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Most of our Departments give out some sort of environmental and cultural awareness messages to our students be it through formal modules or the general "mind expanding" experience of engaging the interest and enthusiasm of younger minds. Yet despite this culture of encouraging an interest in and concern about the world around us it is less clear to me that as Institutions we consistently try to lead by example, somehow feeling that standing on the ramparts of our ivory towers and shouting out instructions/questions to the proles outside is enough so long as we also "open the minds" of those coming through our doors. I appreciate this is a gross and unfair characterisation of Geography Departments up and down the land, but in my experience the sense of the academy being outside of the society it is researching and applying a different set of criteria to its decision making processes persists. With this in mind I wanted to ask members of the Forum, just out of interest, about the undergraduate field work element of your Departments geography teaching (phys and human). I never undertook a Geog BA/BSc and have recently learned as a result I missed out on an essential learning opportunity, namely the overseas field work assignment. From colleagues I understand that the choice of overseas field work location is one of the many factors that play a part in deciding upon which establishments to apply to. Whilst I am sure studying people and places in foreign climes is an essential element of the learning experience of studying for a geography degree it does raise the thorny question of whether we might be sending some mixed measures as an academy here. In the light of the climate change debate and its increasingly paradigmatic and over-riding nature just how do our respective Geography departments justify a) to their students, b) to themselves and c) to the wider community in which they are embedded their decision to plan a 1st , 2nd or 3rd year module around a visit to New Zealand, Outer Mongolia or Cancun? I also have a suspicion that, as well a selling point for recruitment, the periodic field trip is something that "just is" - that despite the mantra of embedding reflexivity in social research and practice maybe its not applied at the level of Institutional practice, as though somehow the Departments we are embedded in are nothing to do with our research. So I'd be interested to hear about the range of overseas locations and numbers of students travelling to them that any of your institutions use annually, and the sort of logics and justifications used by your Departments in relation to any of the three audiences identified above. In addition if any of your Depts have an environmental policy or Environmental Management System it would be interesting to hear of examples of this changing practice in regard to field work or ways in which the institution has managed to integrate the field trips with the EMS without substantially changing practice. Anecdotal responses welcome. If I get enough replies I might try and calculate some sort of generic Carbon footprint for these exercises a) to circulate later for discussion, b) to circulate at the RGS-IBG Annual conference. At the very least I hope we might get some discussion going on whether we do enough as a discipline to demonstrate the very concrete ways in which geography matters. Cheers, Marc Welsh IGES Llandinum Building Aberystwyth SY23 3DB