In this episode of Geo Conversations, we discuss geoscience communication with Dr Anjana Khatwa and Dr Chris Jackson. Dr Anjana Khatwa is a freelance Earth scientist, broadcaster, and writer. Dr Chris Jackson is a Technical Director at WSP.
Episode Transcript
[00:10] Marissa Lo: Hello and welcome to GeoConversations, an interview by Geoscientist magazine. My name is Marissa Lo and I’m the Associate Editor of Geoscientist and today I’m joined by Dr Anjana Khatwa, freelance Earth scientist, presenter, and writer, and Dr Chris Jackson, Technical Director at WSP. So, both of my guests today are leading ambassadors for geoscience, regularly appearing in different documentaries and talks promoting geology to the public. So, I’m really excited to chat to Chris and Anjana today about their experience as geoscience communicators and what future challenges and opportunities there are in geoscience communication. So can you each tell us a bit about your background and your roles in geoscience communication and broadcasting?
[00:55] Anjana Khatwa: My background is in Earth sciences, so essentially I love to tell stories about rocks, fossils, and landforms. And if we go right back to the beginning, that journey into geoscience communication and broadcasting started with me doing a one-year internship with the US National Park Service in Utah. I really learnt alongside some of the best interpreters of the natural landscapes at National Parks in the United States. And I think that’s because they have a real culture and a legacy that’s been passed down through generations about how to speak about natural landscapes. And then brought all of those skills back to the UK, where I returned to become Programme Manager for Learning and Engagement at the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. And since then, I’ve gone on to really focus on how to engage communities with natural and cultural heritage, and that’s been a real passion of mine, is how do we help people to connect with the landscapes that they live in? And in terms of broadcasting, I’ve been offered opportunities throughout this really colourful, colourful career. And that first started when I was at the Jurassic Coast. The Jurassic Coast is an incredibly attractive story for broadcasters and I appeared in a programme called Fossil Detectives, gosh, back in 2008, with two other presenters and have gone on to really champion the stories about the Jurassic Coast, but beyond that, about the beauty of landscapes and the formation and evolution of landscapes in quite a wide variety of programmemes, recorded and live broadcasts, so it’s been quite an interesting journey to go from a research scientist to stepping into a world of storytelling, you know, on screen, but also through writing as well.
[02:41] Chris Jackson: Yeah, I’m also a geoscientist. 2013: I’d never done any public speaking about geoscience at all. I’d presented at numerous technical conferences. I barely spoke to my granny about what I did. You know, like, literally, I hadn’t really shared much about what I did with anybody, even though I tried, they didn’t want to hear! And then in 2014, I literally got an email out the blue from the Geological Society of London asking me to go and give what was then known as the public lectures. And so, there was lots of panicking on my part then to think about how do I take this really nerdy, complicated thing that I do routinely and daily and making it interesting and try and communicate to the public why it’s important at the same time. And it turns out I think they got my name from somebody else who said, oh, Chris is just at Imperial, which is only half a mile away from the Geological Society. So it wasn’t even like I was any good, I had form. So that was in 2014, and then in 2017 was when I first did a TV show, which was Expedition Volcano. And that again was a call in 2016 from the BBC because they’d seen a YouTube video of me from 2014 from the Geological Society talking about salt.
I do love telling stories about rocks and fossils and, you know, the way the Earth has been shaped, it’s fantastic. But I guess in my career I’ve worked either in industry and academia about applying some of that knowledge to very specific practical problems of engineering and resource provision. So, still fascinated by the natural wonder of the world, but kind of challenged routinely to try and almost like, justify why that thing, which is amazing, is also important as well. Trying to go into geoscience communication and telling people, like, not only is it fantastic, but maybe trying to communicate to people the breadth of geoscience, the way it is shaping their lives now, but in ways that are unseen to them, or the ways in the past, how it’s shaped where their town is that they live in, it’s because there was coal there or something. So trying to knit together the stories, using it partly through this kind of more practical kind of look at, you know, resources and safety, sustainable cities, increasingly like thinking about how geoscience is going to help with things like the energy transition, but not losing that natural wonder that Anjana talked about. That’s, that’s kind of where I am at the moment, is trying to use various vehicles to have that conversation with the public, whether it’s through podcasts such as this, or whether it’s through written pieces that I’ve done here and there, or through TV productions. Regardless of the scale and cost of those sorts of endeavours, I think they’re all super valid and super important mechanisms of communicating geoscience to the public, because people consume that information in different ways.
