Clendon David: Royal Society of New Zealand Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Clendon David: Royal Society of New Zealand Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:667;Page:14250] 
DAVID CLENDON (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora koutou. The introduction of the Royal Society of New Zealand Amendment Bill brings us a step closer to fulfilling a commitment made by the Royal Society of New Zealand in February this year when its memorandum with Te Whainga Aronui the Council for the Humanities agreed to bring the two organisations closer. The Green Party is very happy to support this bill as seems to be the mood tonight. As a person who did an arts degree at undergraduate level and then went on to do a postgraduate science degree I will feel somewhat less divided in my membership of the Royal Society of New Zealand given that it is— 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: You’re an expert on this. 
DAVID CLENDON 
: Yes it is a very interesting place to be when one is moving between these two fundamentally different disciplines or approaches. 
Shane Ardern 
: Dangerous ground I’d say. 
DAVID CLENDON 
: Quite right. To an extent this returns the Royal Society of New Zealand to its roots back to the Royal Society in the UK. That society came together in the 1640s as a college of natural philosophers who were delving into this then new model of observation and experimentation that in time became the empirically based science that we understand now. Clearly this reintegration with the humanities is as I say coming back to the roots of that organisation. 
Natural philosophy was a branch of philosophy a theoretical branch coming from an ethical base endeavouring to understand nature as it was then comprehended—dare I say it what we would now refer to as the environment. Clearly there is a long history to the evolution of natural philosophy through to the scientific method objective observation and the like. The downside I guess of the scientific method which is clearly incredibly powerful and has been a very productive approach was the degree of hubris or pride and the disallowance of indigenous forms of knowledge investigation understanding and interpretation of the natural world. In the Western context the reaction to the success of the reliance on the scientific method were the more extreme forms of postmodernism. We are finding that pendulum swinging back closer to a centre point to acknowledge the value of both the scientific method and of a humanities or an arts-based approach to advancing knowledge and research. 
In the modern age if you like back in the late 1950s CP Snow in his lecture  
The Two Cultures 
 and then his book  
The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution  
described the predicament very well when he observed that academics in schools of the arts were not only unwilling to talk to the scientists and vice versa but effectively unable to. They were almost unable to communicate with one another. Clearly in the 20th and the 21st centuries that degree of division within our academic and our research bases would be simply unacceptable and would not advance us at all. In my own discipline of resource management it was clear that it was critical that resource management decisions are best made when they are not only based on good scientific understanding geology ecology earth science and all the other scientific disciplines but also within the cultural context established by law history and economics. It is only with people who are trained and who understand the powers weaknesses limitations and strengths of all of those sub-disciplines that we arrive at very good management decisions like how to deal with our natural world how to manage in the interests of our communities and how to get good economic outcomes. 
In short we believe this is a good bill. It is timely. We are very pleased to see the society and the council coming together in the firm belief that the new organisation will over time become much stronger than the sum of its parts. Kia ora koutou.