New OA student journal on sustainable development

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development is a new, open access journal led by students at Columbia University. Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia’s Earth Institute and author of the 2005 bestseller The End of Poverty, helped launch the journal this week.

From the inaugural issue’s Note from Editors:

Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development began as an idea: an idea that a group of ten students genuinely and passionately believed had the potential to make this world a better place. …

Widespread global poverty, hunger, environmental damage, and conflict are only some of the problems facing humanity today. As a bold collective of students intolerant of inertia, we push you to understand the urgency of forging solutions to these problems. …

The concept of consilience, “the joining together of knowledge and information across disciplines to create a unified framework of understanding,” runs through each article. With this in mind, we urge you to be active readers, to not only think deeply about each specific article but also to consider the interaction between the individual pieces.

We urge you to contrast theory against practice, one discipline against another, and your ideas against the authors’ ideas. The Editorial Board of Consilience has high hopes that this exchange of ideas, sparked by the written and visual media contained in this online space, will contribute to the progress of sustainable development.