This is a work in progress. Words fall down. When they don’t make a useful shape, they are swept away for rearrangement another day.

“The result of their inability to remain silent in the face of such a monumental tragedy is a testament to their courage. Their words, most of them tapped out at keyboards and launched into the ethers, are part of the historical record much as diaries, journals, and private letters were for our forebears. These contributors share a bond that only those who experienced Hurricane Katrina can ever truly understand, although in the writing of these pieces they clearly hoped that someone, somewhere, would at least try.”
– from the introduction to A Howling In the Wires, edited by Sam Jasper (RIP) and Mark Folse

Following Katrina, Sam referred to me as the Keeper of Days. Through every major life event, I have marked days and their associated events. The invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the first Gulf War, 9/11, Bush II, the second Gulf War, Katrina, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, COVID, and now our rapidly emergent dystopia. When it started to feel like Keeper of Years, I questioned why I do it. I initially attributed it to compulsiveness, then conversely an anxiety control mechanism, or perhaps prisoner-style timekeeping, but came to the conclusion that it is just a combination of the history student, mathematician, and conscientious observer in me attempting to get a sense of things and inform (myself mainly). How long can and do human fuckups last? How do they unfold, in what magnitudes, and when along their journey do things improve or worsen? Why do disasters begin in the first place? What led up to them? The macro, the micro, and every sub-process that constitutes the entirety of the whole sad thing. And veterans know that the disaster isn’t the event itself. That’s just Day 0. The disaster is every day that comes after.

Many are still experiencing Katrina twenty years later.

But I get ahead of myself.

I wasn’t always like this. My earliest memories are from Kuwait in the late 1970s and some of the most vivid are those awful green curtains, brown corduroy flared dungarees, and staring at the television during the deposition of the Shah of Iran followed by the signing of the Camp David Accords several months later. Bombs began flying overhead between Iran and Iraq the following year; Kuwait began taking in a number of refugees from favorite nations all over Arabia and their conflicts continued to play out in exile to the detriment of many expatriates. You may understand why the phrase “collateral damage” soon entered my nascent vocabulary.

And the moment I could put pen to paper, I began to write everything down.

Don’t get me wrong – I got my fair share and more of Dinky Dog (shut up), Paddington Bear, Godzilla, and Strawberry Shortcake (I said shut up) and play dates with other children. My parents constantly ensured our safety and I grew up wanting for almost nothing. But I have to hand it to the folks for not sugarcoating and shielding me from the world’s realities when most kids my age weren’t encouraged to feed themselves and tie their own shoelaces much less consider geopolitics and its impact on their daily lives. Collateral damage like them. I don’t know, maybe those kids were better off not knowing.

But we were safe, right? None of this could happen to rich little Kuwait protected by western oil company elites and moneyed interests the world over, right? There is watching and knowing what happens to other people, and then there is going through it yourself. It really has no density until you are the statistic, and in a way few saw coming. In lieu of depressing all of us with the details, you can go read what I’ve penned about how our Kuwait chapter ended at your convenience. And then came Katrina and on and on.

The bigger tragedy is that time passes and compounds experiences, while selectively helping downplay and even romanticize them at the same time. As I have said before, “… [the experiences] are now a part of the amorphous past, which increasingly blurs the farther we hurtle into the future” towards the fresh horrors challenges that await us.

So, I am going to take a page from my parents’ playbook and not sugarcoat for and shield you. There are no Thoughts and Prayers that can keep away the inevitable because it is the direct and measurable consequence of our (in)action. If I ever hear the phrases “Let’s hope for the best” and “Power corrupts” again, it would be too soon. Power corrupts corruptible people and each one of us has to painstakingly create the circumstances for Hope to grow and bloom. “Our fate is your fate,” read a poster or someone said in a town hall meeting somewhere in Louisiana after Katrina. The unthinkable can and will happen to you and your loved ones. Nowhere is safe and no one is coming to help you, not unless you make it so with thought and effort every damned day for the rest of your lives.

