Students Launch Sustainability Magazine

The new Columbia-based online environmental journal, Consilience, has something of a balancing act to perform. On the one hand, it promotes sustainable development across the globe—shedding light on local issues such as the struggles to clean water in Panama, provide electricity in India, and combat instability in Afghanistan. On the other hand, it seeks to blur the boundaries of those geographic identities by connecting participants worldwide via the Internet.

According to its founders, Consilience, which was set to launch at 9 a.m. Monday, may be the nation’s first student-led publication on sustainable development. Run by a staff of about 25 Columbia students, the journal publishes scholarly articles, field notes, opinion pieces, and photo-essays on its Web site, www.consiliencejournal.org.

Jeffrey Sachs, Earth Institute founder and sustainable development professor, and Joshua G. Zivin, director of graduate studies for the School of International and Public Affairs’ doctoral program in sustainable development, will both speak at Consilience’s launch event in Low Library on Feb. 18. There will be laptops on hand so that the audience can access the Web site, which staff members are also advertising internationally by “spamming thousands of e-mail addresses,” editor-in-chief Anubha Agarwal, CC ’08, said.

She called the Web site “interactive.” Among the plans is a discussion board for each article, which would offer readers the opportunity to connect with authors on the site.
While most of the first issue’s 12 articles—chosen from about 60 submissions—were authored by Columbia students, Consilience strives to compile works from a diverse pool of professors, researchers, and students.

“That’s the mission of this journal—to initiate interdisciplinary discussion on sustainable development,” Agarwal said.

The founders took the name from Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson’s book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Promotional materials define the word as “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding.” Argarwal was excited to report that the forward of the first issue was written by Wilson himself.

The Consilience staff has been working on the journal for about a year because they “wanted to get undergraduates and graduates involved in research earlier,” Agarwal said. “We noticed that people had the passion but didn’t know what to do with it.”

Now that the journal has finally debuted, managing editor Sara Arrow, BC ’10, said she hopes Consilience can set an example for other students to take up their own causes.

“We want to show fellow Columbia students what can happen when just a few students put their heads together, in order to inspire them to take on challenges,” Arrow wrote in an e-mail.

lien.hoang@columbiaspectator.com