It ill-behoves editors to go around boasting about their organs. Ted Nield wishes to make an exception...
Geoscientist 20.03 March 2010
In January, we published
an opinion piece by Rick Brassington about his vision for the future of Chartership. Rick does not hold any office in the Society and his views were his own. Like all good opinion pieces it was trenchant and held the attention. Moreover it explored a sensitive issue, guaranteed to make our Fellows lay aside their hammers and pick up their cudgels. Should Chartership remain an “optional extra”, available to those who find it useful in their professional lives, or should the Society move towards expecting all those who practise as professional geoscientists to become CGeols?.
Airing controversial issues, both political and scientific, is what this magazine is for. We do our best to stir things up, and to get our readers writing. For example, dissenting voices from Australia about some of the assumptions underlying the climate change consensus (see Feature and
Letters) exemplify the broader, scientific issues with which we deal. This makes us no different from any other news magazine – though it does make us very different from the sort of membership newsletters you might receive from other societies. The reason for this difference goes back, like Chartership, to the merger in 1991 between the Society and the Institution of Geologists (IG), which made the Society a professional as well as a scientific body.
One of the things
that merger brought to the Society was a magazine – something it had always sorely lacked. Originally called
British Geologist, the IG had become rightly proud of its magazine,and to assuage fears that its new incarnation, renamed
Geoscientist, might be hijacked by the Geol Soc Establishment, the merger deal included an unusual and highly sophisticated settlement, designed to ensure
Geoscientist’s editorial independence. Under this arrangement,
Geoscientist was not to be the Society’s mouthpiece, an institutional
Pravda that was the creature of President, Officers, Council and secretariat in Burlington House. Instead it was to be the magazine of the Fellowship, with an independent Editor-in-Chief who would be a senior and respected figure with no continuing connections to the Society’s governance – a post held today by former President, Professor Tony Harris.
That enlightened arrangement continues, and
Geoscientist operates as a Fourth Estate within the Society, a forum for the Fellowship as a whole, dedicated to providing a public space where controversial ideas can be aired without the stifling burden of having always to bear the Society’s official imprimatur. Thus, all the views expressed in our pages are, unless stated otherwise, those of the authors – as it says in the small print on page 31 of every issue.
This is what makes
Geoscientist a magazine, not a mere newsletter – and is why (we think)
Geoscientist is rather more fun than most organisations’ bulletins. It is also why our articles may occasionally make you frown as well as smile. But please, if you do complain, do not make the mistake of thinking that by publishing them in
Geoscientist, the Society has somehow “seen fit to align itself” with the views you find objectionable. In a free democracy, even the most pro-establishment paper does not print the party line.