A notion that keeps peeking out from behind my statements above is that you are not alone. Yes, I did say “no one is coming to help you,” but that and the number of people around you who are in the same situation are not the same thing. They/We are understandably on edge, untrusting, and downhearted, and will view any new partnerships with skepticism and as coldly transactional. And yet what I have also witnessed firsthand during the worst of times is the considerable power of like-minded community. If humans possess anything, it’s an innate desire for Tomorrow. We will drag ourselves across sharp glass protruding through hot coals to make it even one more day. Harnessing that energy in those who share your values and directing it towards accountability, growth, change, and progress is then the new task at hand.

How do we do it? Ah, that’s the trick. Sorry to ruin the vibe by bringing up logistics, but there is no way to build community other than through being brave, vulnerable, and there, for each person at a time, demanding the same from them, and fighting for those without your privilege. Through personal and joint “thought and effort every damned day for the rest of your lives.”

***

To myself I then say – Why wouldn’t I write and keep writing? As an incurable scribe who has a knack for being in the right place at the wrong time, and didn’t want anyone else to tell my story, our story, why wouldn’t I write? When these things occur to a person who really understands what is happening, gives a damn about Everything, and values knowledge and human progress more than Anything, why wouldn’t I write? There is no other job.

That’s enough for Part 1.

Evidently it takes us successfully placing a space telescope a million miles from Earth to write here for the first time since January 2, 2021. I’ve been short-form writing elsewhere, but let’s face it, Hope and Inspiration quit abruptly when faced with an insurrection at the nation’s Capitol, Year 2 (and 3) of COVID, the passing of friends and family members, energy grid failures, and the protracted erosion of American democracy and human rights. How do you blaze a path to the future when you are being dragged backwards? Only a hypocrite can mentor students towards a future of … what exactly? What am I making for them? What am I helping them make? With what? And for how long?

For one moment: Something goes right and we prioritize science again. Even if for a mercilessly few news cycles, words like “nebula,” “gravitational lensing,” and “galaxy clusters” are placed in circulation, and at least one young person now wants to be an astrophysicist or rocket engineer when they grow up. We are reminded of our size and age in the universe. Hope and Inspiration rise up and promise to stick around if we work on creating and sustaining more such moments. Ones of wonder, awe, and learning, not anger, fear, and ignorance.

***

Read the following sentence, think about it, and then come back. We are large and old enough to engineer and launch a machine that overcame 344 single points of failure to give us awe-inspiring and humbling portraits of exactly how small and young we are. This isn’t meant to inflate or belittle; instead I suggest another metric of being: to think and live in the zone between big and small, old and young, present and future, near and far. It’s not easy to get into that groove and uncomfortable to be in it for more than a few seconds. I keep trying. It helps if you study Stephan’s Quintet, as an example.

“Together, the five galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet are also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92 (HCG 92). Although called a “quintet,” only four of the galaxies are truly close together and caught up in a cosmic dance. The fifth and leftmost galaxy, called NGC 7320, is well in the foreground compared with the other four. NGC 7320 resides 40 million light-years from Earth, while the other four galaxies (NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319) are about 290 million light-years away.” – NASA.gov

The distance light travels in one Earth year is known as a light year. In one picture, we see a snapshot from 290 million years ago (before the time of dinosaurs) and from 40 million years ago (after dinosaurs went extinct). You are simultaneously witnessing two patches of the universe that bookend dinosaurs! It’s an unconformity of time in space! And in the background are galaxies billions of light years away – from before our Earth and solar system even formed! How lucky we are to be able to hold and bend these concepts in our brains, to visualize and perceive differently, to know there is so much more. Another measure of being.

***

The mind-blowing data coming in from the James Webb space telescope are a testament to humanity’s abilities and our relative size in this universe. They are also the result of more than a quarter century of innovation, risk, failure, and growth. Here are some thoughts on each of these aspects, which I hope resonate with every scientist and engineer Building Something Good.

