The following are excerpts from an interview Poorna Pal gave to El Vacquero,

the GCC Student Newspaper, at the beginning of the fall 2004 semester

1. The focus of our Environmental Geology classes:

Environmental Geology  is the scientific study of how our interactions with the Earth processes, resources and environment at once expand as well as limit our economic prospects, so bridging the gap between our passions for the matters environmental and our oftentimes poor understanding of the underlying mechanisms and processes that enable our interactions with the Earth Environment matters of opportunity as also sources of threat to our very survival.

 

In short, our now complete Environmental Geology package at the Glendale College (i.e., combining the lecture and the lab. courses) seeks to bridge the gap that most of our students have between their awareness of the environment and their understanding of it. We all appreciate the importance of our natural environment, for instance, but many of us have little knowledge of the precise factors that make it so. Look at it this way: we all realize that burning the fossil fuels is bad for the environment, and therefore for our individual and collective health. But can we do away with gasoline, and its use, without hurting the overall economy and therefore prosperity?

2. What students might be interested in the class?
   
   Environmental Geology is the study of human interactions with the earth environment, hazards and resources. The focus here being on the 'human interactions', the lecture class here (Geol-102) will help the students understand how these issues affect us, and what efforts help minimize their adverse and/or limiting impacts, whereas the lab class (Geol-112) will look into the practical or nuts-and-bolts aspects of these in order to be able to precisely estimate their magnitudes and understand how the data that scientific studies report are obtained and what their implications are.

    

   It is this focus on the 'human interactions' that makes these two courses directly relevant to all college students today, particularly to whose who are not planning to major in science or technology but are nonetheless concerned about the environment and interested in the ongoing scientific debates about our environment. To give an example, the Fortune magazine reported in January 2004 a Pentagon study that projected the implications of two global warming related environmental issues (increasing aridity in the farm belt worldwide and the likelihood of a sudden ice age in Europe) on our national security. Clearly, innocent tree-hugging is hardly what Environmental studies are about, no matter what many people might still suspect.

    

3. Why could the class also be important for non Geology major students?

The class is mainly intended for non-Geology majors. Note that Geology majors focus on the process whereas non-Geology majors are not interested in understanding how the geological processes work but on how these
processes impact our daily life. For instance, a Geology or Climatology or Oceanography major would try to understand why the Western U.S. is now undergoing the worst draught of the past 40-years, whereas the Geol-102 and Geol-112 students will try to understand how these measurements are made, in order to assess the degree of importance that we need to attach to the related scientific inferences and pronouncements. Like it or not, earth is the only place we call home and earth environment is what affects our present as well as future. To my mind, the relevance of Environmental Science encompasses business, economics and finance, social
studies, real estate and law because, in the ultimate analysis, environmental hazards affect us all, equally, irrespective of whether we understand the causative forces and processes or not. Understanding them
only prepare us better to face them when they affect us, therefore.

 

4. What are some of the practical things you can learn?

As mentioned above, Environmental Geology (Geol-102) is the study of human interactions with the earth environment, hazards and resources. Environmental Geology Lab (Geol-112) then delves into the corresponding
practical, nuts-and-bolts, aspects of these studies. They include such diverse topics as understanding the topographic and geological maps and maps of earthquake risk or seismic zoning (including detection and
scaling of earthquakes), volcanic eruptions and hazards, soil and soil pollution, water availability, scarcity, management and pollution, slope stability and landslide mechanisms (including recognizing and preventing
slope failures), river erosion and flooding, coastal erosion and coastal flooding, groundwater availability and utilization, air pollution, energy resources and energy alternatives.

5. Why is the lab unit so important and what is the new element of the class practically?

Three factors make this 1-unit lab class (Geol-112) so important and useful.

 

One, the GE requirement for our transfer-bound students include at least 7 units of science, comprising two 3-unit lecture courses (one in physical sciences and the other in biology or life sciences) and a 1-unit (3 hours/week) lab class in either physical or life sciences. The 1-unit Geol-112 class thus satisfies this lab requirement for those who take the 3-unit Geol-102 for the physical science lecture requirement.

Two, note that most of our transfer-bound students are not science majors. Selecting the aoppropriate science course thus becomes difficult for them simply because they often find it difficult to apply themselves in a discipline they are not really passionate about. Environmental studies, on the other hand, affect us all, directly as well as indirectly. This Geol-102/Geol-112 lecture-lab combo is thus being offered to cater to the needs of all the non-Science majors who wish to take courses in areas that they can relate to all their lives, even when they may not be professionally involved in it directly.

 

Three, the baccalaureate degree that most of our transfer-bound students are preparing for hardly defines a vocation. Alan Greenspan's (Chair of the Federal Reserve Board) bachelor's degree is in music, for instance, while Ted Turner's bachelor's degree is in classics. Clearly, if bachelor's degree is not necessarily going to define what your profession is going to be, then why not acquire an undergraduate education that is sufficiently broad based to enable you to proceed to any profession of your choice and not just restrict you to the narrow area of your major or specialization. To the extent of the science part of GE requirement, courses like our Geol-102/Geol-112 combo decidedly fit into that category.
 

Environmental Geology is the study of human interactions with the earth environment, hazards and resources. The focus here being on the 'human interactions', the lecture class here (Geol-102) will help the students
understand how these issues affect us, and what efforts help minimize their adverse and/or limiting impacts, whereas the lab class (Geol-112) will look into the practical or nuts-and-bolts aspects of these in order
to be able to precisely estimate their magnitudes and understand how the data that scientific studies report are obtained and what their implications are.

 

Geol-102 has been there for a long time, ever since I have been here, at least for the past 12 years but the course has been looking for its own identity (!) unique from our two high-growth programs, Physical Geology (Geol-101 & Geol-111) and Oceanography (Ocean-115 & Ocean-116), that have brought in the spectacular growth of our Geology & Oceanography Program (it total enrollments, 323 students in 1992-93, grew to 1829 in 2003-04, at the rate of 15.5% per year). The lack of a lab. too was a major weakness of our Environmental Geology offering all these years and this is what the new Geol-112, a 1-unit lab. class seeks to rectify, by enabling us to offer Geol-102 & Geol-112 as a complete package so that the students taking these two courses, either together or in sequence depending on their time budget, will no longer have to scout around for a lab-integrated science program to satisfy their GE requirement.

In short, this now complete Environmental Geology package seeks to bridge the gap that most of our students have between their awareness of the environment and their understanding of it. We all appreciate the importance of our natural environment, for instance, but many of us have little knowledge of the precise factors that make it so. Look at it this way: we all realize that burning the fossil fuels is bad for the environment, and therefore for our individual and collective health. But can we do away with gasoline, and its use, without hurting the overall economy and therefore prosperity?

What makes this package so wholesome, in my view, is this. In Environmental Geology (Geol-102) we focus on the processes or the theoretical constructs. But this is as much a local issue as a global one, in that the forces that threaten the environment tend to be local but the consequences are essentially global. This requires number crunching and looking at the global dynamics of individual environmental events and that is what we would do in the Environmental Geology Lab. (Geol-112) class. This means looking at earth materials like minerals and rocks, doing some hands-on mapping and graphing exercises using the data from published sources, and seeking data and visualizations on-line.
 

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