Integration panel and open forum

Just to remind you, then, of where we are going over the next 80 minutes: we are going to have six panel members now, four minutes each, talking about the disciplinary perspective and where it might go in terms of integration.

Integration Panel report to floor

Tony McMichael: There are really two things that I thought I might comment on, that I think bear on where we might go with all of this and some of the things that we have got to do.

In the discussion about where there might have been some success stories with respect to interdisciplinarity, cross-disciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, I was impressed that the examples by and large were coming from outside the formal institutions of tertiary learning, outside the universities. We heard reference to several international bodies that have necessarily recruited large numbers of scientists and researchers from across a diversity of disciplines in order to address inherently complex issues like climate change and ecosystem disruption – bodies like the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and other such recent initiatives that have brought together a whole range of environmental and natural scientists, social scientists, economists and others. And having participated in some of that work I must say I have found it a much more enriching experience, in terms of learning the idiom, the ideas, of other disciplines, than by and large I think I have encountered within the university system.

It is clear that in some of these settings this sort of emergent property does occur of interdisciplinary engagement, because it has to in order to address the issues that are on the table and about which society and governments are expecting answers and guidance from the research community. Ian Lowe reminded us that within Australia the work of the Wentworth Group has similarly brought together a range of disciplines to address an inherently complex problem to do with population-environment, resource use, sustainability. And likewise a similar body has recently been working on the issue of climate change and its impacts in Australia.

So it is heartening to me to hear that these things are happening, and that persons participating report positive experiences. It is disheartening that, for the moment, the institutional structures within universities don't really facilitate these things. I think that is an issue then that we do need to continue to talk about and to try and find solutions to.

The second thing that I thought I would comment on is the issue of the type of research or the type of science that we are necessarily, then, engaging with and the levels of uncertainty, provisionality, that it involves. We heard reference yesterday to the fact that most of us – and this includes many senior politicians, policy makers – carry this spurious model of science as something that deals in exactitude, something that can produce the single bottom-line number that is 'the' answer.

Those of us that are researchers know that this is not the case; there is inevitably uncertainty around our work. But I think if we are going to make progress in dealing with interdisciplinarity then somehow we have got to work to change the currency, the scientific culture, so that not only the researchers but the community at large and the policy makers appreciate that we are moving into deeper waters, more complex systems, and that answers are going to be more provisional, less certain, and certainly not single bottom-line numbers. So I think that is another challenge as we look to the future.

Stephen Boyden: I have three points to make, three points which I think haven't been made up to now but are important. They firstly relate to disciplinarity. The first one is what I would call a bio-historical perspective: what actually happened, in a nutshell, in the history of life on Earth? The physical environment came into existence, that gave rise to living organisms, biological evolution got under way and we ended up with fantastic biodiversity with all these species interacting in one way or another, with energy flow through the system, nutrient cycles and so on.

But eventually this biological process gave rise to the species Homo sapiens, which has a unique biological attribute: a capacity for culture, and a capacity for human culture. And as soon as human culture came into existence, it really acted like a new force in the whole biosphere, and through its impact on human behaviour has repercussions for living systems within humans and in the natural systems around them and so on. And there is a constant interplay between human culture and the processes of life, the biophysical world. That is not only historically but also here and now; in this room there is that interplay taking place all the time.

Some of us argue that because it is a feature of all human situations, the kind of understanding we need for making wise policy decisions and so on must take account of that constant interplay. In other words, people like myself and others in this room find ourselves looking at and studying the biophysical world and then cultural variables as they affect human behaviour and as that behaviour affects biological systems and so on. And that interplay is of enormous importance in terms of our health and wellbeing, and that of the environment.

I am asking myself: how does this approach fit in to these disciplinary discussions we have had? We find ourselves seeking information from these different disciplines, as areas of knowledge, which can help us to understand what is going on in that system.

To put it another way, rather than, as somebody mentioned, having a round table, bringing all your specialists together to focus on a particular problem – which is a good idea – I would argue that we also need someone who stays at the table, whose interest is bringing together that information from the different disciplines and packaging it in a way which makes sense, which is useful in terms of making decisions and so on. I think that the most important need in this conference is for people who are trained in that particular art.

That is point number one. I hope I have got time for point number two.

I was a bit surprised that no-one has mentioned E O Wilson's Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge – or maybe they have mentioned it and I missed it. I would just like to read three sentences from E O Wilson which I think are very relevant to what we have been talking about. He says:

and he gives molecular genetics, chemical ecology as examples. Then he says:

He then says:

And I think that indeed that point is very relevant to the discussions we have had.

