Current environmental problems increasingly call for research - as
well as education - which crosses the traditional divides between
well-established scientific disciplines and between the natural sciences,
technical sciences, social sciences and the humanities. This
paper addresses the issue of what interdisciplinarity, at the interface
between the natural and human sciences, entails and the theoretical
problems and obstacles interdisciplinarity encounters. A number
of attempts to institutionalize interdisciplinarity, at the Human-
Environment interface, in ‘fields of study’ or even ‘disciplines’, are
briefly discussed, including Geography, Human Ecology, Environmental
Studies, Environmental Management, Ecological Economics,
Sustainability Science and Earth System Science. Key problems of
carrying out interdisciplinary research are identified, including differences
of both an ontological, epistemological and methodological
nature. Particular attention is paid to differences between disciplines
in the way they ‘explain’ and ‘interpret’ phenomena and regularities,
and in ‘world-views’, pre-analytic assumptions and in time scales.