Draft version 1.6 beta — Revised August 21, 2026

A Geoethics Primer for Geoscientists

Acknowledgments

The author gratefully acknowledges the help and encouragement provided by individuals and organizations as this Primer has been under development.

Chapter 2 of this Primer would not exist without the work and writing of Bernie Gert, whom I met at the GSA Presidential Workshop on Ethics in the Geosciences in 1997. Deni Elliott has given us another perspective on operational aspects of Bernie's "common morality," and provided us with a summary video about Systematic Moral Analysis, published by Ethics Unwrapped at UT–Austin. Her book "Ethics in the First Person" is an important contribution to ethics education.

Several organizations have taken the lead in updating and expanding their publicly accessible ethics resources, or simply maintaining their core standards over time. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Institute for Professional Geoscientists, American Geophysical Union, Geological Society of America, and Geological Society of London are steady sources of leadership in science/geoscience ethics. The Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College has facilitated development of geoethics education materials online, in workshops, and in short courses. ASBOG, Geosciences Canada, licensing boards at the state, provincial, and territorial levels, along with US federal geoscience agencies such as the US Geological Survey, provide the basis for legal standards of ethical conduct practice. The International Association for Promoting Geoethics has grown to be a worldwide movement in just over a decade. The public resources of these groups contributed greatly to the content of chapters 3 and 4 of this Primer.

The References and Selected Bibliography portion of this Primer remind us of many people who have not only studied and written about applied ethics, but who have also accepted the personal risks of promoting ethical behavior. I am especially grateful for the efforts of David Abbott, Peter Bobrowsky, Maeve Boland, Greg Boyle S.J., Monica Bruckner, Eric Conway, Giuseppe Di Capua, Hugh Gauch, John Geissman, Linda Gunderson, Seena Hoose, Ian Jackson, Susan Kieffer, Dave Mogk, Naomi Oreskes, Silvia Peppoloni, Gerry Shuirman, Jim Slosson, Keith Sverdrup, Bob Tepel, and John Williams. I am also fortunate to have a long list of other people who have taught me about morality through friendship and example.

The style of the footnote citations is adapted from Richard Tedlow's substack. It solves the problem of crediting direct quotes and other distinctive ideas that was particularly vexing in earlier versions of Chapter 2.

The Glossary is largely composed of links to public resources posted by the Ethics Unwrapped program at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas–Austin, educational videos from The Ethics Centre of Sydney, Australia, and the scholarly articles of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. All three of these sources have rich collections of resources beyond the few that have been linked to this primer, offering many opportunities for further study and growth.

Resources from The Ethics Centre are covered by a Creative Commons — Attribution/No derivatives license, and are linked from this primer to the original source at ethics.org.au. The Ethics Centre's republishing guidelines are at ethics.org.au/republishing-guidelines/

The copyrighted videos and associated web pages provided by Ethics Unwrapped are free educational resources from The University of Texas at Austin (ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/about).

I used AI to help me refine the HTML and CSS coding of this web resource, and occasionally to suggest alternative phrasing of sentences that I had written. In this respect, I have mostly used Claude (Anthropic) and Grammarly, with some early help from ChatGPT (OpenAI). Otherwise, none of the text of this primer was composed by AI.