Those are two of my points. My third point is a very brief one and a very obvious one. It is stating the obvious, but I think it needs to be said again and again and again. It is that ecological sustainability is, in a sense, the bottom line. If a society is not ecologically sustainable, it cannot be sustainable in any other way. If there is not a supply of food and air and clean water and so on, that society can not be sustainable. It is a very simple statement but I think it is not appreciated by many people.

Colin Butler: I have a feeling I am kind of preaching to the converted again, and it is a shame. Anyway, something from the conference that struck me was the importance of setting a target: we should learn from the economists and set a target, even if we don't think it has got much chance of coming true. I think rather than to go for an optimum population, which is really slippery and difficult, a step towards that might be to think of a national target of a per capita footprint or metabolism. I say deliberately 'per capita' rather than the total footprints, because that would leave open the question of what the optimum population is.

This might be pie in the sky, but if the Prime Minister would say, 'By 2010, per capita footprints, 95 per cent or 90 per cent of what it is in 2004,' we could look at different mechanisms – energy, water, soil, fisheries, landscapes – and we could maybe develop some indicators. Just as we have these feedbacks on the weather reports with the water use and I think that has been to some extent successful in reducing our per capita water uses, we could have other things. I think that would be a useful stimulation for the debate and not totally unfeasible.

The other thing I would like to say, very briefly – Paul Kelly mentioned it – is in the document I prepared for the conference and in the earlier one: the discussion of the security element. It hasn't really come up in this conference. Again this is a policy statement and it is not what Doug Cocks wanted me to say, but I think it is really important that we think far more about the fact that Australia is an unsustainable island in an unsustainable ocean. It is quite clear that market economics is not producing sufficiently rapid development in the Solomons and probably Papua New Guinea, but what about the even bigger countries in our region? Indonesia is the obvious one. I am oldfashioned in the sense that I think that slogan from the '70s, 'Development is a good contraceptive', still holds true.

There are two sides to this debate. You have to say, 'Well, let's have more aid, but let's make this aid have more quality,' and that is quite difficult. But we first of all have just got to say, 'Well, let's have more aid.' At the last budget it increased to 0.3 per cent of the GNP; that's a third of Scandinavia's and the UN target is 0.7. So 0.3 is very miserly. I think we should see that as part of our national approach – it should really come from our defence, or perhaps be tied to our defence. And I think that if we could increase the development in our region – Singapore is not a risk, no-one is frightened of Singapore, so perhaps we could do that with the other countries – then it would reduce the risk of future political instability and ease the perception of a growing security risk to Australia, which certainly Paul Kelly is aware of and I think many other people too, even though it wasn't explicit in this conference.

Julie Klein: We have talked a lot about silos today but I would like to remind everybody that those silos are also shot full of holes, and one of the most important things for us to be thinking about is building coalitions across the lateral tracks that have been made. I tried offering some action points in the handout the other day, to suggest some things that we could do. Let me emphasise four things that we can be thinking about for active integration, getting on with the process.

One is remembering that it is a both/and world; it is not an either/or world. We are at a state in the history of knowledge when it is not a matter of saying disciplines or interdisciplinarity. We have a lot of indications that it is a matter of both being in the system, in the system of knowledge. So that becomes a very important theme to be sounding in working with interdisciplinary projects, when choosing relevant approaches and tools and projects, making it clear that interdisciplinarity is also in the midst of the disciplines, drawing on the state-of-the-art knowledge that they have to offer, legitimating that being inside of each other.

Interdisciplinarity is often accused of being shallow. It is not if a sense of rigour is brought into the process and there is ongoing contact with the state of the art in disciplines and in interdisciplinary fields, and in professional fields. So the both/and world, not the either/or world.

The second important point is to remember that interdisciplinarity has a history too. One of the ways of trying to cripple interdisciplinary projects and programs is to say, 'It's just new. It's a fad of the day.' Well, that is simply not true. It has been around for a good portion of the 20th century. One North American social scientist actually said that interdisciplinarity was born in the early 1920s at the corner of 42nd and Madison in New York City. That's a characteristically American kind of claim, but what she was referring to was the fact that is where the offices of the Social Science Research Council were located, one of the first organisations to proactively do interdisciplinary research. And in school education, the concept of correlation and the [inaudible] society has been around since the late 19th century. So it is important to remember that lesson.