[05:27] Marissa Lo: How have the perceptions of geology within the general public changed over your careers?
[05:34] Anjana Khatwa: I’ve kind of been at the forefront of the general public flocking to one of the most iconic geological sites in the country, the Jurassic Coast. So, I’ve seen firsthand how the public at large either see or don’t see the, kind of, the rocks and the landscape in front of them. For the most part, it was really interesting because millions of people go to beaches and go to landscapes to enjoy them on holidays with their families, but actually they don’t see the rocks around them. And this is what we were finding at the Jurassic Coast. We were finding that you have millions of people, they sit on the beach, they eat the ice cream, the cliffs are behind them, the sea is out up front. They’re not there because of the rocks, even though the rocks have this incredible, extraordinary international recognition. And so, what we had to do was we had to work really hard to unpack those stories that are locked inside those layers, in the fossils, in the rocks, and in the landscape. That was very, very difficult because the timescales at which we were trying to communicate this incredible story were unimaginable for, you know, “Joe Public”. And it was a real challenge to begin to really address, well, why is it that these elements of the natural landscape are literally invisible in front of their eyes, even though they are physically there and quite towering above them in, you know, in sometimes in quite a dangerous situation. We began to shift towards really focusing on a human history, so the Mary Anning story, and this is where lots of campaigns began to take off, such as the Mary Anning Rocks campaign.
But, you know, back in. I would say back in 2004, it was very, very challenging. Public perception of geology was that it existed elsewhere in the world. So, you had these incredible programmes presented by Iain Stewart on the BBC that were, you know, here’s a volcano, here’s a glacier, here are all these extraordinary landscapes outside of Britain. And so, what we were faced with was, well, how do we help people to connect with and feel proud of what is in their backyard essentially? What we had to do was shift to this sense of pride and ownership that local communities felt about the landscapes they lived in. And that all came through beautiful storytelling and museums that had incredible collections that housed evidence of life on Earth. And it was through beginning to embed that kind of personal connection with the landscape, with historical figures or places where people lived, we began to see a slight shift in that, that perception that the geology around you within our country is just as incredible and outstanding as the places you see on television in these big, high-profile BBC programmes. And I think where we are now I, so we had this initial, kind of, rush of interest in geoscience with Iain Stewart’s programmes and places like the Jurassic Coast being awarded UNESCO status. But I feel like we are still, at large, living in a public society where rocks are essentially very invisible. They aren’t talked about, they aren’t spoken about, they aren’t seen as a part of the natural world. And I think this is our biggest challenge at the moment is how do we bring life and energy and vision to the stories that they have.
[08:55] Chris Jackson: I think telling the public why it’s important is also beholden on us as geoscience communicators. I think when you’re communicating to your near peers to say: Isn’t this amazing? Yes, of course it’s amazing, you know. But when you’re trying to convince me something’s important, it almost doesn’t matter whether they understand it initially. What matters is that you wouldn’t have electricity in your house unless geologist exists and you wouldn’t have clean drinking water unless you had geologists and hydrogeologists. But I think now we’re at the point with geosciences that we need geoscientists more than ever to deliver these different projects. Therefore, we need to make sure we have a sustained pipeline of engaged geoscientists. So we need to use all of the tools we have available to us to do that. So telling people how much you get paid, talking to people about the historical role and admitting the historical role that elements of geosciences has in the climate crisis, talking about the future role some of those same people and techniques might have in trying to mitigate the impact of climate change. So having that much more 360-view of geosciences with a retrospective bit. I would say as a criticism, if anything, towards media and TV, is they don’t necessarily like that latter bit. I think it’s much easier to show volcanoes and glaciers, as Anjana referred to, and amazing fossil discoveries in Mongolia or like in some, like, you know, place in Leicestershire or whatnot, but actually to have a conversation about wind farms, but then talk about the role of geosciences or talk about, you know, the nuclear waste legacy we have in the UK and what role the geosciences might play in safe disposal of that, they’re really amazing! They’re absolutely incredible stories and they are as incredible as the fact The Earth is 4.5 billion years old – right?
