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Decades ago, pioneering petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt pointed out that oil is first found in the human mind. His insight remains true today: Across geoscience specialties, the human mind is arguably the geoscientist's most important tool. It is the mind that converts colors and textures of dirt, or blotches on a satellite image, or wiggles on a seismogram, into explanatory narratives about the formation and migration of oil, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the opening and closing of oceans. Improved understanding of how humans think and learn about the Earth can help geoscientists and geoscience educators do their jobs better, and can highlight the strengths that geoscience expertise brings to interdisciplinary problem solving.

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“The Future of Interdisciplinarity” explores the role of interdisciplinarity within the ecology of knowledge production and use. Cultural transformation, much of it driven by information and communication technologies, suggests the need to rethink the theoretical space of interdisciplinarity. Three themes are highlighted here: the rhetorical and policy dimensions of interdisciplinarity, the future of the research university, and issues of accountability and impact. Overall, interdisciplinary challenges should be seen as more a matter of political philosophy than epistemology, with attention concentrated on the ways in which interdisciplinarians can connect disciplinary expertise to community needs, highlighting both the capacities and limitations of knowledge.