ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Designing national energy and industrial development: the emergence of environmental geology

• In Event: The Plural Worlds of Earth Science: Visual, Material, and Institutional Transformations Across Disciplines, Scales, and Territories 2

English Abstract

«Environmental geology is a branch of ecology in that it deals with relationships between man and his geological habitat; it is concerned with the problems that people have in using the earth – and the reaction of the earth to that use»
In 1970, using these words, Peter T. Flawn in the Preface of his book Environmental Geology introduced this summary definition of the discipline, whose earliest institutional recognition dates back to that period. Flawn went on to suggest the relationship between environmental geology and the subfields of engineering and economic geology.
According to Italian geologist Felice Ippolito (1972), environmental geology should not have been regarded as a separate discipline, but rather a way of looking at Earth sciences as a whole, by focusing on the interconnections between human activity and the geophysical environment.
The general concerns of geosciences regarding human interaction with the physical environment are usually related to the growth of the global environmental awerness in the second half of the 20th century. To some extent, many of the issues associated with the emergence of the environmental crisis, and in particular those about the side effects of urbanization, industrialization and energy planning, are intertwined with the maturation of the environmental geology subfield. The aim of the paper is to discuss the emergence of this branch of geosciences between the 1960s and 1970s, with a emphasis on the Italian backdrop, where the side effects of rapid but often uncontrolled industrialization were beginning to manifest themselves. From the mid 1960s onwards, the Italian geological community had been dealing with a wide range of challenging issues, launching numerous initiatives to improve geo-environmental monitoring as well as mapping of the national territory, in order to redesignig and planning the country’s energy and industrial development.

Author

• Andrea Candela, University of Insubria