An obituary for the IEE at the GSA
IEE Should Not Rest in Peace
17 October 2001
To my friends and colleagues on the GSA Critical Issues Committee
I became active again with GSA (Geological Society of America) after a 25 year hiatus folowing the Florissant fossil beds litigation to support the effort E’an Zen made as President to reach out and make the earth sciences accessible to decision makers and the general public.
The Critical Issues Committee (CIC) was an attempt to continue that work. Unfortunately, CIC has had mixed reviews.
The other attraction that GSA held for me when I became active after a 25 year hiatus since the Florissant fossil beds litigation was Fred Donath’s vision for an Institute for Environment Education, the IEE, and the early enthusiasm which surrounded its launch.
IEE was something I felt strongly about. It could be a potential force for substantial change in public policy and public perception of the earth sciences and earth scientists. Unfortunately, IEE has come upon hard times. Much of Fred’s original vision has been lost or dissipated.
I wrote to all the GSA presidents, commending them for allowing IEE to grow in an extra-institutional manner, unfettered by the academic constraints that characterize organizations such as GSA and many other scientific organizations. The IEE initiative was a dramatic break with traditional scientific activities. Nothing similar was even on the drawing boards of the life science or the physical science professional and academic organizations.
I also envisioned the IEE as being an action arm for the NAGT National Association of Geology Teachers). It could provide a vehicle for classroom teachers at all levels, particularly in the pubic elementary, junior, and senior high schools, to make a scientific impact on public policy while remaining faithful to their fundamental mission of public education.
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Concerns
With that preface, I have to tell you how disturbed I am over the plans for IEE that are pending in the newly reorganized GSA Administration. IEE will become a part of a GSA administrative unit dealing with Education and Outreach Programs and will be under the supervision and control of the new Director of Education and Outreach Programs at GSA who is supposed to start work in January next year. It will be no longer independent and free-thinking.
IEE needs at least another year or two of an essentially freewheeling intellectual skunk works unfettered by institutional considerations to develop geology as a public science. IEE is the most appropriate vehicle for that effort. The reasons are relatively straightforward and entirely pragmatic. There are many good reasons for retaining IEE as an independent organization for a year or two, while the dust settles at GSA headquarters.
IEE already has some institutional status and organizational structure. IEE had a broad base of support within the earth science community that ranges from the periphery and fringes where I prowl to the deepest academic lairs of the profession.
IEE was characterized by people who were action oriented regardless of their personal professional activities. IEE was developing a tradition and an organizational orientation that provided an outlet for activities by GSA members that did not fit comfortably in the existing institutional structures, substructures and academic culture of GSA.
The present plan for IEE reminds me of the way IBM killed its PC business at the start by sweeping it into the existing institutional organization and structure. It disturbs me greatly to hear the sound of doors in academic cell blocks clanging shut to secure the intellectual prison that many scientific organizations have become.
Every large institution needs a place for its black sheep, or those with unconventional ideas or impatience with the delay inherent in decision-making within large institutions. Just as most successful corporations allow for innovation and pilot plant or skunk works operations as a means of keeping creative employees happy and providing a means for testing new ideas without damaging the structural integrity of the entire organization, so scientific organizations need a similar vehicle. IEE is the only structure in GSA which could become that vehicle. IEE still can.
Suggestions
IEE should be allowed to continue for a year or two as a semi-autonomous quasi-independent organization reporting to the membership through top management without any intervening layers of control. It should be run by a senior person and a tightly knit executive committee that has some kind of track record in GSA and their own specialty groups.
The ultimate mission of the IEE should be to promote public awareness of the earth sciences and their importance to public policy and decision-making at all levels of government, education, and the media.
The floods in West Virginia, the electric power problems in California, the instability in the middle east, and the ultimate problem of potable water for all human beings and sufficient energy to power civilization require an informed body of decision makers reflecting the opinions of an informed citizenry. (This was written in October, 2001)
That is the mission I believed IEE had undertaken. It can still complete that mission if it is not folded into and hidden behind the walls of an institutional prison. With its mission accomplished, IEE can then be folded back into the more structured part of GSA, if desired, with new leadership – the senior person replacing his or her self during those two years.
Some observations
As I watched the evolution of the thoughts of the participants in three institutes— Mt. Hood (GSA, AIPG) Taos (AAPG), and Nebraska City (GSA and AAPG), I had a chance to take the measure of the earth science professionals against the scientific professionals I have worked with for 40 years in the other fields, particularly the life sciences. As a result, I have decided to concentrate the last years of my life working among the earth scientists. I have all but given up on the life scientists whether biologists, biochemists or physicians. Although I still keep an active role in many of the organizations associated with those fields, I do not believe they will ever make a substantial contribution as organizations to humanity or civilization in my lifetime.
The Critical Issues Committee (CIC)
CIC is an example of an initiative which proceeded as a pilot for a short period of time and from which a great deal was learned. The lessons learned from that effort could be applied by IEE in other pilot projects that might have more success and be addressed to a broader audience.
