Among the challenges set forth by the millennium we are now starting is to find innovating formulae in order to integrate the knowledge and the information produced in different fields of knowledge. This is due to one of the most important problems of our times, the fact that the international scientific community, artists, politicians, and decision makers, find real difficulties to come out of their own fields of study and of their specific languages, in order to dialogue with experts of other areas of knowledge.

The above is the result of introducing, during the last centuries, a mechanicist type technical-scientific paradigm which has encouraged a dissectioning model of the world. And, consequently, it has encouraged partial approaches, sometimes too distant and “strange” from one another, concerning complex processes that require an integrated view such as the phenomenon of life on its whole extension, physical and social.

In fact life, in its different expressions, challenges us towards an interpretation in which the different types of knowledge open up to dialogue, and are willing to abandon this strangeness that makes them distant from one another. The objective is, essentially, to accept the incompleteness of each of them and the need to meet on the borders. Fortunately, nowadays we start to understand that the old exclusion paradigm is followed by an inclusion one, which is a fruitful meeting of different knowledge.

Of the different types of knowledge that are invited to dialogue, Science and Art represent two important ways to approach the world, from different methods and languages, but with the same objective. This objective is to discover the mystery of the living; to reach complex representations of nature and society; to incorporate the subject to history and the context.

Fortunately, nowadays we live stimulating times, which allow approaching the necessary dialogue between them. Science of the XXth Century has moved towards a new paradigm where there is space for chance, disorder and the complexity of the living. This paradigm talks more about probabilities than about certainties and considers scientific certainties as provisional and incomplete achievements.

Because, although it is essential to count with accurate scientific points of view, nowadays even scientists start to recognise that their laws and principles - because they are obtained by specific methods which need to delimit and reduce plots of reality- are valid, essential, but incomplete to provide an exhaustive view of the physical and social lattice which forms our habitat, if it is not using further integration processes to reconstruct the whole object being studied.

Thus, many scientists feel the need to turn towards art, to the creative imagination, when the limits of the analytical knowledge become weaker, when they become confronted by diversity, facing the challenge of uniqueness, of the non-repeatable, what cannot be subject to the regularity of laws… also facing problematic situations such as the global environment. It is enough to remember the words of Albert EINSTEIN that chair the Environmental Conference at Rio in 1992: “Imagination, in moments of crisis, may be more important than knowledge”.

In the same way, many artists have gone beyond the limits of their knowledge to look into the scientific world and to reach –being lead by it- into spaces that are not occupied by the everyday conscience. Our time is the expression of a widespread conscience concerning a necessary dialogue so that “art and experience are capable to lay out a bridge over the abyss that separates the point of view of knowledge from the ethics and politics discourse, thus clearing a path towards the unity of experience“ (HABERMAS).

The XXIst Century that now starts appears like a space of opportunities that invites to restore the broken dialogue between Science and Art, two legitimate ways to interpret the world. From both these interpretations it is started to be accepted that the most necessary knowledge, the one that talks about life, is produced in the reason and emotion interfaces, between what we know and what we feel, in the body-mind relation which, finally, is the relation between the visible and the invisible.

To apply this integrated knowledge to the analysis, planning and management of the environmental processes and problems is a challenge due to its innovation concerning the treatment that the environment normally receives. It is also, undoubtedly, an opportunity to advance towards transdiciplinary processes, which will report on the complexity of our environment, on the phenomena of life in its whole extension.