来源：《新科学家》
原文见刊日期：2022年2月5日
“We learn geology the morning after the earthquake,” the 19th-century essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote. The quote has a pithy resonance as we grapple with the fallout of our inaction on so many fronts, from pandemic prevention to climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.
19世纪散文家拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生曾写道：“我们在地震后的早晨学习地质学”。这句话在我们应对从大流行预防到气候变化、污染和生物多样性丧失等诸多方面不作为的后果时产生了精辟的共鸣。
These days, hardly anyone learns the subject. In the UK, just over 1000 pupils a year gain an A level in geology, down from almost 4000 four decades ago.
如今，几乎没有人学习这门学科。在英国，每年只有1000多名学生在A-level考试中选考地质学，低于40年前的近4000名。
There are many reasons for that squeeze, not least the narrowing of the school curriculum to subjects deemed more “relevant”. That perhaps can be traced back to geology’s core image problem: it is seen as just a load of dusty old rocks.
造成这种减少的原因有很多，尤其是学校课程被压缩到更“相关”的科目。这或许可以追溯到地质学的核心印象问题：它被视为只是一堆布满灰尘的古老岩石。
A glance at a computer or smartphone – their components cocktails of chemical elements, from silicon in the processor to lithium in the battery, derived from dusty old rocks – should be enough to convince that this is no sustainable objection.
看一眼电脑或智能手机——它们的部件是由化学元素混合而成的，从处理器中的硅到电池中的锂，都来自尘封已久的岩石——应该足以让人相信，这不是可持续的反对理由。
But it speaks to another part of geology’s modern image problem: its long history in service of the mining and fossil-fuel industries. Our rapacious consumption of Earth’s mineral resources, enabled by geologists’ intelligence, is why we are now debating the definition of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.
但这也道出了地质学现代形象问题的另一部分：它为采矿业和化石燃料工业服务的悠久历史。地质学家的智慧使我们对地球矿产资源的贪婪消耗成为可能，这就是为什么我们现在正在争论一个新的地质时代——人类世——的定义。
Geology is, and should be, about so much more. It is a window on past climate change and so the best tool we have for understanding our future. And its potential in creating a more sustainable world is huge, be it in learning more about soils to allow farmers to get the most out of their land, in tracing how contaminants affect the provision of safe water supplies or, of course, in helping us to predict and mitigate the effects of earthquakes and other natural disasters that disproportionately hit the world’s poorest.
地质学是，也应该是，关于更多的东西。它是了解过去气候变化的窗口，也是我们了解未来的最佳工具。它在创造一个更可持续的世界方面的潜力是巨大的，无论是在更多地了解土壤以使农民最大限度地利用他们的土地方面，还是在追踪污染物如何影响安全供水方面，当然，还有在帮助我们预测和减轻地震和其他自然灾害的影响方面，这些灾害不成比例地打击了世界上最贫困的人口。
It is time for geology to embrace a new future focused on sustainability and, in turn, be accorded the respect it deserves as a discipline crucial to our understanding of the world and our relationship to it. That way, metaphorically at least, learning geology can become a way to help stop the earthquakes before they happen.
地质学是时候拥抱一个以可持续性为重点的新未来了，反过来，地质学作为一门对我们理解世界以及我们与世界的关系至关重要的学科，应该得到应有的尊重。这样，至少从比喻意义上讲，学习地质学可以成为一种帮助在地震发生前阻止地震的方法。