Acknowledgements
This textbook, Environmental Geology, was completed as a sabbatical project during 2023/24. I feel strongly that all students, but particularly the population of students being served at community colleges, which are often comprised of a larger proportion of underrepresented students than found at larger research focused universities, should have free access to high quality learning materials. I am thankful that Normandale Community College and the larger Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system supported me in this view to approve this as a sabbatical project. I am also grateful to David Vrieze Daniels, one of Normandale’s amazing librarians and a champion of OER on campus, who helped get me set up and going with this project.
While work on Environmental Geology began as an adaptation of Physical Geology – H5P Edition, given the environmental focus it quickly became its own beast. However, Physical Geology was a valuable resource for learning how to organize work in Pressbooks and for many amazing figures and H5P activities. The early chapters of Environmental Geology draw on the Plate Tectonics, Volcanoes, and Earthquakes chapters of Physical Geology and I am thankful to Karla Panchuk and Joyce McBeth for this resource and the help it provided in making the daunting task of starting to write a textbook just a little bit easier! This book would also not have been possible without the original version of the book upon which the H5P edition was adapted, Steven Earle’s Physical Geology. The section on groundwater and the figures contained within it were useful sources.
Finally, this textbook would not be possible without the many institutions and individuals who share work under a Creative Commons license or other open license. This makes it so much easier to include high quality images in a project like this. Many high profile scientific journals, like Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences have begun publishing work under Creative Commons licenses, which allowed up-to-date science to be easily accessed and included in a visual format in this text. U.S. Government agencies such as the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA, NOAA, and the EPA publish work in the public domain allowing for easy use and adaptation. IRIS (Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) and SERC (Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College) are invaluable for data, figures, and teaching activities and Our World in Data has a variety of charts and information across a wide range of topics but was particularly useful for water, energy, and climate data in this textbook. Both of these publish their work under a CC BY-4.0 license. Finally, there are many individuals who share their photographs or other artwork of weird and wonderful things through Flickr under a Creative Commons license allowing people like me to find just the right photo to go along with the written content.
