blogger with a few hundred readers, and a teacher with a few hundred students each year. Did I say hopeless? Yeah, that's the way I feel sometimes. But I also know that education is a powerful tool, and I have to believe that politicians can only deny what is happening right before their eyes for so long (and then when the predicted catastrophes occur, they will say "no one could have foreseen this"). And change will come.

I wish the change wouldn't be wrenching. I wish it could be planned and carried out in a way that upholds human dignity and doesn't result in suffering, starvation and permanent economic depression. We will have to leave petroleum and fossil fuels behind, and embrace renewable energy if our standard of living is to continue as it is now, if there is to be an economic future for the children being born today, and if there is to be a healthy ecosystem on our planet. There is still time to plan, if the politicians would learn from someone besides their corporate sponsors.

Get involved and make a change! We did it in 1970, we can do it again.

Why Geology is Important; Why Education is Important...The Sendai Earthquake in perspective

We learn about geology for many reasons. If you have ever visited this blog before, you know we learn geology because it is just plain fascinating. But sometimes we learn geology because lives are at stake...

It has been a week that will long seared into our collective memories as we watched a tragedy unfold in real time in Sendai, Japan. An earthquake of magnitude 8.9-9.0 struck about 80 miles offshore, with a horrific tsunami that did incalculable damage along the coast of the island. It then spread throughout the Pacific Basin, and the effects of the quake became worldwide in scope. Whether one realizes it or not, every human being on the planet was touched by the shaking. Not in some metaphysical new-age sense, but literally. The waves were detectable for hours on seismometers worldwide, meaning we were all rising and falling whether we were aware of it or not. We were all part of this story.

Many will watch an event like this unfold and try to find some meaning. In one sense, there was no meaning; this was something the Earth does. Subduction zones have been active on this planet for billions of years, and will continue to be active for billions more. The oceanic lithosphere shifted a few tens of feet deeper into the mantle, where it will eventually be melted or distorted beyond recognition. The materials disappearing from the surface today will eventually reappear, as part of a volcanic eruption, or as a fault sliver along some plate boundary in some future era. Events like this are common beyond measure; the Earth has experienced millions upon millions of huge earthquakes like this one, and though life is extinguished in some areas, life in general goes on. This quake meant nothing in the long run.

On the other hand, there was much about this tragedy that has meaning. With our brief life spans measured in decades, we will rarely experience such events in our personal lives. I could never wish such tragedy on anyone, but we also learn that living on this planet means that we are sometimes exposed to extreme deadly events. If not an earthquake, then a volcanic eruption. If not an eruption, a deadly flood. If not a flood, then a searing heat wave, or freezing blizzard. No one is totally safe or immune from these events, and most of the time we are not really aware that they can happen to us at all. They come as a total surprise.

In earlier centuries, such events elicited cosmic and supernatural explanations. It was the capricious nature of the gods that caused these terrible punishments. These people must have done something wrong to deserve such horrific retribution. If we couldn't think of an explanation, we made one up. I would love to say we have somehow moved on from this kind of thinking, but charlatans like Pat Robertson and others remind us constantly that ignorance and hate are alive and well in our society and across the world.

Why is geology important? Geology provides us with a new mythology of the world, one that based on a better understanding of the processes of our planet. We don't just see an earthquake happen on the surface and jump to the conclusion that the giant turtle that underlies our bit of land has taken a few steps. Instead we explored new pathways to knowledge that revealed that the earth itself is releasing energy to space, and that one of the ways that this happens is through the movement of lithospheric plates. Do we know the absolute truth? No, we don't. That's why we seek to learn more. We can now predict where earthquakes are likely to happen, but we cannot tell when, at least not well enough to save lives and property. If we are to live at the limits of sustainability on this planet, we need to know all we can about it.

Why is education important? Everyone has a right to know what geologic hazards may affect their lives. It should be a fundamental human right. It's not, but we can make the effort to make sure that people know what can happen, and help them to prepare for it. I live on a plate boundary, and a major earthquake is likely to strike close to my home. But I know from personal observation that people in California are shockingly unprepared for a major seismic event. Few have an emergency kit in their home, or a plan for what to do in the event of a major quake. Few people know the location of the legendary San Andreas fault, and even fewer can name any of the dozens of other active faults that exist in our state. We see the unfolding disaster of self-destructing nuclear power stations in Japan, and are mostly unaware that we have nuclear power plants along the California coast (there were even plans to build a nuclear plant directly on the San Andreas fault at Bodega Bay in the 1960s). We can't make people learn these things, but we've got to try, and we have to give our teachers and educators and media specialists adequate tools to do so. Recession or not, cutting back on education at all levels is a foolish idea.

Seers and psychics have always sought to see the future. They have used tea leaves or chicken entrails, and consumed hallucinatory drugs to achieve visions. Earth scientists use seismometers and supercomputers to model future activity along fault zones (and consume lots of coffee). They also make predictions in many other fields, including climatology, hydrology, and volcanology. Our society is living, as I said before, at the very limits of sustainability. We need to know when the quakes will happen. But even more importantly, we need to use the tools at our disposal to understand the changes that are happening in our climate. We need to fully understand the behaviour of ocean currents and cycles. We need to have a clear understanding of how much coal, gas and oil is left, and how the continued use of these fuel sources affects the climate. Recession or not, cutting back on basic research is a foolish idea.

Why the flower at the beginning of this post? I wasn't sure at first. I was in the field yesterday with my students, looking at California's Mother Lode. It's early for wildflowers, but a few were visible here and there. This was a beautiful Indian Paintbrush that seemed to be glowing in the sunlight. It occurred to me that the best flower displays in the Sierra foothills actually take place in the aftermath of forest fires. A disaster wipes out the old trees and tangled underbrush, but life springs back, and sometimes there is beauty. I guess I am hoping that some good can come of this disaster; that we might make some smart choices about where to go from here...

