Peak oil, global warming, ANWR, environmental degradation-all topics that grab headlines today and raise public concerns. Like many others with a lifetime of work in the oil industry, I hold opinions on these topics that can be quite different from those of my neighbors, my friends and my family. But often I say nothing, because I find it difficult to articulate my beliefs in short, pithy sound bites. How can you explain to the mom standing next to you at the soccer field why it cost $75 to fill up her Suburban with gasoline? Surely, it must be price gouging by oil companies intent on making obscene profits. Let's face it, people who work in the oil industry almost live in a world apart from the rest of the population. We speak a mystifying language, secure in our knowledge of sedimentary layers and dynamic tectonic processes, but we struggle to communicate without jargon. And the chasm between what we know-how oil is stewed in the great cauldron of the Earth, how it undulates into massive reservoirs laid down by some unnamed antediluvian river, and how we find it with our sound waves and drillbits and derricks-and what most people know is so wide as to seem almost unbridgeable. Yet bridge it we must. It's a problem we've had for decades upon decades. In March 1920, George Otis Smith, director of the U.S. Geological Survey, addressed the nascent American Association of Petroleum Geologists in Dallas. His topic was the public service opportunity of the oil geologist. Much of what he said still applies today, to all the geoscientists, engineers and landmen who work so hard to propel the industry forward. Back in 1920, people were already worried about oil's short future. U.S. proven reserves were 6.5 billion barrels, but the consumption of gasoline had exploded. Promoters fleeced unsophisticated investors, and tainted legitimate producers in the public's perception. And prolific volumes of oil were wasted by poor conservation and shoddy production practices. The notorious Teapot Dome scandal wouldn't erupt for two more years, but when it did, oil executives would be seen by the public as co-conspirators with corrupt government officials. Smith's answer to these issues was education: "There is much misunderstanding about the oil industry wholly apart from that caused by misrepresentation, and you who best understand oil and its differences from more simple resources, such as cotton and corn and hogs and pine, are the ones to inform the public." That's still the standard we must bear. People in the oil business are well schooled in the past, trained to look for resources deposited eons ago. We're comfortable with worlds dominated by invertebrates, with endless seas and odd plants and strange failed lines of evolution. It's this geologic view that allows us to place current events in perspective. We do not believe in a fragile, static planet. Rather, the earth is a robust, fluid, wonderfully changing world. And we understand the finality of fossil fuels, aware of the hundreds of millions of years of sediments that we bore through to find fields. We know the finer and finer screens through which we sieve the subsurface. And we grasp the ways such technologies as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing allow us to make blood from turnips, forcing energy from rocks that previously would not yield their treasures. We need to share this understanding of the earth and its processes, of the limitations and potential of oil and gas resources, of the role of alternative fuels, with people outside the industry. With patience and perseverance, we need our voices to be heard and our votes to count. "No bulkheads should stand between our science and our citizenship-between our scientific standards and our civic duties," Smith said. So that's the challenge that I am taking up. I will work on a few sound bites, think up some short, reasoned statements to convey my beliefs. I will volunteer at the local elementary and middle schools, to give talks and show fossils. The soccer mom will end up knowing a little bit more about unrest in Nigeria, politics in Venezuela and uranium enrichment in Iran than she bargained for.

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