Desilofication
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009Yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down with a number of colleagues at the NASA Ames Research Center for an all-day meeting related to understanding a coherent approach to global water sustainability. One of the themes that seemed to run throughout the day was that we have put our efforts (in this particular case for water sustainability efforts) into fragmented silos that often remain isolated. This, of course, reflects a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge whereby we have put knowledge in these silos and have gone to great lengths to keep them separate. One university professor in the group referred to his own division where he spoke of 3 different chairs of different areas of water management that never interacted with each other. For any of us that have spent any length of time in academic institutions this comes as no surprise.
If we believe that reality is an integrated whole, then a fragmented approach to the generation of knowledge will never approximate an accurate understanding of the underlying structure of reality. No wonder then that our social systems (i.e. governance, economies, etc.), built upon our perception of the structure of reality, often don’t seem in line with the rest of the biosphere.