POSTSCRIPT: After posting this, it occurred to me that I forget to mention one more atrocity: media coverage. The cable and network news have abrogated their responsibility to produce responsible journalistic coverage in favor of spectacle and high ratings. They long ago let go their science advisors, and their news readers (and that's all they are anymore) have little or no education in the earth sciences. They have very little knowledge or expertise in geology, seismology, or climatology, and they continually make the same factual mistakes every time there is a new earthquake or other natural disaster. FOX, MSNBC, and CNN: your science coverage is an embarrassment to journalism.

A CEO, a Tea Partier and a Union Member...

It's the "joke" that's making the rounds today:

"A public union employee, a tea party activist, and a CEO are sitting at a table with a plate of a dozen cookies in the middle of it. The CEO takes 11 of the cookies, turns to the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy. He wants a piece of your cookie.'"

It's been a hard day, a hard week, a hard couple of years. I'm finding I may have to say goodbye to a number of people with whom I've worked for years. For all I know, my own job was on the chopping block; many others at our school didn't think this would happen to them, and yet it did. We are lopping off entire programs: engineering, architecture, mass media and others. Deep cuts in others. The math is frightening; the state doesn't take in enough to pay for the education it is committed to provide. So the cuts come.

We can take steps; there is talk of offering a voluntary pay cut to save jobs and programs. There are other alternatives being suggested. But all of them represent a retreat from education.

I don't blame our local administrators; they've been dealt the cards they have. Many of them are new at their jobs, having been hired only in the last year or two. We will see how they deal with these hard issues. Today's cuts are the opening move and much is to be negotiated.

I do blame the politicians. I think that the people of our state might be willing to sacrifice a little longer to maintain the education of their children, their spouses, their parents. But there is a group, a political party, that is resisting letting the population even vote to continue a bit longer the taxes and fees that were instituted in the last year or two and are expiring. They should get out of the way and at least let us try to convince the population that education is worth saving.

And there is the bigger issue, the subject of the joke of the day. There is a yawning economic chasm between the rich and the rest of our society. More wealth is concentrated with the highest two percent of the population than at any time in the last century. And no one seems to ask, or even suggest that they could help in this time of dire need, by paying taxes at a rate equal to what they paid only a decade ago, before the Bush tax cuts and others decimated federal and state budgets. Instead we argue among ourselves over the crumbs.

The economists tell us the recession is over. But all I see happening around my community is more store closings, more employees being laid off, more houses being foreclosed. We are living in a depression, and I don't see the end of it. Maybe there is some economist who can explain to me how things are better right now.

A message to the ultra-rich: laid-off workers don't buy your products, invest in your hedge funds, or buy houses. Neither do people who are still working but are worried for their jobs and seeing their salaries cut. I paint with broad brush strokes and I know that there are many well-off people who understand this basic economic truth, but there are obviously many who don't. This society allowed you to become rich; to paraphrase the Bible, from those who are given much, much is expected. It's time for everyone in our society to step up to the plate and work together to get out of this horrific economic mess.

Education made this country and my state great. I knew many of the "greatest generation" who came home from the second world war, got an education, and proceeded to build the greatest economy ever seen on this planet. They went to the moon and the planets, they invented computers that transformed society, they built a society that took care of the aged, the sick, and disabled. They made unbelievable advances in medicine. They built the best cars and transportation systems in the world. I saw these things happen in my lifetime. Our children have that potential, if we can only guide them and inspire them.

But instead we are now in retreat; education is devalued and teachers and professors are demonized by politicians. We are made to do more, far more, with less. I despair and grieve at what our society has come to. We have huge challenges ahead as a society; the end of the oil economy, global climate change, resource depletion, water shortages, food production disruptions and many others in the earth sciences alone. Every other academic field can point to other big problems. And our response is to cut the pool of talented individuals by making education inaccessible to more and more members of our society.

What Does Education Look Like?

What in the world could cause students to be taking pictures of murky brown water??

I am leaving tomorrow on our yearly field studies journey to Death Valley National Park. It is one of the centerpieces of our earth science/geology program at our community college, and has been a yearly tradition since I started at the school in 1988. Hundreds of students have attended and participated; many have gone on to become geology majors and teachers, and many point to their experience in the field as the defining point in their lives.

Geology is the most field oriented of the natural sciences. One could be educated about the facts of the earth in a classroom, one can look at all the latest innovative media resources about the earth, and one can become proficient at the science. But classroom learning is nothing like standing on the outcrop, and seeing the rocks, seeing the actual structure of the earth. To be a student standing in front of an angular unconformity or a fault line in an outcrop, with all the vegetation and debris obscuring the actual relationships, is to be a James Hutton, a Charles Lyell, or a Nicolas Steno on the threshold of significant insight. It is the exhilaration of discovery, a deeper understanding growing out of putting the pieces together by yourself. It is the exploration of mysterious places, a voyage into terra incognita.

I don't think I can overstate the value of field experiences in an earth science/geology education. But I don't know what is coming next. The depression (and despite what the economists say, this is a depression) is ripping out the heart of education in our state and across the country. In the midst of economic chaos, the need for an educated population is the greatest it has ever been, and our resources are shrinking. Where do we go from here? For now, I'm going to do what I can, and what is possible. I'm going to take an enthusiastic group of students into the wilds, and we will experience together the thrill of discovery. And I'm going to hope for the future.