Sustained Conversation
yvonne liu interviews sara arrow and daniel greenberg
In Low Library on Feb. 18, a ceremony was held to commemorate the launch of the first student-led sustainable development journal in the nation. Columbia’s Earth Institute star, Jeffrey Sachs, was on hand along with several other distinguished speakers in the field. The journal, dubbed Consilience after a book by Harvard professor Edward Wilson, came together over the course of the year and has made the publishing of student research its main goal. The Eye sat down with managing editor, Sara Arrow, BC ’10, and co-founder Daniel Greenberg, CC ’10.
How did Consilience originate? What inspired it?
arrow: It actually started as an idea, almost a year ago, among three students (I’m not one of them), among the current editor in chief, the senior editor, one of the other managing editors, and someone who graduated Columbia. And they thought of this idea of having a dynamic space for conversations about sustainable development. They spoke to some people and floated some ideas. It never came to anything. And then in the fall of this year, three of those students and a few other students got together one night in the piano lounge and started talking about it. We felt like there was a need for a publication of this sort, given the new program in sustainable development and just given the fact that this was an under-represented issue on campus. We really kind of started just with an idea that we should create a journal, and hopefully create a journal that was global in reach and scope. We tried to reach out to students and professors around the United States and also around the world and so we sent out a call for submissions to people that we knew abroad and to universities, professors, and students abroad. And we actually got a little over 60 submissions that we ended up choosing from—about 13 of them became our final journal.
How is Consilience related to the new sustainable development program and the new environmental conservation concentration?
arrow: There certainly isn’t a formal link between those programs and Consilience. But I think what we really wanted to do with the journal was to be able to create a space for students to publish their research that they had either done in the field or kind of in the halls at the Earth Institute and at other research institutes at Columbia. There wasn’t a space for students who are doing innovative research to really publish before Consilience came around.
You said it started with three students, but now it’s a team of over 20 students. How did all these other people get involved?
arrow: I think it was a really organic process—it just kind of came together with people being interested and not necessarily within any single discipline of interest. The editorial board is made up of political science majors, biology majors, human rights majors, econ majors, but there seems to be a common interest in looking at the issue of sustainable development. So we came together. Certainly we had a few informational sessions—we found some of our board that way. We reached out to graduate students, so that we could have an advisory board. We formed an associate board, which is composed of students who are interested in the journal, but aren’t necessarily editing the pieces.
At the launch event, Jeffrey Sachs and Joshua Graff Zivin spoke. How are they involved with the journal?
arrow: Professor Graff Zivin is our publication adviser, so once we assembled what we decided is our final table of contents, basically our final journal, we sent it along to professor Graff Zivin. He gave us suggestions on how to improve some of the pieces, we passed those suggestions along to the writers, and in general he was helpful because he knows how exactly a journal is supposed to look, what makes a journal legitimate and credible, some of the more nitty gritties of citations. And being the Ph.D. director of the sustainable development program, he has a lot of contacts of people who are interested in sustainable development that he could send our way. Professor Sachs is kind of interested in what we’re doing. And we let the Earth Institute know early on what we’re doing in terms of Consilience. He expressed excitement about how undergraduate students and graduate students were coming together to create this publication and he has supported us along the way. He hasn’t actually formally become part of the process, but it’s exciting for Consilience and for him to come together at the launch event to celebrate.
greenberg: Also, Consilience is originally a book by E. O. Wilson. E. O. Wilson and Sachs have worked together on a lot of issues relating to ecology, and E. O. Wilson wrote the foreword to Consilience (the journal) and also to Sachs’ new book, which he [Sachs] presented at the launch event.
How long did it take to create the first issue?
greenberg: Forever.
arrow: I guess we started in mid-October, the beginning of October with an idea. A lot of the work we did was over break, a lot of the primary work we had to do in the beginning was getting our name out there, getting our name to students around the world, so that they could send in pieces, to professors all around the world, a lot of mission-statement building and figuring out what we were doing. The editing process took till the end of February, about two or three months.
Are there any new ideas or things you want to change for future issues?
arrow: We learned a lot of things, so one of the things that we learned was that we really wanted to focus. We kind of went in saying, “Oh we’re going to try and bring in as many people as possible in conversation with each other—professors, practitioners, students, and other people who are interested in sustainable development.” I think along the way we realized that we’re really committed to publishing student research, undergraduate and graduate. So that’s something I think we learned along the way and we certainly learned other things like that along the way. In terms of the focus of the publication, our understanding of sustainability and development is kind of in flux given who’s on our board. So over the years, what we choose to publish and what lens we use to look at sustainable development will change. I don’t know that there are actually specific ways that we’re going to change that.
greenberg: I think there’s a misperception generally in American colleges, perhaps, that sustainable development has to do with the environment. Not necessarily American colleges, just my experience. ... Whereas development for me at least is really about people. That being said, I realize the interconnectedness between the environment and development and how one relies on the other, but we’re definitely not an environmental journal only—like Spec said we were.
arrow: I think also our goal is to create almost like hubs of Consilience around the country if we can, so that we can not make it a journal limited to Columbia, but we can really publish pieces by students at universities and also have students at universities read the publications. At the beginning, we set out to not just be a Columbia publication, so I think that’s something we will try to develop over the years. \\\