[10:45] Marissa Lo: What are the main challenges you’ve individually faced in geoscience communication?
[10:51] Chris Jackson: I would say one challenge I’ve faced is the deprofessionalisation of science communication, that, I think it’s really important, but I think in the industry I used to work in, in academia, and even to some extent, to a lesser extent in industry, it’s just not valued enough. So the challenge is getting time and space and recognition for that contribution as a geoscience communicator, because it’s seen as being the easy thing to do. The hard thing is running the scanning electron microscope and going in the field and collecting gas samples around volcanoes, that’s the hard stuff. And we’ll leave all of the talking to school kids and doing TV shows to like this magical breed of person who knows enough about those things. But also it’s just deep – and you can hear in my voice – it’s deeply frustrating because it doesn’t drag people into the endeavour because that’s what we need, is the richness of voices contributing to geoscience communication. But why would you if it’s deprofessionalised and you’re almost mocked and derided for actually viewing as intrinsic part of your, yourself and your, what you offer society.
[11:53] Anjana Khatwa: Yeah, Chris is absolutely on point here. We are in a space where we have to compete for attention and for time from people who we wish to engage with, with the geosciences. And particularly in the natural heritage sector, we’re competing with other voices that are, you know, talking about the vandalism that happened with the Sycamore Gap tree being cut down. We are competing for space where people are talking about the reduction of butterflies and insects this summer, rivers that are suffering from sewage pollution. It shouldn’t be a competition for space to be heard, but geoscience exists in the shadows, in the periphery of where these important conversations happen. I’ve been really interested in why that’s happened, why, what the difficulties are in, kind of, placing geoscience alongside all of these other areas of natural sciences. And I think the biggest challenge is that rocks, especially, and geological landscapes are seen as very much a constant, that they don’t change, and they do change, but they change over very long timescales, in some cases, or quite dramatic timescales, such as a rock fall on the coastline. But I think it’s that constancy of the geological world that makes it quite difficult for people to spend time thinking about. And also, as Chris mentioned, the relevance. I think most people aren’t conscious about how much geoscience underpins our lives today. And so, it’s this kind of mixture of tackling a disinterest in the science itself because people don’t feel like it’s relevant to their lives because they don’t experience firsthand or an immediate sense the impact it has.
Personally, as a woman and as a woman of colour, especially in broadcast and production, I’ve often kind of experienced that whole difficulty of: oh, you’re a woman and you’re a woman of colour and people just won’t believe you when you talk about science on, on television or on radio or whatever it is. That is also an additional challenge that folks like me experience when you are entering that world of communication, of public communication.
[14:10] Marissa Lo: Anjana, before, when you mentioned that geology in particular is, sort of, fighting for space amongst other subjects, why do you think it’s geology in particular? Why is it not, say, biology or chemistry that has that issue?
[14:25] Anjana Khatwa: I think geosciences struggles to be heard in quite a noisy space, particularly in the natural heritage sector and nature writing or nature production, principally because I think it’s that human interaction with the natural environment that feels more real. It feels more immediate in the sense of, at the moment, there’s a big conversation happening about pollution in rivers, and that’s a very visible impact of how people are emotively reacting to an impact on the natural environment. I think when people look at the geological world and they see a rockfall or a landslide or a quarry, we feel often quite distanced from the impact, that process or that exploitation has on our emotions. We somehow feel quite disconnected from it and I wonder why that is, because people are really emotive about sewage in rivers, because it’s affecting the ecology of the rivers, it’s affecting life, if you like. And we don’t see rocks as a part of the living natural world. And I think this is a really interesting concept because if we look across the world at different global cultures, particularly in Indigenous communities, rocks are animate. They are part of the natural world in a very animate sense. They’re imbued with spirit, they’re imbued with life. And I think in the, very much in that Western Eurocentric context, rocks aren’t seen in that way. And so this is where the distance is created. We become observers of the observed. And part of that is the responsibility of science, because that is how science is conducted. In a way, what perhaps we need to do is to reframe our thinking of how we feel and how we present our understanding about the geological world, that it is as important and as alive as the rivers that flow across the landscape. And perhaps through that emotive connection, we can begin to care about them and see them and respond more with greater resonance when we see them impacted.
