Living With the Available Earth For geologists and others who daily deal with investigation or management of earth or land resources, Earth Day is Every Day. This slogan, from an earlier year, is intended to express the important concept that all people need to care for the earth every day, so as to keep it a hospitable place to live. Yet we find it advantageous to focus on a single day of the year to emphasize our need to act and to implement our care. One of the three special focuses for the 1996 celebration of Earth Day is planning for the future.
Geologic knowledge is crucial to such planning.
We all live with the available earth, the earth that is here and now. Geologists interpret the history of the earth from its inception, over 4 billion years ago. We also describe our available earth and, from our interpretations and description, forecast changes that will occur. The geologic features we describe now are only a moment in a geologic picture that changes through time. We formerly thought that the impact of people on natural geologic processes was negligible and that future changes would occur in similar geologic measure as in the past.