1. Innovation – Go boldly in the direction of your dreams, but lead with honesty in planning. “It started with a very optimistic and unrealistic cost estimate with a huge promise. It’s like relationships that we have in our lives. If you start with a lie, it’s usually not going to last.” – Thomas H. Zurbuchen, NASA.

2. Risk – Quantified probabilities of success and failure, but probabilities nonetheless. “Exploration involves risk. If you’re not willing to take the risk, you don’t belong in this business.” – Mike Menzel, lead Missions systems engineer, NASA JWST

3. Failure – Failure is an option, and there is crying in science. There’s also pulling yourself together and moving on with integrity in science. “People make mistakes. What you don’t want to do is infusing in people, especially your engineers and technicians, an environment that says ‘Oh, don’t make a mistake and if you do it’s more profitable to hide it than to let it out.’ If they’re going to cancel us, they’re going to cancel us, but we’re going to do the honest thing.”

4. Growth – Being accountable for, learning from, communicating, and reaching out of past mistakes to succeed. “I realized how much worry I had been holding onto, after working on this thing for the past 11 years – and a lot of my colleagues have worked on it longer … but that it’s fully capable of doing all the amazing science for which it was built. It’s a wonderful feeling.” – Jane Rigby, operations project scientist, NASA JWST

***

Exploration and democracy go hand in hand.

What does this all have to do with the here, now, and putting food in people’s mouths? Why are we going about exploring space when there are a multitude of problems to fix here in America? Well, why can’t we do both? It is no longer an either-or proposition when liberated from the dual myths that there is only so much of the pie to go around and that money generation is a zero-sum game. Let’s not forget, however, that publicly-funded space science has plentiful rewards that have bettered modern life and continue to contribute to our standard of living. Only as long as we keep Hope and Inspiration alive.

Exploration and democracy go hand in hand. The folks mentioned here – the engineers and scientists who built and launched the JWST, will analyze its data, and may invent indescribable new technologies from their findings – didn’t spring up out of nowhere. This is why we need well-funded public schools with better-paid teachers, easier paths to higher education, intelligent political representatives to populate our scientific oversight and funding committees, and greater public access to science media and literacy.

Please let these not be the last new NASA images of the universe I see in my lifetime.

***

Sources and further reading:

• PBS Nova “Ultimate Space Telescope” [watch online | 53 minutes]
• Hubble vs. James Webb interactive slider [link]
• NASA’s Webb Sheds Light on Galaxy Evolution, Black Holes [link]
• Meet the woman who makes the James Webb Space Telescope work | Scientific American [link]
• The book ban movement has a chilling new tactic: harassing teachers on social media | MIT Technology Review [link]

Two weeks ago, I held virtual office hours for those recently out of work and/or seeking career reinvention. It was an apt culmination to a year of public talks, online writing and one-to-one conversations on career change, diversity & inclusion, and strategies to work beyond today’s global impasse into a sustainable future of growth for all. The gist of the engagements come down to: How to Innovate and how to feel Empowered in the truest sense of the terms. So, I cleverly entitled my session Innovation & Empowerment Office Hours.

Session Philosophy and Caveats

Before going into any such session, it is important to understand and state your own principles and boundaries.

These are two philosophies I hold dear: 1) The future of our energy and infrastructure are heavily dependent on understanding earth systems and forward-facing, cross-trained earth practitioners will increase in value, and 2) A visionary leader mindset can be learned and internalized.

Brave innovation in the earth system, with leadership from earth scientists and engineers, will immensely help humanity as we collectively chart our planetary future.

Creating a sustainable future requires adjusting our clocks from short-term fiscal cycles to beyond our lifetimes into The Long Now. So, adopting an attitude of Timefulness, which includes” a feeling for distances and proximities in the geography of deep time” can only help. As Marcia Bjornerud goes on, “Most humans have no sense of temporal proportion … the durations of the great chapters in Earth history, the rates of change during previous intervals of environmental instability, the intrinsic timescales of ‘natural capital’ like oil, gas, air and groundwater.” Temporal and spatial proportion is the bread and butter of earth practitioners! Brave innovation in the earth system, with leadership from earth scientists and engineers, will immensely help humanity as we collectively chart our planetary future.

