The disciplines of geography and geology and the field of water sciences have traditionally been western, white and male (Dutt, K. 2020 “Race and racism in the geosciences” Nature Geoscience Vol 13, 2-3. nature.com/ngeo; Goldberg, E. 2019, “Earth Science has a Whiteness Problem” The New York Times, December 23, 2019). Most of your faculty members were trained in predominantly white and male departments, which can reproduce ways of being and knowing that are exclusive and oppressive to those who are not white or male. Our faculty is predominantly male and yet ethnically diverse, and as many women are full professors as men. That is, we partially reflect the past of the disciplines from which we come, and we collectively aim to change the future of those disciplines.

Our commitment is to widen the participation of under-represented groups in Geosciences, which for us is not just about training more women or people of color or Black students in our department but also about diversifying and training our faculty--all to expand our disciplines’ ways of knowing and thus change the disciplines themselves. We strive to recognize the past and current injustices perpetrated by the institutions we are part of (the university, professional societies, etc.) and to mitigate and redress those injustices where possible.