About This Site

For many years, I have been teaching a course at Boston College called Geoscience and Public Policy. There is a general Earth Science textbook that serves as basic reading for the underlying science content of the course, but until version 1.0 of this this guidebook (January, 2019) there had been no textbook covering my own storyline. This "online guidebook" (now version 4.0) serves that purpose as a second textbook.

The theme of the course is "Life is uncertain..." There will always be uncertainty and risks that we have to accept as part of our lives. How people deal with uncertainty has always fascinated me. In this course, I use geoscience as a backdrop for exploring how the human desire for certainty in an uncertain world influences peoples' understanding of science and science-based public policy issues. The course uses examples from geoscience and environmental science as a springboard for exploring more general issues in science and public policy (and sometimes touching a bit on philosophy and theology).