Prior to the office hours, I posted the following rules:

• Contribute To Receive. You get what you give to any conversation. If you’re there just to pick brains and not contribute, pass resumes, or hog the engagement, I reserve the right to eject you from the call, and 
• Honest Thought Required. Come with an open heart and mind, but most importantly, come with them. Few topics are off-limits but let’s try to stay productive. 

Despite this, a couple of attendees violated the rules of engagement and showed up simply to suss out how I got my current role, and if there are jobs available where I am now. Thankfully, we were able to quickly get past this sort of dead-end interaction and turn them into useful conversations out of which both parties got something. The flip side of such sessions is that they require a significant investment of free/volunteer time and being strong for others can take an emotional toll. You have to set firm boundaries to avoid being eaten alive.

I love that people felt comfortable enough to get vulnerable and share what really mattered to them, and wish I could hold more such sessions on a frequent basis. Community is critical at this time. However, there is only one of me and one of you. I urge that you help broaden the impact by holding similar office hours in your own circles, and encourage others to do the same.

Session Structure

Since each of us is a complex integral of our experiences, how do we use that to live today while simultaneously building for tomorrow? How do we innovate – generate value – and empower ourselves and others? In the office hours, I set out the following themes that the attendees discussed:

• Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats (SWOT),
• Personal Individual Development Plan (IDP),
• Mental Health,
• The Near Future / The Pivot
• The Future of Oil and Gas,
• The Energy Transition, and
• Reading List

Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities & Threats and Personal Development Plan

The office hours started with a meditation on Strengths from previous experiences that can translate to any job regardless of industry. And another deeper one on Weaknesses, which I view as Challenges or Gaps, that may be addressed through future roles, along with tactics to overcome personality differences and cultural barriers in those roles.

Again, going through Opportunities and Threats, I reminded participants that circumstances and events are Opportunities and Threats. Unless they are about to physically harm you, people are not Threats and don’t treat them as such. Go to the root of what about someone threatens you, and address that as a Challenge or separately outside this exercise.

• I then suggested they use these findings towards their very own personal development plan, not just in a professional context.
• Where do you see yourself next year and in 2, 5, 10, 20, 30+ years?
• How do you view retirement?
• What do you see you as having accomplished by then?
• Whom do you want to have interacted and teamed with to accomplish these objectives?

To help shed the blinders of recent employment, I encouraged participants to think in terms of success for the long haul, beyond the quick fix and quarterly financial report cycle.

Whether you are a person or a group, learning about and preparing for the future come in handy in detecting and acknowledging bubbles instead of ignoring and trying to avoid their inevitable pops. Another suggestion is probabilistic futures thinking exercises (great for groups), which “use divergent thinking, seeking many possible answers and acknowledging uncertainty [versus] analytical thinking which uses convergent thinking to seek the right answer and reduce uncertainty.”

Mental Health

Speaking of denial, a big elephant in the room is mental health. There’s no crying in the workplace and we are professionals conditioned to “squeeze our rage into a bitter little ball and release it an inappropriate time.” (Points to whoever gets that pop-culture reference.) Talk therapy is a lifesaver for those who can access it because it helps many verbalize and work through their own issues with the help of a certified professional. I asked participants about their current levels of anxiety, depression, anger, coping mechanisms, and their access to mental health and community required at any time but especially now.

The job belongs to the company. You own your career.

