All you have to do is look at a tree – any tree will do – to see how badly our disciplines serve us

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

Paul Ford on why interdisciplinarity will win the future. A quarter millennium ago, William Blake nailed it: “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way… As a man is, so he sees.”