For two decades the ACS has supported Chemistry in the Community (ChemCom), a high school course that is based on issues such as those highlighted this month and describes important ways chemistry can be applied to those issues. For nearly as long, Chemistry in Context has provided a similar approach for non-science majors at the college level. But not much is available for the science majors who will need to develop expertise and actually go out and work on science and technology that will address the many problems we face. Worse, there is no groundswell of support for efforts in that direction. I have argued before that we could motivate students in introductory courses much more effectively if we helped them to see how crucial chemistry is and will be for solving many of these problems and if we helped them to learn that they could become important contributors to the solutions. Why don’t we do more of this?

I think an important issue is that we just don’t have the time to keep current on the science, technology, and public-policy aspects of the many environmental problems we face. Thirty years ago I co-authored a textbook on environmental chemistry that provided background on most of these issues and was up to date at the time of its publication. I soon realized that unless I concentrated solely on keeping current on each of those issues, the textbook’s content would become out of date almost immediately after publication. I had many other interests and never prepared a second edition. Most of us are in the same category when it comes to constantly updating our courses with the latest information on environmental science, technology, and policy. Students have a right to expect that we be up to date if we are going to discuss these issues and that is a very difficult responsibility to meet.

Perhaps there is a better way than acting individually. The World Wide Web is now providing tools that can facilitate concerted effort by many, allowing each individual to become a tributary and everyone to partake of the broad stream of information that results. One example is the wiki we have set up through the ChemEd Digital Library so that any chemist can contribute to the Periodic Table Live!. For each of the elements, the wiki allows anyone familiar with its properties and uses, with the scientist who discovered it, or with other aspects of its chemistry to contribute their expertise easily and conveniently through a Web-based interface. Perhaps a better tool for enhancing the stream of Earth-Day chemistry would be a Weblog (blog) moderated by someone with interest in a specific aspect of environmental chemistry or policy. The moderator would be responsible for keeping up with the latest developments in a relatively narrow (and therefore tractable) area and updating the blog on a daily or weekly basis. Anyone who visited could therefore be assured that the latest, most accurate information about the issue and related pedagogy would be found there. Feedback through comments on such a blog would permit all sides of an issue to be explored and would encourage everyone with relevant knowledge and experience to contribute. A moderator’s role would be similar to the role of a feature editor in this Journal, except that it would be more proactive. Rather than waiting for someone to submit an appropriate article, the moderator would upload information at regular intervals and would evaluate responses to that information from a broad range of chemistry teachers, deciding which comments were relevant and adding them to the stream.

The collective effort I envision here would be of great help to anyone writing a textbook, whether specifically directed toward environmental chemistry or more generally oriented toward introductory or advanced students. More importantly it would support anyone using a standard textbook who wanted to extend and enhance the current concentration on fundamentals out of context. It could even lead to an online Living Textbook (see JCE LivTexts) that would incorporate all of the environmental chemistry in an ongoing process of incremental contributions to the stream of science and pedagogy. Such a collective effort will require that many readers of this Journal each make a small contribution of time and effort. The benefit received by the community (and by each individual contributor) should greatly exceed the effort required of each contributor. If you agree, volunteers are welcome to contact me at any time. Thanks to the Web, all of us can now work as a pedagogical team to help students realize that chemists have a lot to contribute to Earth Day. Please join the effort and participate in broadening this stream of chemistry!

Blogged at NSDL Expert Voices.