Interdisciplinary Collaboration
This project is an interdisciplinary approach to combine anthropological, cartographic and oceanographic science to understand how coastal change has an anthropocentric impact on the Cape. This type of synergistic scholarship is what is needed to create innovative solutions that not only address how to withstand global climatic changes but also how to change the environmentally compromising choices we as a global community are making, while helping us reprioritize our value systems to embrace new patterns of sustainable consumption. In a recent lecture, “Integrating Cultural, Linguistic and Biological Diversity” by Dr. Eleanor Sterling, she touched upon the immediacy with which we need to deconstruct the barriers that confine our individual disciplines to work cooperatively to come up with comprehensive responses to global warming that come out of culturally informed scientific analysis. She concluded her talk with this quote by Roland Barth from “Jeunes Chercheurs”:
Interdisciplinary work, so much discussed these days, is not about confronting already constituted disciplines (none of which, in fact, is willing to let it go). To do something interdisciplinary it’s not enough to choose a “subject” (theme) and gather around it two or three sciences. Interdisciplinary consists in creating a new object that belongs to no one.
Just as interdisciplinary collaboration is needed between disciplines, similar partnership is necessary between coastal communities. In a world where more than 70% of the population lives on coastal plains, the Cape is just one community amongst many that will experience calamitous problems if we do not collectively reverse the factors that are causing sea level rise and global warming. Albeit a growing international concern, sea level rise seems to exist currently in the realm of scientists and policy makers and rarely includes input from local stakeholders like residents. As evidenced by this project, seeking local knowledge is essential to gain a comprehensive chronicled understanding of the interaction between a coastal community and its interactions with the ocean, which can inform site specific solutions. A more anthropological understanding of how individual communities can respond to global warming is essential and necessary to facilitate a greater sharing of cross-cultural information regarding different approaches, research and techniques that might be applicable in other locations. As more evidence is released all the time that global warming is more severe then we had previously imagined or calculated, this type of cross-discipline and cross-cultural collaboration can help catalyze the imminent action that is required to counter global warming.
