Editorial - Diversity

Hello Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 6 of Consilience.

This issue is devoted to exploring and celebrating diversity in all of its many forms. 

Diversity is something that is studied so often across the sciences that many of us start to take it for granted. Be it the fact that every time you shuffle a pack of playing cards you are creating a combination that has never been produced in the history of humankind, that we now have a census of over one billion stars (which is still less than 1 % of the stars in our Galaxy alone),  or that at any time, it is estimated that there are some 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) individual insects alive on our planet (to put that into context, recent estimates of the total number of humans who have ever lived on our planet are in the order of 100 billion i.e. 100 million times less than the number of insects that are currently alive today).

Sadly, despite this abundance of diversity in the topics that we study, science itself can be an incredibly exclusive and exclusionary ‘club’. Addressing this lack of diversity should be paramount to anyone who is involved in science, not only because it is ethically the ‘right thing’ to do, but because ultimately greater diversity results in better science. The greater the diversity of expertise available to us, the broader the gamut of potential solutions to global, interdisciplinary problems such as disease transmission, food security, personalised healthcare, and the climate crisis.

Poetry possesses the potential to help diversify both science and scientific discourse, for example by presenting an alternative lens through which to view scientific discoveries, or by providing a creative way through which to conceptualise scientific research. However, in order for poetry to do so, it is first necessary to address its own struggles with diversity. One of the ways that we can do this is to challenge the notion some people have that poetry is ‘not for them’. By presenting a diversity of voices, knowledge, and lived experiences we hope that the poems in this issue might, in the words of May Yang, cause each of us to read them and think:

I know you
I see you
I hear you

As usual, thank you to the truly diverse group of poets, artists, editors, and reviewers who have helped to make this issue possible. And to you, Dear Reader, for lending us your eyes, ears, and voice. 

The Consilience Team

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The cover art is a derivative of the artwork of ‘Colour’ by Xaali O'Reilly Berkeley, edited by N. J. Kinar. The original artwork was processed by N. J. Kinar using a computer program to find visual correlations between all of the artworks submitted for this issue (five images and two videos for seven artworks in total). The videos were sampled at a rate of 1 fps (frame per second) to obtain corresponding still images. In total, 421 still images derived from the seven artworks were used to create a photo mosaic of the ‘Colour’ artwork by matching still images to pixels. After matching, the original pixels were blended with the still images.