Defining a set of essential ideas that a literate American should know about the geosciences is a critical national need in an information-rich age characterized by a rapidly changing planet and numerous resource challenges. Critical decisions involving Earth science are continuously made within the political and educational realms, with significant impacts on all American citizens. In today’s world, it is no longer sufficient for scientific communities to assume that simply doing a good job of carrying out cutting edge research is sufficient. The research community simply must do a better job of making sure that its scientific discoveries do not get buried in libraries or on the Internet, but make it into mainstream circles. The research community must do a better job of helping the public understand the most important concepts emerging from geoscience reserach. However, understanding scientific discoveries requires a science-literate population. The Earth sciences literacy document that has been produced here will help accomplish that goal, and can help inform those who will make future decisions involving governmental legislation and educational science standards.

With the development of the Internet, our society has very rapidly gone from being information-poor to information-overwhelmed in the area of science (and many other areas as well). As a result, the need for a set of BIaSCs (“Big Ideas” and Supporting Concepts) has become paramount. There is an overwhelming amount of information available, but not necessarily any sense of how to navigate through it or determine what is most important. Someone trying to find out about an Earth science topic (a lawyer, engineer, museum director, textbook writer, legislator, etc.) could easily be overwhelmed by the amount of information available. A prioritization of essential ideas, carried out by the scientific communities, would provide the basis and framework that would help people navigate through the rapidly expanding amount of scientific information.

One obvious area for the importance of BIaSCs is in school curricula. If you are trying to design an Earth science module, how do you now choose from amongst all of the information available? How do you make sure that the most important information comes clearly through all of the available details? The situation is further complicated because of the decentralized way our country works, in that each state sets its own standards. There is the potential for a wide diversity in the nature and quality of Earth science education in American. A publicly-available set of BIaSCs will help ensure that these state standards are accurate, relevant, and up-to-date.

State standards for K-12 education are generated in accordance with national standards like the NSES and AAAS benchmarks. However, the state standards need to go into greater detail than these national standards provide for the actually development of curricular programs, and these national benchmarks are more than a decade old [National Academy of Sciences, 1996; American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 1993]. It is also important that the big ideas of Earth science be presented in clear easily-interpreted language. For instance, the AAAS content maps [American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, 2007], while thorough and multidimensional, do not clearly provide a sense of what it is that all Americans should know about science.

Another area in which BIaSCs are important is in the creation of textbooks. It is somewhat ironic that the need for textbooks is now very great, but for a very different reason than it once was. In the past, textbooks were vital for providing access to information. Given the explosion of information available instantly over the Internet, they no longer are needed for that purpose, but are now extremely necessary for presenting, in a clear, comprehensive and coherent way, the essential information on a topic. However, textbook writers face the same challenge that teachers face: how to select for presentation the most relevant and important scientific information. Scientists become experts in ever-increasingly small sub-fields of research. It has been said that the last person to “know everything” (i.e., to have read every book that was published) was Alexander Pope. We are a long ways from there. Future Geoscience textbooks will be greatly improved as a result of communities coming together to generate frameworks of essential information.

The importance of these BIaSCs is by no means limited to K-16 education. Many Americans have learned much of what they know (or misunderstand) about Earth science from sources outside of school: personal experiences, popular media, informal education venues such as museums and parks, and non-formal groups such as youth groups. Earth science literacy principles will provide a consistent framework within which informal and non-formal educators could work to reinforce essential understandings.

It is quite possible that, from the perspective of future civilizations, the 21^st century will be defined by three things: climate change, water availability, and energy resources. These three are not independent, of course, and the fate of humanity will rest upon how they are addressed over the next 100 years. Importantly, in the context of the current proposal, all three are deeply rooted in the areas of Earth science. Many important political, legal and ethical decisions are being made related to these issues that already severely affect the lives of all Americans. The lack of clear, concise and comprehensive community-driven guidelines puts all Americans at risk of bad decisions made either through either ignorance or self-interest. For example, the resistance within certain spheres to accept the relevance and validity of global climate change for as long as it did caused our country significant embarrassment at an international level, and severely delayed international attempts to address the matter.

This is especially important in areas of Earth science, which are becoming increasingly relevant as human populations increase and natural resources dwindle. More than a third of all land not covered by ice is now used for producing food for humans (agriculture or the grazing of livestock). This land use must be planned with maximum understanding of Earth science, and the BIaSCs we have created here will become part of a process that help guide the education and policy-making needed to allow it to happen.

Unfortunately, we also live at a time when there are strong movements that seek to discredit the discoveries of scientific research. Whether acting out of fear, misunderstanding or malice, these movements often portray the healthy debate of scientific inquiry as confusion and a lack of agreement. An individual or set of individuals pushing certain self-serving agendas can almost always find a quote or viewpoint that backs their idea. Many of the foundations of our sciences, such as the age of the Earth, radioactive decay, biological and planetary evolution, climate change, and even the existence of plate tectonics, are discredited and ridiculed by extracting fragmented quotes from prominent scientists and taking them out of context.

A deep schism is opening up within our country: at the same time that tremendous scientific advances are being made, increasing percentages of Americans are refusing to believe them. For example, paleontologists have recently made tremendous headway in resolving the evolutionary history of vertebrates. However, a recent study by Miller et al. [2006] found that the number of Americans who actually believe that evolution occurs has dropped down to 40% (compared to about 80% for many Scandinavian countries). In fact, out of 32 modern countries, only one country, Turkey, had a smaller percentage of its citizens believing in the occurrence of evolution. In a frighteningly ironic dichotomy, America has one of the most advanced and educated scientific communities in the world but one of the most scientifically ignorant populations. A document of the basic “Big Ideas” of Earth science, created by the Earth science community and supported and endorsed by the major Earth science organizations, would be extremely powerful in combating these destructive elements. Again, it is not enough that the Earth science communities carry out good research. These discoveries need to be communicated to the American people, and the people need to have sufficient literacy in the geosciences to understand those discoveries. Defining a set of geoscience BIaSCs will clearly show that the entire community is very unified in their convictions of the reality of a basic set of ideas and concepts.