Geoethics: Hammering Out an Interdisciplinary Conversation
Interactive Talk
20.04.2023 15:30 – 16:30
Location: conference room (fourth floor), Rachel Carson Center
Speaker: Dr. Bethany Fox
Organizer: Katie Ritson
The “sustainable transition” to technologies such as electric cars and high-capacity batteries is projected to produce enormous demand for geological products such as lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. At the same time, geoscience plays a fundamental role in addressing many other pressing environmental and climatic problems, such as water supply and natural hazards. Geoethics—the ethics of “doing” geoscience—is therefore of fundamental importance at this historical moment. As an earthly ethics that necessarily stretches beyond geological considerations to consider the socio-natural, cultural-spiritual, and political-economic, any engagement with geoethics demands conversations that bring geoscientific understandings into more explicit dialogue with ideas from the social sciences and the geohumanities.
This interactive talk, presented by a geologist but supported by extensive interdisciplinary work with scholars from the humanities and social sciences, aims to bring current understandings of geoethics across multiple disciplines into conversation and lay out a potential pathway for future meaningful—and, indeed, ethical—interdisciplinary approaches to geoethics.
About the team
This work has been carried out by an international team of researchers based in the UK, New Zealand, and South Africa, and led by Bethany Fox, a geologist, and AC Davidson, a human geographer. Team members include geologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. The work is part of the project “Mining for Meaning: The Geoethics of Extractive Industries”, funded by the British Academy.