PUTTING FLESH ON THE STONES - BRINGING EARTH SCIENCE TO LIFE FOR THE PUBLIC

Communicating Earth Science is not rocket science – but then most of the public are neither rocket scientists nor Earth scientists. So we have to use appropriate language, language that the public understands, if we wish to communicate our ideas – and yes, our passion – to the public. One of the targets of IYPE, the International Year of Planet Earth, was “Outreach, bringing Earth sciences to everyone”. But too often material allegedly for non-geologists is full of jargon: quite suitable for geologists, amateur geologists and geology students but quite indigestible for the public – ‘normal people’. Of course the danger is that in simplifying – “dumbing down” – we lose scientific integrity.

Over the years some excellent schemes have made Earth science accessible to non-geologists. Examples include work at the geological reserve in Haute-Provence, and the geological garden, the Géodrome, beside the Paris-Orleans motorway. More recent schemes include both Shetlands and North-West Highlands Geoparks in Scotland, and Naturtejo Geopark in Portugal. And on a very small scale the excellent Green Sandstone Museum in Soest. These schemes appear to work for a wide target audience, often using quite subtle techniques to provide information at different levels for different people.

When planning interpretation for the public we can probably do no better than follow James Hutton – “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end” – when he wrote in the eighteenth century that he hoped his ideas “might afford the human mind with information and entertainment”.