Everything is connected. This simple truth has profound consequences. It should be obvious that all knowledge is connected too — though this is clearly not the case. Simply look at any course catalogue at a university and you will find that knowledge has been divided into disciplinary silos and academic departments.
When I went to college back in 1995, I arrived with a full scholarship that allowed me to meander across the course offerings without selecting a major. It was commonplace that a friend would come across me on campus and we’d strike up a conversation. Many a time it was that I walked with someone to their class and asked the professor if I could sit in.
This was how I mixed and blended domains of knowledge. Everything truly was connected to everything else. A class in U.S. civil war history would overlap with insights from a math class in calculus. Both were studies of change and each had something that could inform the other. While I wasn’t looking for it at the time, the word for what I was observing already existed. It is called consilience.
Consilience is the pattern of knowledge that enables different kinds of information to converge as a shared reality. The key word here is converge because there must be coherence and consistency across different data sets, research inquiries, methodologies, and so on.
When I wrote The Grand Synthesis of Biology and Society back in 2016, what I hoped to show was that all human behavior is a subset of animal behavior — and thus every study of human affairs fits within the context of evolutionary studies. This is depicted graphically above with social systems inside of the larger category of living systems.
It should be obvious that social behavior arises from living organisms who interact with each other in a shared environment. What I later realized is that all of the biological and ecological sciences are actually a subset of Earth Systems because they exist within the biosphere of our living planet.
The work I was involved in when writing the grand synthesis in 2016 was to establish the Cultural Evolution Society. Several researchers in the field of cultural evolutionary studies came together and we co-authored a paper titled What are the grand challenges of cultural evolution? that was subsequecently published in Nature: Ecology and Evolution. Knowledge synthesis across a great diversity of fields stood out as the largest challenge at the time.
We somehow needed to integrate all of the social sciences with the humanities, together with all ecological research and the biological sciences. This became part of the mandate for the scientific society that we had established. Now that I am co-founder of the Design School for Regenerating Earth, another mandate has appeared — namely to continue the consiliatory work of integrating knowledge about cultural evolution with all that is involved in the study of the dynamic Earth.
In 2011, I helped establish the International Centre for Earth Simulation (ICES)which sought to bring 120 different research fields together using advanced computing and scientific visualization. Even then it was clear to me that special tools would be needed to bring everything from the “Earth’s core to space weather” (as ICES founder Bob Bishop liked to say) together in dynamic models of real-world change.
Now we are going a dramatic step further. How do we regenerate the Earth? With a full third of landscapes on our home planet degraded and having crossed numerous planetary boundaries, we are far from being safe. Human extinction is a real possibility. Biodiversity loss and pollution go hand in hand with ecosystem destruction. We are in overshoot-and-collapse at the planetary scale. Only a regenerative approach that works across all relevant levels — from local plots of land all the way up to the planet as a whole — can enable us to manage the profound threats of the times we are living in.
I would like to invite you to join the design school. Come help us synthesis all the knowledge about social and ecological change in service to a regenerated Earth.
