Hello world!

Hello and welcome to my blog!

This space is a place where I will discuss and reflect on a variety of different environmental problems that reveal themselves through field trips taken with the course, Geology 312: Environmental Geology. Through the discussion and reflection, I will ideally be able to demonstrate my understanding of these issues as I progress through the course.

From my understanding, environmental problems refer to a network of complex issues, including pollution, deforestation, overpopulation, waste, depletion of natural resources, water pollution, etc. These issues are an interruption from the way the Earth is naturally and stem from human activity and negligence, whether purposefully or accidental. These problems can also relate to each other and cause a domino effect of other/more issues. This is what makes environmental problems so complex, they typically have multiple dimensions and relate to each other.

Interestingly, as Earle outlines in Enviro Geo Text:

…environmental issues, in general, are more important than ever due to the crisis of climate change and the rapidly expanding human population, but also because climate change is, to a large degree, a geological problem. We can understand its past by studying the geological record going back thousands, millions, and billions of years and we can understand its present by applying geological methods to data collection and analysis. Moreover, climate change is affecting many processes that fall into the realm of Environmental Geology, such as water supply, flooding, erosion, deglaciation, and slope failure (1.3 Environmental Geology, https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Geology/Environmental_Geology_(Earle).)

Environmental geology can essentially relate to a good chunk, if not most of the environmental problems the earth is facing today. By changing our practices and understanding our impact we can contribute to solving the problems.