Temporarily at the present time there has to be a central clearinghouse for ideas about public information and education concerning the earth sciences and the environment. IEE is the proper vehicle for that effort, however, it must remain essentially independent for at least another year or two while its own infrastructure for innovation is built. Direct Management of IEE by any member of GSA staff makes IEE less than it should be and much less than it can be no matter how well meaning the “director” with multiple responsibilities may be.
If IEE is to complete the mission it was originally intended to accomplish, it needs to remain independent and, as they say in the law business, sui generis. IEE must not become just another committee within the existing GSA institutional structure.
An apologia pro ma vita
I realize the temerity that I must be displaying to all of you with these comments. I recognize that I am not a member of the “profession” although I feel that I have and still can make a contribution to the work all of you do professionally. Considering the profession from which I come, the Law; and my own long term involvement in the most contentious aspect of that profession, litigation; my personality occasionally makes some scientists uncomfortable.
I hope that my sense of urgency is not particularly discomforting to earth scientists who consider the near future the next three or four million years and the recent past ten or twenty million years ago.
Nevertheless, I appreciate the hospitality you have shown me and I genuinely enjoyed the time we spent together both in person and through e-mail.
Because I am concerned over the future direction of GSA and I am even more concerned about the widespread public ignorance about the earth and its systems, not just here in America but throughout the industrial world, I am venturing a radical suggestion in the form of a plea to those of you that have significant stature and influence in GSA.
An aside on the recent “reorganization” of GSA
So there are no secrets, I have been communicating regularly with Dave Stevenson who I believe is doing an extraordinary job attempting to rebuild GSA as an organization and restructure its management. I am uncomfortable with the circumstances surrounding the removal of the last Executive Director and the loss of Cathy May. My discomfort is both as a lawyer and a human being who has, on occasion, run afoul of the politics of large organizations.
The deeper I dig into the putsch at GSA headquarters, (2000—2001) the more ugly the situation appears. I have observed sexual politics through the eyes of the law for a number of years. GSA is extraordinarily fortunate that Cathy and her friends are behaving in as civilized a manner as they are. I don’t know who provided the legal advice to GSA about how to handle their personnel problems, but whoever they were seem to be unfamiliar with modern employment litigation. GSA is still not past the statute of limitations for an action by Cathy and perhaps the former E.D. as well. The law of “the hostile workplace” keeps expanding every day, for good or ill.
I believe that if IEE is allowed to continue as a semi-autonomous independent entity with appropriate dynamic leadership it might be possible to deal with Cathy May and her Foundation in a civilized fashion and perhaps bridge the abyss that appears to have arisen over the last few years within GSA.
First, some basic propositions
All of the issues that have concerned ourselves about over the last few years became “critical” issues because, at their core, there is a general lack of public awareness, much less understanding of the basic concepts of earth science. There is even less knowledge and understanding about the earth as a General System.
The earth sciences are the last and best academic and professional chance to introduce young children in the public school system to the scientific method and some understanding of the world in which they will have to live, and more significantly, in the world they will have the power to substantially modify by their own personal and political actions.
It will take at least a decade or more before the Colleges of Education in our major Universities even begin to ask for, much less accept, help from scientists. Some of your own personal friends and colleagues who may be the exceptions that prove the general proposition. We do not have a great deal of time to make significant changes in science education at the elementary school level. The horizon is probably less than eight years and may be as little as four years.
At the present time, there is no organization with the potential for establishing the earth sciences as the core for the elementary science curriculum.
GSA, like most large scientific organizations, does not respond quickly to short term needs. The deliberative process at GSA, although somewhat faster than many other scientific organizations, is still too slow to accomplish anything in the area of public information and education in real time.
The life sciences are hopelessly inadequate to the task of public information and education as they become more and more specialized and more concerned with life at the molecular level rather than the biological, yet they have taken the media by storm.
Only IEE, with the backing of, but not the micro management by, GSA might do the job through public information and education. IEE, as a somewhat autonomous institution within well-established guidelines, had the flexibility to accomplish great things in a short time. It still can.
My Plea
I would like to enlist the support of each and every one of you in an effort to re-establish IEE, which I understand is now going to be called the Institute for Earth Science Education, as a semi-autonomous organization within GSA.
The immediate IEE mission should be to develop new short term strategies for informing the public, at all levels, about the earth as a General System; the earth sciences as the “bedrock” of public policy dealing with the earth and its resources; and earth scientists as the keepers of the arcane knowledge about the earth who should be at least consulted before serious permanent and irreparable damage is done to the Earth.
The GSA meeting in November in Boston is nigh upon us, and I would like as many of you who share my feelings expressed in this memo to try and arrange a meeting first among all of us, and those others who might be receptive to this idea, and then with the appropriate administrative powers of GSA. Our ultimate goal would be to obtain GSA organizational approval to continue the IEE for another year or two as a semi-autonomous independent body with a real mission and mandate based on well-defined goals. (The meeting never happened. The GSA leadership was not interested.)
Some well-defined goals
- IEE should seek to be an interface between the public and the earth science community of professionals.
- IEE should seek to become a force in public information and education about the earth sciences and the environment.
- IEE must help the public see the earth science that underlies many issues in public policy, ranging from resource management to the basic economics behind our tax policy.