[16:31] Chris Jackson: I think Anjana is exactly right. It’s trying to get that more human connection in the way that, you know, Attenborough and Cox do with their respective disciplines, is maybe one mechanism by which we can stir the emotions of people a bit more about what’s around them. You know, going to the quarry point: you walk past a quarry, it’s a big scar in the Earth, that’s a negative thing. There’s no relationship between that quarry and building stones that are used in the village next to the quarry. Like, you can go to some communities, you know, north Nottinghamshire coal fields, and there’s a deep resonance of, a deep awareness of those populations with the, you know, Upper Carboniferous coal seams, of course, because that’s, that was, at least, historically, what the foundation was of that community. So, I think maybe in those communities there is that emotional connection to the Earth because it has been the thing that’s given life itself. You know, it’s given finances and safety and security, but in other places, which are more distant, and, you know, Anjana, we’ve talked about this in terms of urban geology and people live in cities and towns where apparently there’s less geology around them. There’s not, right, 10 metres beneath their feet are rocks! But there’s this idea that rocks are things that poke up above the ground and then, I don’t know, there’s soil beneath our feet. I mean, if I ask my kids, that’s probably what they’d say. What’s beneath our feet? Soil from here to the centre of the Earth, you know. But, like, trying to get that, that geology is all around us and it’s, and it’s facilitating lives and livelihoods is a really strong tool.
[18:10] Marissa Lo: If each of you had unlimited resources, what would you do to improve geoscience communication in the UK today?
[18:20] Chris Jackson: So this is one thing I’m, kind of, very keen on at the moment, is like actually doing, like, audience mapping, or stakeholder mapping, I guess you call it in business. It’s where you actually go out and determine the level of knowledge of the people you wish to engage with, and then you curate a message, a delivery mechanism, also a message, around that. Because I think the problem I’ve seen in the past and the problem I see now, and I see it even in some of the way, the ways I do things, is there’s a deficit model applied to science education or geoscience communication, right? So I know more than these people, therefore I’m just going to tell them lots and lots of things about whatever it is that I know more about it than them. And actually, what would be far more productive, I think, is to go to those audiences and say: what’s your understanding of, you know, some given range of geological processes or some given range of ways in which geology is operationalised in engineering or something, and then using that to fill in the gaps. You know, like you maybe spend some time telling them about some fundamental things, but like really trying to fill in the gaps in their knowledge so that they leave that interaction, that engagement with you feeling smarter than when they started. That’s the whole point of geoscience communication, science communication is, I think, is to leave the, is that the audience to leave there feeling like super clever and chuffed that you played a role in that. So yeah, that’s probably what I would do is like a big nationwide, different age levels, different industries, and try to map that network of understanding and then to use whatever money’s left over to kind of construct some different ways in which you go and talk to people. That could be social media, of course, it could be a big glossy BBC TV show.
[20:00] Anjana Khatwa: I think that’s such a fantastic answer, Chris, because I think that’s exactly what I would do. And I think what you’ve touched upon is this really important process of deconstructing that gatekeeping of power and knowledge that the geoscience community is quite guilty of. And we do that through jargon, we do that through the publication process. And this is why I believe from my experience of working with, with the public, that there is such a disconnection between the science that we love and what we do, with how the public feel about geosciences. It could be a two-way approach. And this is what we’ve seen with some of the projects that we’ve done when we’ve gone out to communities and worked with them to enhance their understanding of the geology in their landscape, where we take our knowledge and our understanding of these incredible landscapes and how they formed to community groups and very diverse community groups, young people, disabled people, people of colour. We have an opportunity as scientists to learn from them about how they interpret and how they feel about the world around them. And I think this is particularly profound when we are working with faith groups, and particularly elders in the community because they have a certain sensibility about the world, which we can be guided by. And one of the key approaches that I found in my book that I’ve just finished, is how scientists can be actually guided by spiritualities, multiple spiritualities from all sorts of communities from all over the world and how that builds a sense of empathy and humility in ourselves about accepting that there are different ways of knowing the natural world. What that does is it begins to link our human experience to these extraordinary processes that have formed landscapes and rocks which then, as Chris said, service the needs in our society, so we feel that relevance to our lives.
[22:04] Marissa Lo: How do we target that next generation, would you say? How do we target school age people who have never considered doing geology? And I guess this links back to my question of, you know, unlimited resources: are there any sort of projects you would want to do specifically with school children to help them consider geology at university level?
