Reply to Fildani, A.; Hessler, A.M. Comment on “Gerbaudo et al. Are We Ready for a Sustainable Development? A Survey among Young Geoscientists in Italy. Sustainability 2022, 14, 7621”

We very much appreciate and thank Andrea Fildani and Angela Hessler for theircomment [1] on our article [2]. Their 2021 paper [3] inspired us to conceive of a surveyamong the Italian geocommunity about the connections between education in sustainability(EfS) and Earth Sciences (ES) education. The first step of our research was made amongthe participants at BeGeo21, a congress held in Napoli in October 2021, mainly gatheringMSc and PhD students of ES in Italy. As we underlined in the article, the importance of thesurvey stands in the fact that many of the participants will be part of Italian geosciencesdepartments for the next 20 to 30 years [2]. As Fildani and Hessler well understood intheir comment, our purpose was to raise awareness in the Italian geological communityabout the lack of strategy with respect to educating the newest ES generations towardssustainable development [1]. In order to better analyze this aspect, our intention is toexpand the analysis first to the entire Italian geoscientific community (step 2), and then tothe European one (step 3). We have already started working towards step 2 by submittinga new questionnaire to the participants at the congress of SocietàGeologica Italiana (SGI),which was just held in Turin in September 2022, whose title “Geosciences for a sustainablefuture” seems to harmonize with our purposes. After the analysis and the reporting of thedata we will have collected, an excellent occasion with which to move to step 3 will be thenext EGU general assembly (Wien, April 2023); this step will prove whether our survey hasthe potential to be exported and applied in other countries [1]. We are also very delighted that the comment underlines the ethical dimension ofour work, which is very important to us, as we believe that geoethics will be one of themost interesting fields of research for future geoscientists. By reflecting on the values thatunderpin the appropriate practices and behaviors of geoscientists [4], geoethics has turnedout to be the discipline that connects ES with sustainability issues. More specifically, thecall for the building of a new pedagogical proposal based on geoethics with formative andpolitical purposes [5] finds us in full agreement and we are willing to commit ourselvespersonally.In their comment, Fildani and Hessler also point out that the consideration of theconcept of “deep time” should be involved in any initiative about sustainability, whichonly Earth scientists could master, in order to be able to read the current ecological crisisacross time-dependent scenarios [1]. We agree with this point of view, firstly, becausewe recognize that quick engineering and technological solutions to environmental issuesoften reflect a shortsighted approach that lacks a systemic vision [3], and secondly, becausewe believe that the concept of “deep time” has robust educational power that should beexploited either in ES departments and in other school and extracurricular settings. If “ourblindness to the presence of the past in fact imperils our future” [6], the primary aim of theES community, in Italy and all over the world, should be to bring to the table of the publicdebate its extremely important and unique contributions through an educational program,starting from primary school up to university, in which the understanding of Earth’s pastis clearly connected with a sustainable future for humankind.