GLPNEWS | NOVEMBER 2012 5 Perspective Inter-disciplinary articulation can be conceived from diferent points of view. It may distinguish multi-, inter- and trans-disciplinarity, depending on the degree of amalgamation of disciplinary knowledge; it may be understood as problem- oriented or as broad theoretical matter; it frequently appears as a major challenge in new domains of research, in particular, when the social world is involved with the issues under scrutiny. This essay takes on two key elements of the land and environmental changes ields - their ecological and social dimensions - to ofer a few relections about the nature of their inter-disciplinary exchanges to contemplate the problem of how society may respond to these changes. Starting with a personal recollection of land change studies in the Amazon, I frequently remember serious inter-disciplinary issues amid the debates about deforestation causes and efects, and the considerable changes in remote sensing aiming at Earth System research, always exposing the disparity of the methodological, theoretical, and epistemological bases of our disciplines (e.g. Costa et al. 2007, Batistella et al. 2008, Schor 2008, and Keller et al. 2009). At the same time, the Amazon sometimes can be a hot political topic for which the resources of the diferent actors signiicantly depend on technical and scientiic arguments, a condition that further ampliies the usual tensions and contradictions of the scientiic ield, and forewarns of unexpected methodological and theoretical troubles (e.g. Mack 1990, Mello 2006, Schor 2008). The broader ield of Global Environmental Change (GEC) - where we ind remarkable programmatic progress including novel graduate and post- graduate programs, sophisticated means for Earth observation and numerical modeling, and concertations involving natural and social sciences - is similarly tense and conlictual, frequently placing the scientiic ield in the middle of serious political impasses. It is not unusual, in our ield, to ind questions about "how to convince the … public that an interpretation supported by … evidence has more validity", concern whether "political actors … unduly inluence" environmental management, and doubts about "the cost-beneit of protecting against diferent levels of change". The question about how society may comprehend and respond to GEC has evolved so that it can hardly be formulated in unequivocally deinite technical terms, as it becomes apparent that, on such matters, "one of the reasons why we disagree … is because we seek to govern in diferent ways" (Hulme 2009). INTER-DISCIPLINARITY, HUMAN-ENVIRONMENT INTERACTIONS and the ALL-SIDEDNESS of MAN Diogenes S. Alves "Restricting oneself to specialized work, which involves the renunciation of the Faustian all- sidedness of man, is, in today's world, the precondition for doing anything of value at all; hence deeds and renunciation inevitably condition each other today … For [Goethe] acknowledgement of this meant a renunciation, a farewell to an age of plenitude and beautiful humanity… The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when [Puritan] asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life … , it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order … which today determine the lives of all the individuals … with irresistible force … [and] perhaps will so determine … until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt." Max Weber ([1905] 2004) (approximate translation from the Brazilian 2004 edition, relecting Cohn's ([1979] 2003) and Wilding's (2008) interpretations of Weber's work). National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brazil dalves@dpi.inpe.br