Managing Earth's Ecosystems: An Interdisciplinary Challenge

In the beginning, there was the universe; from the Middle Ages on, there have been academic disciplines to study it. When early inquiries and discoveries were being made and the universe appeared a neat, clockwork Newtonian place, the Western scientific disciplines—primarily physics, chemistry, geology, botany, and zoology—seemed to fill the bill. But problems weren’t long in appearing. The boundaries between chemistry and physics and between botany and zoology began to break down early on, and, by the middle of the last century, those between chemistry and biology (a descendent of botany and zoology) lost their sharpness. Considerable inertia may build up in institutions, however; it may be particularly strong in those sheltered from competitive market forces, such as universities. Channels developed to direct flows of capital into university schools and departments; infrastructure and discipline-oriented reward systems were established, and positive feedbacks favoring established disciplines naturally developed, amplifying the career value of a disciplinary focus and deepening the channels controlling resource flows. Thus a conservative division of the world of scholarship has been fostered. This conservatism influences virtually every aspect of scholarly inquiry, from the framing of research problems, to funding and conducting investigations, to publishing the findings where they will reach the targeted academic audience, and to communicating the importance of the work more broadly to undergraduate students, policy makers, and the public. Let’s consider first the framing of research problems. Since the Middle Ages, the process of cultural evolution has generated a body of nongenetic information sufficiently vast that no one person could hope to grasp more than a tiny fraction of it. If human beings are going to learn more about how the world works, and better direct their collective understanding to the long-term service of humanity, the world of knowledge must be subdivided somehow. Disciplines therefore are necessary. At the same time, few significant human problems lie within the boundaries of current disciplines. A question such as ‘‘what is consciousness and how does it relate to emotions?’’ might be considered primarily in the arenas of neurobiology and philosophy, but important dimensions clearly also lie in fields such as genetics, endocrinology, evolution, and behavior. Similarly, a problem such as ‘‘how can the harmful environmental impacts of human activities be greatly reduced?’’ might seem squarely situated in demography, ecology, and economics (to readers of Ecosystems, anyway), but further consideration quickly takes one into fields of engineering, sociology, psychology, anthropology, political science, law, and ethics, to name just a few. Failure to recognize the footprint of such problems on what might be thought of as a multidimensional, multidisciplinary surface could lead at best to silly, naive ‘‘answers’’ and, at worst, to bad policies with serious societal consequences. Ecologists must be particularly wary of this. Arguably the most critical problem in ecology today is to establish a scientific basis for making human activities ecologically sustainable. Yet rarely are issues in this area approached systematically, because to do so would obviously require forays far afield into disciplines in which ecologists typically get little or no training. It is much easier—and more rewarding professionally in many tangible ways—to limit one’s explorations to better mapping of the ‘‘terra cognita.’’ Received 4 February 1999; accepted 3 March 1999. *Corresponding author. e-mail: gdaily@leland.stanford.edu Ecosystems (1999) 2: 277–280 ECOSYSTEMS r 1999 Springer-Verlag