There was a surprising outpouring of feelings on the part of all participants. Combined with a sense of betrayal on the part of their former employers, the lack of a real career community outside their place of work is where the unemployed feel quite exposed and raw. There are many I know who have suffered long bouts of extreme emotional distress on layoff or retirement, because they have come to conflate job with identity and purpose. How terrifying is it to not have “a home” because you no longer have a job doing what you know and love? This is an important aspect in which professional geo-scientific (more) and engineering (less) societies had ample opportunity and instead have dropped the ball. Over time, many have turned into growth-driven companies themselves that are run by cliques, protect the material interests of corporate members, and pay lip service to transformation, which inevitably results in the treatment of members as little more than dues-paying store customers. This is a dying business model; instead our work and its people need more forward-looking, courageous, energetic, open, grassroots and collaborative platforms.

Please remember this: If in your heart and soul you consider yourself an earth scientist or engineer, no one and nothing can take that away from you. Especially not a company. As I’ve said before, I urge you to take this time as a mental health break and “then imagine what you really want to do be it in energy or not, no matter whether such a thing exists yet or not. And then bring your whole self to follow that with passion and dedication.” The job belongs to the company. You own your career.

The Near Future

Some aspects of this discussion included:

1) Folks who had previously felt safe in their jobs and had thus lacked the perspective of “the outside world” finding out they are not alone. Misery loves company, but company can quickly turn into a force for growth.

Here, I returned to the “futures thinking” philosophy and cited my history of leaving a company when I was already employed. You are nothing but a number to companies and they are in no way beholden to you. Corporate loyalty is a thing of the past, and

2) How critical it is for individuals to create networks and for groups to enable sustainable, give-and-take communities of value when the going is good, and not just seek and/or withdraw meaningful support when times are bad. What is the value that you bring to the table? Why should people join you? What is your lobbying power? What real change can you make and consistently? If an organization can help people only in times of plenty, then this is the time to consider that a risk and pull way back to rethink mission.

The Pivot

Change is hard, y’all. We discussed pivoting and reinvention as functions of years in career, financial capability, and time investment, and how much energy professionals with high-paying jobs up until now are willing and able to reach out of their comfort zones to morph. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a computing or data science education, but if you are just getting around to it and because it’s the in thing now, you are already behind the curve. Instead, stop and ask yourself the following:

• What moves me?
• What burning world problems do I want to solve?
• With whom do I want to work?
• How and where do I want to work?
• What financial, short-term and long-term risks am I willing to take?

Further, doing whatever needs to be done, learning whatever needs to be learned, in order to better understand the earth as a system ought to be the only driver of an earth practitioner. Coding/data science is a tool, but it is not the only tool. What other tools can you discover, build, hone and bring to the table? There are quantitative toolkits, analytical toolkits, field methods, engineering advances, emerging skills. Whatever it is, be one with the future of your tool set and keep it sharp. Again, adopt a mentality of seeing everything one achieves (even during a work hiatus and even if you leave your field) as in service of a meaningful career.

Finally, before mid-career professionals write themselves off, I firmly believe they are in the Goldilocks zone as they have a track record and enough experience to oversee and deliver projects, and learn new things efficiently. Wentworth’s CEO Katherine Roe recently said, “[The way] the sector was behaving 30 years ago is no longer relevant. I don’t have 40 years’ experience, but I have relevant daily experience and I think right now, given how quickly things are moving, that’s really more valuable in some ways.”

The Future of Oil and Gas

With Saudi Arabia, OPEC, COVID and other market forces in charge, we can no longer look to most independent or national Oil & Gas companies as the adults in the room for future-facing advice on the fate of the fossil fuel economy, as they too are at a loss, fiscally and strategically speaking. Moreover, these companies serve stock/stakeholders and unfortunately cannot/need not invent beyond “do more with less people” to overcome their economic hurdles. There will always be a need for Oil & Gas geoscientists and engineers, but ones with strong constitutions to brave the inevitable roller coaster that will seat fewer and fewer geo-professionals.

