Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

• Author: Dunn, Seth
• Position: Review

Edward O. Wilson, (New York: Knopf, 1998).

As the widely dreaded senior essay approached during my final fall in college in 1992, I decided to write about the historical roots of climate change science, and how it was shaping and in turn being shaped by the emerging global warming debate. But I encountered an unexpected roadblock: I could not find an advisor for the project in the department of history (my primary major); and in the environmental studies department (my second major) I faced resistance from one of my supervisors - a geologist who was then a "greenhouse skeptic." After some effort, I finally gained the support of the environmental studies program director, and the reluctant patronage of a foreign policy historian.

My research began in the geology library, where I tracked down the findings of scientists examining the "geosphere" - climatologists, oceanographers, and other earth scientists looking into the rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and its relation to an observed rise in global surface temperature. But to understand the implications of a changing climate for humans and other forms of life, I had to move next door to the biology tower, where I explored the work of ecologists and other life scientists who study the "biosphere." Both groups are now working together furiously at the boundary of the geosphere and biosphere, attempting to study the Earth as a dynamic, whole system - and to assess the consequences of tampering with it.

Next I found myself trudging to the other end of campus to the history and rare books archives, where I sifted the minds of Archimedes, James Lovelock, and others who foresaw the need to understand our planet as a unified entity. Finally, I needed to examine whether the interaction of science and policy on previous international environmental issues - ozone layer depletion, in particular - might shed some light on the ongoing interplay of climate politics and science; this took me once again across campus, to the social science and forestry school libraries. The journey was a simultaneously exhilarating and frightening experience, and taught me a lesson in environmental problem-solving: there is no clear, simple way forward, and some may think your route wrong, so follow your inner compass of curiosity and dance between the disciplines - and try not to accumulate too many overdue book fines.

My foray into writing a senior essay is a microcosm of the cross-disciplinary collaboration now taking place on climate change and other key environmental issues: endocrine disruptors, desertification, the resurgence of infectious diseases, deforestation, growing disparities in resource use. The need to better comprehend and develop approaches for solving these problems is pulling together researchers from what may appear to be far-flung fields: virology, philosophy, anthropology, toxicology, and oceanography, to name merely a few. To understand the risks of climate change, for example, we must integrate the knowledge of paleoclimatologists, epidemiologists, and wetlands ecologists; to reduce them, we must pool what is known by welfare economists, engineers, and hydrogen scientists.

This "jumping together" of facts and theory across disciplines - christened "consilience" by scientific philosopher William Whewell in 1840 - is the subject of Edward O. Wilson's latest book. Bridging knowledge between fields in both the humanities and the sciences is not merely an...