Dear readers,

since years I am promoting on my own accord my cultural work with joy and energy. It is important for me to spread thoroughly elaborated scientific data and tested facts as well as to express my own well-considered opinions. I am freethinking and I like complexity.

Another point is to be permanently aware of my moralic and civic duty to act responsibly: i. e. to try to understand  - by thinking as earnest and profound as possible - the backgrounds of actual problematic situations and trends, to develop well considered proposals for betterment and to publish them. This concerns especially the actual environmental situation, the anthropogenic energy- and mass-fluxes caused by rising consumption of natural resources and interconnected dependencies and bottlenecks as well as reprehensive violence.

Since 1997 - subsequent to the accomplishment of my doctoral thesis in geology - my cultural work evolved into interdisciplinarity and contains at present the following topics:

1- revisional work (since 2000) in own basic research, which is composed of geological mapping, sedimentology, stratigraphy and tectonics. By means of the method of the Socratic self-dialogue, I test the quality of my thesis's base, which consists of a geological map 1:10000 - elaborated between 1986-1989 - , covering an area of ca. 30km². In this area, I try to detect, analyse and correct own errors and failures, which inevitably occurred in a complex and difficult general situation (concerning physical access, outcrop situation, tectonic deformation, discernibility of geological formations, insufficient advice by a supervisor as well as contradictory and arbitrary information in related scientific literature), and to avoid new failures. Therefore I wrote a friendly blog, in which I ask publishing houses to improve quality control of submitted papers. This self revision work will soon, when finished, be summarised in a manuscript entitled "Taking a ride on a Tuscan dragon: a geological survey in the metamorphic core complex of Monticiano-Roccastrada (Italy)".

2- Organisation and cultivation (since 1996) of a database, in which I opened up professional literature on environmental geology and ecology, and which I made accessible to the common since April 1999. I chose the non profit / pro bono option in order to have more users and to rise the probability to spread more useful and important ecological and environmental information. The activation of key words (in German language) generates citations in alphabetic order, which are linked to the relating specialised papers in the journals and to the technical books present in the online libraries of the publishing houses.

3- scientific base work (since 2003) for the establishment of the virtual Geopark Werdenfels (Southern Bavaria, Germany). Beside intending to raise the degree of sensibilitiy of the public for beautiful and fascinating rock formations and landscapes, I also try to explain the deeper meanings of those huge piles of lithified matter expressing aesthetics, singularity, transitoriness and vulnerability: the possibility to extract from rock data about palaeoclimatic changes, their causes and consequences and to compare this knowledge with or to apply it to the actual environmental development (climate change, warming and acidification of the oceans, sea level rise etc.) in the anthroposphere. Lithified products of ecological turnovers / palaeoclimatic changes in earth history are well exposed in Middle Triassic and Middle Cretaceous formations: tropical fringing reefs failed to adapt to the onset of greenhouse climates and demised.

4- my intellectual online testament, in which I develop, substantiate, and defend thoughts about a sociological key-problem: reprehensible violence - negative aggression - of mankind against individuals of its own species, against other forms of life (plants, animals) and against the unanimated nature: pretensions and greed provoked that more and more resources are captured, harvested, mined, extracted, processed and finally dissipated and dumped. The text results in the statement that the situation might improve, if educators would better transfer -the deep meanings of fairness, considerateness and peace; -the urgent necessity to include ecological rules in the world economy; -the facts of vulnerability, forlornness, singularity and vanity of each person; -the fact that cooperation, moral courage, sharing with and helping other persons can make a good part of life's sense. Fact based knowledge as solid mental base, which prevents from affective acts and temptations to execute reprehensible violence as well as to withstand deterministic economic rules..

5- updating the book "250 years of industrial consumption and transformation of nature: impacts on global ecosystems and life", in which I describe the development of industrial mass extraction and mass utilization of mineral resources in a chain of growing economic values as well as its consequences and multiple side effects for humans and environment caused by misuse and utility-, commerce- and greed driven mass applications of valuable resources inside earth and of brilliant ideas and inventions of the greatest and most creative thinkers in technology and science.

6- the assistance of my wife Helga Pfoertner during her publishing work entitled "Mit der Geschichte leben: Mahnmale, Gedenkstätten und Erinnerungsorte für die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus in München 1933-1945" (in German language) - "Living with history: memorial sites for the victims of Nationalsocialism in Munich 1933-1945" (translated).

Energy, but also fear stimulate me to develop and push foreward that cultural work and I am convinced that this is useful and necessary in a largely spoilt mass-, consumer- and trash/dump society, which spreads without consideration of complementary disadvantages for many other individuals, which spreads by dumping humanitarian and social standards achieved laborously over the centuries, and which is ever more caught in by utilitaristic optimisation and commercial mentality. A system has originated, in which disparities, crises and instabilities grow, political extremism spreads and the degrees of freedom of future generations get restricted ever more. I am convinced that my critical cultural work is an essential counterpoint to that problematic kind of mainstream.

Yours sincerely

Hubert Engelbrecht