Frustration and disappointment hang over this area as well. Not so much that fossil fuels have started to experience a use decline (a very long-tailed curve, nevertheless a decline), but more that Oil & Gas companies are laying off qualified earth scientists and engineers instead of upskilling and placing them in the front seat to strategy/solutioning for the energy transition and sound policymaking needed with it. This brings us to the other elephant in the room.

The Energy Transition

Oil and gas on one end and sustainable energy on the other of the energy topology is all companies talk about and invest in. What about the huge chasm of the energy transition in between? Few strategize the real sausage making and toil between where we are and the brave new green world we desire. The Transition problem space, and in fact every earth question – including infrastructure, carbon capture and storage, water supply, and so much more – needs good earth scientists and engineers collaborating with other smart people of different backgrounds and expertise. Without us, it will not be done well or sustainably.

Oil and gas on one end and sustainable energy on the other of the energy topology is all companies talk about and invest in. What about the huge chasm of the energy transition in between?

Outside of this session, I’ve talked to many about the unknowns of this concept: When is the last part of the energy transition? Will we anticipate it usefully, with many probabilistic models and outcomes? What about shifting at scale? When is net-zero emissions really (What is it really? Like oil and gas economics, the answer depends on whether you do it full-cycle or point-forward and how you report it.) And what should energy companies and other key actors do to transition? How do we work with countries and communities with the right policy that benefits the most people? How do we make it so that people who intrinsically understand the earth impact its policy?

Again, there are countless opportunities here for those who know the business of the earth, but we have to birth them. How and where? Again with ourselves and others, if we do the work of joining together to form tight-knit and open communities of invention.

Suggested Reading

• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility – The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer, Stewart Brand
• Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, Marcia Bjornerud
• Lab Dynamics: Management and Leadership Skills for Scientists, Carl and Suzanne Cohen
• How To Be An Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi
• The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, Bina Venkataraman
• How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok

What’s Next?

Victor Hugo beautifully said, “If a writer wrote merely for their time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away.” I fully realize that one’s basic physiological needs (food, water, shelter, safety) require employment, but if that is where each of us stops, we have already lost. This “I’ve got mine and I’ll kick it down the road” mentality is what brought individuals, corporations, societies, countries and the whole world to the conflictive stagnation of 2020. Our first task as a species is to get over what serves us in the short-term – job, privilege, institutional barriers, denial of past and future – and build for people you will likely never see, using philosophies of constant reinvention, career, equity, and collective growth. It’s way past time for a global reckoning. Is it possible? Yes. Is it ambitious? Always. Bring it.

In this spirit of collective growth, I will eventually launch a non-profit online collaborative that prioritizes open access and dignified interaction for all. In this space, participants will be able to collaborate and form their own networks for mutual support, skills development, and solution building. My aim is to create a foundational community diverse in expertise and demographics, representing science, technology, the arts, sociology, education, design, and business development, with inclusion, equity and accountability as core tenets. Stay tuned for more news in the coming years.

Advice for the young at heart
Soon we will be older
When we gonna make it work? *

We are

• in the fourteenth week of a quarantine or some kind of COVID-time physical and social limitation,
• into three months of energy supply and demand shocks, mass layoffs and continued unemployment in many sectors,
• almost a month into global protests against police violence and daily discussions on race, diversity and equity in science and the workplace,
• officially in an economic recession while strapped tight into the reopening-reclosing-reopening-reclosing roller coaster,
• in the fraught lead-up to another US presidential election while still dealing with the now that is the result of the previous one,
• exhausted and uncertain,
• working through exhaustion and trying to handle uncertainty,
• at a crossroads.

Please let’s not cancel 2020, but instead hold and look at it. It is the inevitable outcome of the decisions we made as a modern people, country and world, and the point at which we admit we cannot go on like this and then make important choices for tomorrow. Through all of my conversations and observations of the last few months, one truth crystallizes: Not only is it impossible to return to the past, I inherently distrust people who venerate history, especially a static, symbolic and romanticized history, at the expense of the future. So, how do we make that future and starting right now?

