Abstract

Geologists and ecologists are increasingly engaged in common forums to discuss earth resource projections, environmental policy, and the concept of sustainable development. A 1998 American Association of Petroleum Geologists Division of Environmental Geology meeting led to new conversations between these groups about human population growth, the biodiversity crisis, and the prospect of global warming. Different perspectives on these phenomena may result from three factors: 1) geologists are more accustomed to certainty, as energy and mineral targets tend to be fixed in place over human time scales, whereas biological entities are not; 2) geologists are most familiar with curvilinear forecasting of substitutable reserves, whereas ecologists are becoming especially concerned with species-specific thresholds and chaos theory; and 3) both groups of scientists debate the meaning of “sustainability.” An evaluation of human population data yields a standing-room-only condition on land areas in just 674 years, a mere one-third of the Christian era. Biodiversity is not known to an order of magnitude, yet humans are driving a mass extinction event at rates 1000-10,000 times greater than background. Global warming science is limited by the unavailability of a “second Earth” to directly experiment on, forcing reliance on models that inherently involve approximations, simplifications, and assumptions upon which reasonable people will differ. “Analytic deliberation” is one new method of making environmental policy decisions, as geologists and ecologists increasingly accept participation in larger social forums.