Because there are no saved archived images or pages from this meeting, the Joint Assembly in 2009 of Earth Science professionals, that took place in Toronto in 2009, this website will eventually serve to discuss Earth Science technologies, and education in the disciplines of earth science, which would of course include geography, land and environment, climate studies.
Science technology and scientific news concerning the planet and our environmental impacts. It would be nice to have some artistic animations.
Obtaining useful content on the above bolded topics is needed, and to plan a place for our visitors to click to reach further information on the similar topics. Perhaps finding some blog posts where chat characters discuss these words.
Life as a Geology Professor
Our planet is an indescribable and amazing place, and I was lucky to realize this from a very early age. The same realization allowed me, many years later, to choose a career in geology, which finally brought me to the position of associate professor at a college devoted to Earth science. But, long before I entered this field of study as a professional educator and research, I was just a small boy, growing up in a rural location, more than an hour’s drive from any bigger city.
The town where I was born had less than a thousand inhabitants and the huge majority of these worked on farms, growing crops and cattle. My parents were regular town folks, almost identical to every other family around us. My father was a rancher with a medium-sized farm and about 10 hectares of land while my mother was a home keeper. I was born in the 1950’s when the world was a completely different place than it is now.
My youth was spent not in front of a TV, but outside, playing in the nearby fields, meadows, and forests. As a single child, I had plenty of friends, but the closest relationship I had with anyone apart from my mother and father was with my grandmother. I remember her as a tough old lady who lost her husband many years ago and was forced to find work as a worker in a local quarry, specializing in rock testing and classification. There, she spent her career examining samples of different rocks and learning a lot about geology.
When I was about 7 or 8, she was already in retirement, so she took me on small walking trips where she began teaching me about different rocks, sediments, layer types and much more. At first, I was a bit bored by all of that, but then, all of a sudden, I began to realize that every foot of ground or stone had an amazing story to tell. These stories were millions of years old and told about powerful volcanoes, changing global climate and many other scientific things which all fascinated me.
In a short couple of years, I was able to recognize any local rock and gravel by sight alone. When I finished high school, I had no dilemma about what I wanted to study. In a blink of an eye, I was finishing my Ph.D. thesis as a geologist on the shifts of Earth’s crust during the ‘Paleogene’ period.
I became an assistant professor at the age of 34 and loved every minute of my job. On it, I taught not only why the environment is constantly changing the nature of our planet, but also why we are the ones who are both impacting the change and are impacted by it. During my time as a teacher, I witnessed many interesting moments, some of which were hilarious, especially when we took field trips to the wilderness, where I saw how kids became more and more disconnected from the natural environment, and glued to technology.
Just imagine having a class of students in a gorgeous waterfall granite pit, and watching most of them trying unsuccessfully to post pictures of it on their Facebook or Twitter accounts. But, I do not lament this fact and throughout my career, I always enjoyed being with young people. The new generations grew up differently than I did and that is perfectly natural and there is nothing wrong with that idea.
But, as I finished my career, I was distressed by the fact that even world leaders believed that science technology would be enough to help humanity in the turbulent period before it. As a scholar of Earth’s history, I knew that violent change was normal in our geological past, but now, I felt that the upcoming changes were entirely man-made. By disrespecting and overusing our natural environment, we jeopardized our own chances to prosper on this planet.
As I saw on the Joint Assembly 2009, our outlook was very somber and worrying. Here, the data was presented that painted a troubling picture about the coming decades, but even more worrying no one from the mainstream media seemed to pay any attention to it. Now, years later, when global weather changes are starting to wreak havoc, I am scared that we might have awoken too late.
Today, it is up to my students and their kid and grandkids to learn to love and appreciate their mother Earth in all of its glory. More importantly, it is time for them to save it from others in our species that value only profit and care nothing about the state of the environment. They will be free to use the power of science technology and anything else to spread this crucial information, but they have to realize the same thing my grandma taught me more than 60 years ago – our planet is wonderful, precious and the only one we have.
