The Earth Science Literacy Initiative (ESLI) seeks to create community consensus regarding what every person should know about Earth science. This NSF-sponsored, inter-agency effort compliments the Ocean, Climate, and Atmospheric Science Literacy Principles documents. The Earth Science Literacy draft document contains the Big Ideas and Supporting Concepts that underlie the research fields funded through the NSF-EAR division. The document was initially generated through the participation of more than 350 scientists, educators and agency representatives during an online workshop in May, 2008, and a writing workshop in July, 2008. The document then underwent two rounds of revisions in the fall of 2008. An active organizing committee has overseen the entire process of creating the ESLI document.

The draft document has eight Big Ideas which follow the themes of (1) the process of Earth science, (2) Earth's history, (3) Earth's complex interacting systems, (4) the evolving geosphere, (5) water-related processes, (6) Earth's controls on the evolution of life, (7) resources and human benefits, (8) natural hazards, and (9) human impacts on the Earth. Under each of these Big Ideas is a list of 7-10 supporting concepts that provide the scientific content of the idea.

The theme of energy comes into the ESLI framework in several locations. For example, the availability of energy resources is an important part of the Big Idea on natural resources (#7), and the geologic impacts of consuming these resources is an important part of the Big Idea on human impacts (#9). More information can be found at www.earthscienceliteracy.org.