Looking longingly over our shoulders at glowing versions of an increasingly blurry yesterday – the one in which a few were comfortable and tried to convince the rest of us that we were, too, and wouldn’t it be nice if the children and second-class citizens simply understood that and re-assumed their places in the antiquated but “safe” power structure – will not get us there. In fact, that’s what got us to the 2020 we’re currently scratching our heads over. Nor will half-baked and ill-advised attempts help in any way. We want to digitally transform, but not too much because it’s not in our strategy. We aspire to go carbon-negative, but wave away the full-cycle costs and the labor of transition. We want to appear diverse and inclusive, but hey people of color, you do the work and we may or may not listen. We like to use words like resilience, but tremble, cower, and fall apart at mere ideas that challenge our long-held world views.

Yes, I have absolutely conjoined technological, industrial, social, economic and political issues here because

1. Science, engineering, technology, infrastructure, policy, politics and society (the people who do this work and the people who are impacted by it) are so tightly intertwined that you cannot effectively work with one without actively engaging and impacting the others, and
2. The future requires viewing the whole earth and all of its systems as one large interdependent system. If you can understand multi-physics processes, you can understand this.

It is in our power to shape far-reaching change. And this is where I draw a line in the sand: You’re either committed to the future, or against it. You’re a giver, or a taker. You’re uncomfortable and using that as a signal to change yourself, or going down with the deck chair on that water-logged ship. And I am done aligning myself with those who don’t want to do the heavy lifting to realize this. Conversely, I stand with, learn from and give to those who want to do the work – “from a place of trying to do the right thing more than trying to do what is best to maximize [their] personal possibilities” * – to make a world of huge capacity for future generations.

Last week, I gave a talk to a group of young and/or out-of-work geoscientists and petroleum engineers in a career strategies seminar as a part of the Society of Petroleum Engineers Gulf Coast webinar series for their members in transition. The title of my talk is Strategies for Career Future-Proofing. Yes, come for the fluffy corporate-speak title, stay for the real talk, which is available for your listening pleasure HERE (fast forward to 1:46:00 for mine, but I encourage you to check out the two speakers who went before me).

At the very beginning of the talk, I stress the following: Strategies – not tactics. Career – my words are deliberately crafted for those intending to build a career as an extension of self, not folks seeking jobs. Future proofing – not Now proofing. Thinking strategically about building a career and a future to go with it requires the deep consideration of People – who you are and your community, your Practice – how to get where you want to go, and your personal Philosophy why do any of this? With my own personal educational and career journey, the talk goes into further detail on each of these with examples and tasks, with these takeaways:

1) People: As earth problems grow, cross-trained earth practitioners will only increase in value. To be the best possible earth scientist/engineer, your only driver ought to be doing what needs to be done and learning what needs to be learned to better understand and serve the earth as an integrated system,

2) Practice: If you are in or thinking of going back to school, anyone can get a degree or acquire a skill. Instead, take the opportunity to learn how to learn and (re)build your foundation. For their own future relevance, universities can stand to fundamentally revamp curricula to foster thinkers and creators, and not commodify education to stamp out STEM workers. To quote Scott Newstok, “The value of an education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks,” and

3) Philosophy: Whatever you choose to do, plan it with vision and commitment to yourself and the world, while nurturing a strong personal philosophy of thoughtfulness, curiosity and being intentional.

People, practice and philosophy take an immense amount of trust (in yourself and others), training (do the work) and time (so, start now).

Along with the tasks, I also assigned reading:

• The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
• Timefulness: How Thinking Like A Geoscientist Can Help Save The World
• The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead In A Reckless Age
• How To Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons From A Renaissance Education

How can I make long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare? How can I learn and let in more and more that will help me see the earth and infrastructure, our whole being on this planet, as a system? How do I deepen and broaden my own understanding of the human experience to better design for that system? Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but I’d rather dream about the future.

Come with us who will build new energies, curricula and communities that the future’s children will then take down and build anew. Else, goodbye.