Working groups (question 1): Questions/discussion

Ian Lowe (Chair): Through the discipline of all 10 groups, we have 15 minutes for conjoint discussion before we move seamlessly into the Integration Panel, which Doug Cocks will chair. So who is provoked?

Jenny Goldie: I am just responding to what Ian said about the book - an exciting book on sustainability. It arises out of the In Search of Sustainability conference last year, and it is called In Search of Sustainability. It is now with the publisher, CSIRO Publishing. There are 10 chapters on issues ranging through water, land use, energy, climate change, population, work, peace and equity, and many of the authors have been at this conference. It will probably be out in about August.

Bob Douglas: This is just to say that I forgot, in my presentation, to make one of the key points that I think we came out with. It is that there is a real problem of communication across the disciplines and that one of the real contributions of the conference was the argument map concept that came up yesterday. Although none of us has had experience of use of it, we wondered whether it may be a very good discipline for better communication across disciplines that are not communicating very well on some pretty vital issues.

Anna Robinson: There has been comment made by different people about the prospect of bringing interdisciplinarity into university undergraduate degrees by making people do more degrees. Can I just raise the spectre of HECS fees. Every time you do a unit you are charged. So while we are considering that, and considering Glenn Withers' idea of making postgrad research somehow different through interdisciplinarity, we have got to take into account the financials. If the economists would like to advise us on that, great stuff.

Ian Lowe: Well, if the economists don't, I will advise us that, if we are serious about a knowledge society, we should be educating all the community to the limits of their ability rather than the limits of their parents' wallets. But that would be a political observation, which I obviously can't make from the chair, so I won't say that.

Barney Foran: I would like to ask of the Chair, or someone who could comment on it: what are the structures within the Academies to actually take some of these ideas forward? One of the challenges, I think, to all of us is that, while we may have great cross/inter/transdisciplinary stuff, getting traction with decision making at local, state and federal government levels is hard. So what is the connection between the Academies and core nodes of decision making?

Ian Lowe: I am advised that this comes in the next session.

Alan Jones: One of the terms we haven't heard, to my knowledge, in the last two days is 'risk management'. I wonder if that is something, in terms of looking down the track, that needs to be incorporated along with 'complex systems' – which are being addressed by people in CSIRO. That is what these very, very complex issues seem to revolve around – well, complex systems and their analysis, but also the sorts of risks of various actions or not taking actions. Some of these risks can be quite frightening. I mean the possibility of some feedback loops involving climate or feedback loops involving the different models of carrying capacity that Donella Meadows presented in her second book, actually, Beyond the Limits by Meadows et al, especially the sorts of population and environment interactions whereby resources are drawn down but are then unable to recover, and there may then be a feedback loop whereby they decline extremely quickly.

Written into ESD-type things we do talk about the precautionary principle. There are numerous definitions of that. One looks in vain – perhaps I really haven't seen it in operation and perhaps it is – and there doesn't seem to be the sort of process involving risk assessment and risk management and taking perhaps the precautionary idea, or the onus idea, and marrying those with what we want in the long term, our longer-term goals.

Tony McMichael: Ian, it occurs to me that in planning the conference our primary stated objective was really to get representatives of key disciplines together and have them offer a critique of their own discipline - the limitations, the paradigms, the prejudices et cetera that they bring to the debate - and I think we have done quite well in hearing from seven or eight of the key disciplines.

It now occurs to me that what we haven't been hearing, on the more positive side, is 'success stories' from those that have engaged in interdisciplinary activities, within or outside universities. I am just wondering whether that is something that is a genuine lack, in the sense that there are success stories out there but we have not, structurally, included them in the program because we have sought disciplinary representation rather than interdisciplinary representation – or whether, if we looked, we actually wouldn't find many success stories yet within the Australian university and research community. I would be interested in any observations as to whether there are success stories that we might have heard but have not.

Ian Lowe: That is a good question. One of the groups actually said that that was something we needed: success stories of transdisciplinary inquiry. If anyone has a success story, it would be Cliff Hooker.

Cliff Hooker: I just want to make the audience aware that there is a National Academies Forum - which means the four Academies - initiative, which Thomas [Brinsmead] is directing and I am supervising, and its brief is in fact to cover all of the projects going on in Australia now, looking for successes in integrative method in sustainable assessment. We are three months into that project, we will be presenting a major report on it for all the Academies towards the end of the year, and next year the four Academies are hoping indeed to organise a conference which will try to firm up what a sustainability science, an interdisciplinary sustainability science, would be like for Australia.

That may prove to be too ambitious, but the brief summary so far is that there are lots of little fragmentary integrative pearls in the 30 studies we have now examined, but there are no big pearls that we can present you with at this point.

And as for Alan Jones, the risk analysis is in fact part of that study. That was the strategic integration that I presented yesterday. And there's lots more to say about that too. But I want people to realise that coming down in the rest of the year will be a major Joint Academies Initiative to review our partial successes.

Ian Lowe: Thanks, Cliff. Barney, was yours also an oyster?

Barney Foran: Just a small one – or it's a moderate sized one. The Future Dilemmas study about Australia and its future population-environmental issues which was released about one and a half years ago has been a very quiet success. We have been run off our feet talking in quite a number of big boardrooms around Australia, investment bankers, local governments, state governments - a huge range of issues. They are not particularly focused on the population issues per se, but on the long-term looking at everything, which they found compellingly interesting. People have told me they carry it around in their briefcase for reading on planes et cetera.

I am not patting myself on the back here, I am just noting that these are the issues, and they are now being followed up by at least two states who it looks like are, hopefully, going to ask for that type of long-term integrative multidisciplinary type of approach to be applied in detail to their states. So it can happen. We have done similar studies on the entire Australian fishery and the entire Australian land and water system in a 100-year context, and they too are having their small ripples through quite complex decision making milieus, if you like, at a national and state level. So it can happen. You have just got to do it, though, not talk about it.

Ian Lowe: Thanks, Barney. Tony, I would also say that the Wentworth Group's study of inland rivers and the more modest exercise that you and I and various others have been involved in, to produce a report that is going to the printers this afternoon about climate change and its effect on everything from human health to agriculture, natural systems and insurance, is an example of an interdisciplinary collaboration. The worrying thing is that we are scratching round to find half a dozen good examples, where you could get 8,530 examples of subdisciplines that are doing excellent work within their framework.

John Coulter: This is just a personal comment that I meant to make when I was up front there. Having been to many of these conferences, I find that this one is fairly typical in that many of the speakers have come along and they have presented and then they have walked away. If you really want interdisciplinary exposure, many of those people who have presented have not left themselves available to be exposed to the views of others. Yesterday I was discussing with Ian [Lowe] organising parliamentary presentations in the Parliamentary Library, which is done on a regular basis. They are usually fairly thoroughgoing presentations lasting an hour and a half or so, but it is very rare for parliamentarians to even turn up to those. Occasionally you will have one or two parliamentarians, you will have some staff members, but it is extremely difficult to get people who are coming from somewhere else to actually expose themselves to and take on board the alternative viewpoints, the alternative paradigms.

Ian Lowe: I want to make the comment that Steve Dovers, in CRES here, organised an excellent interdisciplinary meeting at which the rules of engagement were that you submitted your written paper in advance but you were not allowed to talk to it and you were not allowed to leave but were required to engage with your colleagues from different disciplines in addressing a common problem from a shared information base of the written documents you had submitted. It was one of the most exciting conferences I have ever been to, because everyone was there and engaged and listening to each other.