Füchse und Igel – das Fragment aus einem alten Werk Tolstoys („Russian thinkers“, Tolstoy – „Foxes and Hedgehogs“, die zentrale These aus Archilochus – Essay on Tolstoy – Isaiah Berlin) beschreibt zwei grundlegend unterschiedliche Menschentypen. Einerseits die Igel, die über einen Bereich sehr genau bescheid wissen und andererseits die Füchse welche ein wenig Wissen aus vielen verschiedenen Bereichen besitzen und vernetzen können.
Durch die Natur des Studiums sollten Umweltsystemwissenschafter in dieser Einteilung mehr Fuchs als Igel sein. Dazu einige Anregungen aus dem WWW:

Financial Times:

Leaders need many hedgehog qualities – the cry that the probability of victory is 0.6 is not inspiring. But the analytic skills needed for good judgments are those of foxes. Effective management teams include both hedgehogs and foxes, which is why the modern tendency to appoint hedgehogs and allow them to surround themselves by like-minded hedgehogs is so dangerous.
http://www.johnkay.com/political/447

The Boston Globe:

Expert hedgehogs come in blue and red, left and right, but when things go awry -- whether it's the Iraq War or the War on Poverty -- they are likely to go on believing they had the right idea but the wrong timing, or that they were blindsided by events. The foxes, on the other hand, are more likely to rethink the whole story.
As Tetlock writes, ''Once many hedgehogs boarded a train of thought, they let it run full throttle in one policy direction for extended stretches, with minimal braking for obstacles that foxes took as signs they were on the wrong track."
It's no surprise that foxes are better at forecasting than hedgehogs. But the media roundtables and think tank conferences and wise guy lists are dominated by folks who speak the simple, decisive language of sound bites. Indeed, the quickest way to avoid cable show combat is to tell a booker desperately searching for someone to talk about the death penalty or the Patriot Act that ''I have mixed feelings about that." http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/30/hedgehogs_and_foxes/

Daniel W. Drezner:

A hedgehog is a person who sees international affairs to be ultimately determined by a single bottom-line force: balance-of-power considerations, or the clash of civilizations, or globalization and the spread of free markets. A hedgehog is the kind of person who holds a great-man theory of history, according to which the Cold War does not end if there is no Ronald Reagan. Or he or she might adhere to the “actor-dispensability thesis,” according to which Soviet Communism was doomed no matter what. Whatever it is, the big idea, and that idea alone, dictates the probable outcome of events. For the hedgehog, therefore, predictions that fail are only “off on timing,” or are “almost right,” derailed by an unforeseeable accident. There are always little swerves in the short run, but the long run irons them out.
Foxes, on the other hand, don’t see a single determining explanation in history. They tend, Tetlock says, “to see the world as a shifting mixture of self-fulfilling and self-negating prophecies: self-fulfilling ones in which success breeds success, and failure, failure but only up to a point, and then self-negating prophecies kick in as people recognize that things have gone too far.”
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002441.html

Weiterführende Links:

Das Buch Foxes and Hedgehogs: http://www.amazon.de/Mathematics-Hedgehogs-Foxes-Inaugural-Lecture/dp/0854320334/
http://www.kheper.net/topics/typology/Fox_and_Hedgehog.html
http://www.johnkay.com/political/447
http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002441.html
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/12/30/hedgehogs_and_foxes/