Traditionally, it's been rare for biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers to communicate with ease, let alone pursue cooperative research. Rarer still has been the inclination for researchers to reach beyond their hard-science disciplines in shared endeavors with economists, lawyers, public health experts, sociologists, and so forth.
What we're only now beginning to understand is that to solve today's problems--especially environmental problems--we need to draw on the expertise available across disciplines, scientific and otherwise. Currently, the most successful environmental solutions are being developed by laboratory scientists, field researchers, doctors, and lawmakers, all working together. But attaining a really productive level of cooperation is far from easy. In a college environment, professors are used to sharing their results, but they balk at sharing in the research process. Communication is lacking, and, to make matters worse, the typical campus rarely sees science faculty classrooms and offices in proximity to those of the nonscientists; ...
