About this blog
The goal of Consilience: The Blog is to advance sustainable development by:
- Disseminating meaningful information among professionals and between professionals and academics;
- Breaking down the fragmented and calcified processes that inhibit the uptake of sustainable development;
- Providing a consilient forum for all participants in the built community.
Etymology of Consilience: From Whewell to Consilience: The Blog
William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Founded Upon Their History (1840). Whewell (pronounced “Hule”) was an English polymath, scientist, philosopher, Anglican priest, theologian, and historian of science.
At a time when men of science were becoming more specialized, Whewell was truly a Renaissance Man with his published works in architecture, mathematics, mechanics, physics, geology, mineralogy, astronomy, theology, economics, poetry, philosophy, and translations of the work of Goethe. He coined the words “scientist, “physicist” and was the first to use the term “consilience” as part of the phrase “the consilience of inductions.” According to Whewell, the consilience of inductions takes place when an induction obtained from one class of facts coincides with an induction obtained from a different class – this consilience is a test of the truth of the theory in which it occurs. 
Leonardo da Vinci is regarded as an archetypal "Renaissance Man" and is one of the most recognizable polymaths.What Whewell called the “jumping together” of scientific domains is exemplified in some of the greatest discoveries (e.g., Newton’s unification of the separate theories of the motion of terrestrial bodies with the celestial for his theory of Newtonian physics). Charles Darwin’s explanation of the origin of different species unified what had been distinct domains, including geology, geographical distribution of taxa, morphology, and embryology.
Professor WilsonThe term consilience remained in obscurity between the 1880s and 1999 when it was revived by E. O. Wilson through his book entitled Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Edward Osborne Wilson is an American entomologist, a sociobiology and biodiversity researcher, a naturalist, and consilience theorist.
According to Professor Wilson, the basic premise of Consilience is that we can repair the intellectual gulf between science and the humanities by extending the method of reductionism to all areas of knowledge so that by understanding the component parts in isolation, we can understand the workings of the whole. Wilson’s view of consilience is not collaboration across disciplines but a unity of knowledge achieved through the application of reductionism and the use of scientific methodologies.
Many current definitions of consilience are attributed to Wilson for its resurgence, however, fail to address Wilson’s reductionist approach to bringing about consilience and simply define it as “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding” (e.g., an excellent open-source journal www.consiliencejournal.org).
Consilience: The Blog leaves behind Wilson’s reductionist path to consilience while embracing it as an invigorating and valuable theoretical tool to bring together different disciplines, each with its own origins and realities.
Consilience: The Blog embraces the conceptual unity proposed by consilience and recognizes that it is uniquely applicable to sustainable development with its multiple domains within the built environment. The multiple domains that are the focus of this blog are the professionals in the built environment and the academics that are both educators of these professionals and researchers.
Consilience: The Blog will address two different levels at which consilience must operate within the built environment. At the first level (we can call this a higher-order or macro level), there are a series of interactions and feedback as a result of interactions with humans and nature. For example, our industrialized economies, industries, and technology cause changes in population density, energy consumption, and land use, which in turn lead to environmental changes such as global warming and loss of biodiversity. In our closed-loop system, these environmental changes impact our neighborhoods, our culture, and our economic and life activities. The resultant changes in our cumulative behaviors and activities again cause changes in our natural environment. While we consider these interactions and the feedback processes as part of our global environmental problems, we acknowledge that this process is, at its root, the result of our individual behaviors and actions, thus the second or micro level.
The micro level for Consilience: The Blog consists of a place where sustainable development professionals (defined for our purposes as architects, engineers, land-use planners, landscape architects, appraisers, accountants, attorneys, and include those in leadership CSR capacities) and their educators make real-world contributions to the built environment. A best-practice example of consilience within this community is the use of Integrated Project Delivery, a collaborative interdisciplinary process using such tools as Building Information Modeling during the project’s life-cycle from conception, to construction, operation, and concluding with re-use or redevelopment.
Grant W. Austin, MAI, MMRS, M.S., MRICS
President,
Institute of Green Professionals
February 26, 2009.
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