Dear Alumni and Friends,

Welcome to our first e-Newsletter! I’m Lynn Moody, newly (as of last September) “promoted” to Department Chair after Brent Hallock asked to step down and return to full time teaching. I’ve taught at Cal Poly for about 14 years, having started out as a part time lecturer, and am now a professor and honored to be here. I am glad to say that we have the best support staff at Cal Poly, the best and most concerned faculty, and the best interactions with affiliated faculty in the geography and geology programs. Most of all, we have the best and brightest students in our college. In this issue and future issues, we plan to highlight students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

We are in challenging times – locally, state-wise, and globally – with issues of the economy, drought in California (do you, like me, cringe every time the weather forecasters on the television news channel burble on about “nice, warm, dry days and cloudless blue skies”?), and escalating competition among urban development, agriculture, and conservation of wildlands and watersheds. We are facing issues of food production, global climate change, soil, water, and air quality, environmental degradation, land rehabilitation and reclamation, and energy production. Our graduates are uniquely positioned to address these issues in their careers, and in fact, our greatest department challenge right now is recruiting students to fill the many career opportunities in the environmental, soil, and earth sciences. We owe it to California, the nation, and the world to attract more good students into our programs and partner with them to give them the skills to meet these challenges!

With all the challenging issues, we have reasons for optimism – the new Obama administration professes to be pro-science and pro-environment. Information about soils is working into the national conscientiousness – witness the new Smithsonian exhibit "Dig It! The Secrets of Soil", the documentary “Dirt the Movie” featured at the 2009 Sundance film festival (check out, http://dirtthemovie.org), and the popularity of Michael Pollan’s and David Montgomery’s books.

In this issue, you will read about some of our students, our alumni, our faculty, our staff, our advisory council, and other departmental issues. We will try to keep you informed of what we have going on. We are in the process of updating our website. We ran the draft by our Advisory Council and got some positive feedback.

So, thank you for your support, let us know when you have positions to fill with our excellent graduates and interns – and most of all, keep in touch. Remember to email us at earthsoils@calpoly.edu or me directly at lmoody@calpoly.edu, let us know if you are moving or changing address (email or land). Send us suggestions. Keep us up-to-date with what is new with you. Send us the contact information for alumni and friends whom you know but are not on our list.