It is also important to remember that each project generates its own sub-history, and to capture the knowledge that each project brings forward. For that reason I was delighted to hear about the desire to collect success stories.

We should also be empowered by the fact – my point number three – that we know a lot about how to do interdisciplinary work. It is certainly hard to do, it is new to many of us, but there is a huge literature, there is a big integrative toolkit, there is a large family of proven methods. It is very important that we remember that and bring that to the table in doing new projects. Cliff Hooker's very rich model that he presented yesterday reminds us that we always have something new to learn, but we have a lot of useable knowledge and it should not be dormant knowledge.

As my fourth and final point, it is so important that we do partnering internationally. I agree with Barney Foran that each of us needs to, in our countries, get our own houses in order, but what a moment in time this is. In the EU, inter- and transdisciplinary research is being targeted at a high level in the research programs in Brussels. In Canada, in Ottawa, interdisciplinarity is now mandated as a point that must be addressed in all research grants. In Washington, DC, your counterpart body, the National Academy of Sciences, is issuing a major study on implementing and facilitating interdisciplinary research.

We can't all go to Brussels, we can't all go to Ottawa, we can't all go to Washington, but I would also remind us that we have powerful tools for communication – the Internet. I had breakfast this morning with members of Land and Water Australia, Alice Roughley and Catherine Mobbs, who are doing some important work in integration here. We were talking about the power the Internet has to keep us in touch with what is going on in other countries. We are standing inside a building that was a bold experiment in the 1950s – the members of the Academy taught me that. People thought that it would be too bold an experiment, to build a building like this. We now can build buildings without walls and doors. And we should seize that opportunity in partnering.

Richard Baker: I would like to take up Julie's offer to shoot holes in silos and also respond to Tony's call for success stories, with an example of a transdisciplinary teaching course. It is a course that I teach on resources, environment and society, which has as a key focus the theme of this conference. (Indeed, quite a large number of participants here have spoken to that course over the last couple of years that the course has been taught.) I want to pick up on some of the things that have been said at the conference in terms of the need to cross disciplines – Bryan Furnass's eloquent talk that we must overcome disciplinary tunnel vision – and I would argue that we need to teach skills in achieving that.

There is an assumption that we can all suddenly become interdisciplinary workers, when we have often had a long history in universities of being put into silos. I have both first-year and third-year students here, so I have to be careful what I say, but I would like to compare the first- and third-year student experience and expectations. The first-years, in general, come in with very open minds, keen to address particular issues, interested in issues of sustainability, issues of equity, be it global inequalities between countries or gender issues or urban/rural divides in Australia. But through the course of their studies they are funnelled into silos. Increasingly, by the time they get to third year, students either have a science-based focus where they expect a right answer – going to some of the things we have heard today, of very narrow definitions of what science is – or they have immersed themselves in arts courses and are quite naive about the biophysical relationships that are such key issues in terms of those courses.

Students are asserting themselves at ANU to get away from that. So ANU leads Australia in having a majority of students now doing multi-faculty courses. Joint degrees are now in the majority at ANU, but the university structure is challenged to keep up with what the students are demanding. The silos are being imposed upon students and we need to break out of that.

So the students of first year are going to be our future researchers, our future policy makers, our future politicians, and we have a university system that is inherently subdivided into those different areas and all those issues of the turf wars that we talked about.

The undergraduate program is a human geography course, and during the course I aim to get the students to interact with every other possible social science that is relevant to geography. It is not made explicit – so here is a secret for the students who are here today – but by the end of the course I hope that they have come into contact with every one of those sister, associate disciplines that human geography happens to be linked with.

So while we have a silo view of the world, I would argue that we do need disciplines such as geography, where people can learn to talk to demographers and talk to the anthropologists. When we start doing that, geographers in particular have had some insights into looking at different ways of knowing, and challenging the pervading view of science in this country as a Western view of science.

We have, for example, a very, very long tradition of Indigenous science in Australia which takes a very holistic view of the environment and is pressing some particular issues which are quite distinct, usually, from those that Western science has put forward.

So we have Indigenous scientific systems which embody many of the characteristics we would usually reserve for how we think about Western science, but Indigenous science has this question-framing, observation focus, communicating the results through a highly developed form of ceremony, and also a highly predictive predictive power.

There is lots more information about my course on the ANU's website. You will find many examples of the students' work and also a way of overcoming disciplinary silos.