Leaders in Canada’s geoscience community make a case for evolving education

We must understand the Earth if we are to live in harmony with it and survive upon it. Many modern societies have a voracious appetite for resources. We use them all day, every day. Kitchen appliances use close to 100 raw materials that were extracted from Earth’s rocks and minerals. Cell phones contain a treasure trove of metals, from the gold in SIM cards, to the rare earth metals in the circuity that enable screens to display in vivid colours. Efforts to harness renewable energy are accompanied by the need for efficient energy storage, hence the increased demand for lithium for battery storage.

If you don’t grow it, you have to mine it! Earth scientists are in the unique position of investigating Earth’s evolution, locating the resources it craves, and assessing the environmental consequences of such resource exploitation.

Natural processes have dictated Earth’s evolution before the dawn of civilizations and before the concept of individual countries. These processes do not respect national boundaries. Understanding them, therefore, requires interaction of an international cadre of researchers, which must be accompanied by respect and an appreciation for how our different cultures have spawned different ways of investigating Earth’s evolution.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s decision-makers; our generation of Earth scientists has a responsibility to ensure students have an understanding of natural global processes and how they have evolved over time, so they are better equipped than their predecessors to make responsible and informed decisions about sustainable development of our planet’s resources.

This responsibility involves outreach to students in other programs, making introductory courses accessible to non-majors, enticing those non-majors to convert, and then providing them with the opportunity to become part of the Earth science community.

I was lucky to have gone to a school in British Columbia where I was able to take a Grade 12 geology course. In university, when I struggled to decide on my major, I remembered that class and took an Earth science undergraduate class. Obviously, it stuck.

I think there are opportunities for us to reach out to high schools, in particular high school educators and career counselors, to inform them about the breadth of the geosciences and the many career opportunities that lie within it. If [educators and counselors] become more knowledgeable about our field, perhaps they will take it more seriously and inform their students, which is an increasingly diverse body. Maybe we can kick start a change where the geosciences are treated more similarly to the other sciences.