GEOPOETRY
Wait, what? Now you are just making up words…
A figurative bridge linking science and poetic frames of mind, much like linking the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
Upon hearing the word ‘geopoetry’, one would expect something along the lines of either poets having an interest in geology or geologists who write poems. This is actually not too far off…
Scottish poet Kennith White founded the International Institute of Geopoetics in 1989 and described geopoetry as being fundamentally concerned with a relationship with the earth and with the opening of a world (Wordpress, 2012).
Did You Know?
Harry Hess (referred to as the father of plate tectonics) coined the term when he first published his theories and findings in his article ‘History of Ocean Basins’ in 1962. He called it ‘an essay in geopoetry’.
Hess described his theories as geopoetry in order to convince his peers to suspend their disbelief and scrutiny long enough to consider and understand his observations about seafloor spreading. Hess needed his audience, in the absence of much hard data, to speculate imaginatively, as if reading poetry (Wordpress, 2012).
The point was that different fields, different views and the use of language in different contexts had the same fundamental intentions, by challenging through imagination and astonishment, our relationship with the earth.
On the Geopoetics.org website, it was strongly affirmed that the earth is referred to as a natural resource and as a source of economic wealth, and that herein lies the problem. This kind of language implies exploitation and abuse to the degree that threatens the earth and the problems faced today are a direct result.
In groundwater practices, we interpret data gathered in the field and conceptualise a clear picture of the goings-on underneath our feet. It would be rational to assume that each hydrogeologist must enter a mental space beyond ordinary analysis, where conjecture and imaginative play is needed, and this particular mental space is said to be shared with poets.
That is also why no two groundwater numerical models will be exactly the same.
In other words, we should still be astonished by the very thing we are trying to make sense of.