[22:24] Anjana Khatwa: So, I’ve been part of all sorts of different projects like Chris, which have been involved in inspiring and engaging children and young people with careers and moving into the geosciences in whatever form that takes. I’m really interested in the communities around children and young people that influence them about the possibilities that geoscience can offer as careers. And for much of my work at the Jurassic Coast for 15 years, I did a lot of work with teachers and learned societies about how to provide resources within that formal curriculum stage. For the last, I would say, four or five years, I’ve kind of moved away from that and have really begun to focus on the influential people in children and young people’s lives outside of the school environment. So, I’ve really focused on elders in community and parents and carers, and how we can, kind of, enhance their passion and love and joy about the natural environment, so that they are able to bring that interest to the children and young people in their lives. And we’ve done this through community walks, we’ve done this through community led education and engagement programmes. And I’m currently on this journey, at the moment, as my book is being published next year. And I give lots and lots of talks to, I would say, retired people who are grandparents and carers for children. And what I find really interesting with that particular age group is that a lot of the women are grandparents to children, but this is a lost generation of women who, during the 1950s and 60s, were told that science wasn’t for them. What I found really fascinating is that they’ve often come along to talks, along with their husbands, and they’ve often come up to me afterwards and said: do you know what, I didn’t think that this talk would be for me because I thought you were just going to talk about rocks. And they said, you know, I’ve come away really inspired, and I’m going to go home to my young person that I look after, and I’m going to go for a walk with them and we’re going to look at rocks and there’s a, you know, there’s gravel in my driveway and we’re just going to explore them. And I think there’s an opportunity, a huge opportunity to provide content and experiences to that generation of women and men who are carers for young people in their lives to begin to use the time that they have with them to create a sense of influence that will hopefully feed into and support what is happening within that formal education environment.
[25:01] Chris Jackson: Yeah, I think in that formal educational environment, so initially I’m just thinking here about universities where geoscience is being taught. I think one really powerful tool would be to actually upskill everybody in their geoscience or science communication, right? So actually have geoscience communication as a fundamental element of a geoscience degree in the same way that we would view sedimentology or volcanology or, you know, geophysics or whatever it might be. Therefore, we value geoscience communication as much as we do those rock facing or fossil facing or geophysics facing disciplines. So that would be my kind of plea, or what I would love to see happening, is geoscience communication to sort of be mandated almost by accreditation bodies like the Geological Society, where they may wish to say, well, we actually view this thing as being so central to being a geoscientist. Because that’s ultimately what the accreditation framework is slightly about, is, you know, you need to have these different things to call yourself X, Y, or Z. I think we’re at the point maybe with science communication and geoscience communication, we don’t have the luxury of using one method or sitting passively and waiting for policymakers, governments to come and ask us for our opinion. We need to come at it from multiple directions, with multiple tools, and be a lot more on the front foot, much more proactive in our engagements. And that comes back to what we were talking about earlier on is valuing that activity.
[26:27] Anjana Khatwa: Yeah, I agree. I think it’s all about winning hearts and minds. And I think what I found quite remarkable over this whole conversation about rivers and the health of rivers is that rivers are essentially, you know, like rocks, they are seen through that Western scientific lens of, you know, they are inanimate. But there seems to be a real passion and a championing for protecting the health of rivers. And I think we have a potential, we’re right on the cusp of doing that for the geological environment. And I think it’s the way that we begin to engage people with their stories and with their relevance, as Chris has spoken about, with their relevance to our lives. Starting from that point of view of where are you at the moment? How do you relate to that, to the geological environment? And it could be for some people they carry a pebble in their pocket. Maybe it’s a crystal that they draw energy from or maybe it’s someone like my mother who has a rock in her Hindu temple that embodies 21 goddesses. There are so many different facets for how people relate to the geological world and it’s embracing that diversity of thought that enriches that sense of empathy that people could feel and have.
[27:46] Marissa Lo: Amazing. Well, thank you so much Chris and Anjana for your insights. It’s wonderful seeing all the different projects you get involved with and thanks for your time today.
[27:54] Chris Jackson: Absolute pleasure. Thank you for having us. Thank you.
[27:56] Anjana Khatwa: Thank you so much.
