Here in Week 4, Section 1, we continue the discussion of forms of ecology and emergence of the field of ecology. As Mary Evelyn has just pointed out, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson continue in their thought and their perspectives on ecology. That conjunction of scientific ideas and religious and philosophical values. So we want to explore that a bit today in a transition that's focused on the issue of holism and to reach back into these religious and philosophical positions and to draw forward, then, some of the values embedded in these positions. For example, if we consider the Sistine Chapel and the image of God reaching across and touching with his hand, the hand of Adam. And we have that subtle emphasis here on handicraft, that creation, including Adam, including human beings, is crafted by God. So this religious idea of creation as God's handicraft, is accompanied with a parallel idea that this creation has a plan embedded within it. So these religious ideas are percolating in the West and they're coming towards this emergence of ecology. Along with religious ideas, we have such philosophical concepts as harmony. This can be associated with the Stoic tradition, a philosophical tradition out of Greece, in which the term "harmonia" was used to talk about the world's soul as manifesting the orderly patterns of the seasons, the days and nights, and the emergence of life. Harmony itself as a philosophical idea, becomes a major expression of this concept of holism. Along with harmony, we reach back into that concept of the great chain of being, that all of creation is organized in an orderly, logical manner by the creator, reaching from himself at the top down into the lowest parts of creation. We have these views of nature in religious and philosophical positions in the West, and these ideas themselves are then shaped by theological cosmology. And this image, often associated with Giordano Bruno, who had a sense that the universe that he was within was actually part of a much larger universe, and that by realization, one could come out of one's universe into that larger infinite universe. You can see then it's very suggestive of how theological ideas were beginning to shape our understanding of cosmology, of this holism that has come down in the West. And so theological cosmology gives emphasis to the divine plan and several strands of that are developed and also patterning in nature. We see the religious and philosophical attention to number and pattern. As these ideas come in the 19th century, then, the attention to holism and the scientific perspectives on holism begin to objectify that reading of creation as a whole and unified patterning, which has interdependence woven throughout it. So the effort to objectify, to gain some distance, and to begin to analyze ecology carries forward this analytical insight into the whole by developing mathematical models to try and understand this whole that is composed of different parts. The question being: What's the relationship between the parts and the whole? For example, it's very clear that the excitement around the field of ecology is generated by this sense that it's an integrating science. It brings together not only the natural world, but the human community as well, and we see the human realm as interacting with the natural world, both in terms of change that's affected, but also change from the natural world onto the humans. So these three points of objectifying holism, analyzing it through mathematical modeling, and also ecology as a new science that holds great promise of integration. As ecology emerges, its first clear expression is with Ernst Haeckel in 1866 who first uses the term, and Haeckel is himself very much motivated by ideas that he has received from the organic thinking of Goethe and also Alexander Humboldt. These ideas about the whole, Haeckel would describe as a monism. Again, this is a longstanding philosophical term the oneness, the monad, the sense of the holism is deeply interconnected and can be seen both as parts and wholes. So these ideas of the holism as composed of parts coordinate with the lineage, which also is very evident in the work of Carl Linnaeus and the taxonomic naming of all of the forms of creation. So this sense that this harmony and the patterning and natural economy in the world is the influence that's coming to Haeckel as he first articulates this sense of a field of ecology. This field then, as it has come down to the present, has retained this commitment to the idea of a whole. The Canadian ecologist Stan Rowe, whose phrases, "living Earth" and "home place" are very evident in his work as he began to reflect upon some of the devastation that was taking place in the forests of Canada. And he realized that this challenge that we faced in our time was significantly connected to the values that motivated our relationship with the natural world so that rather than the values that separated us, he was concerned with that analytically distancing, as we objectify the natural world, that he was concerned to preserve the deep mystery, that which was beyond our understanding. And from that deep mystery, the sense of creativity that flowed out could still be encountered and understood by an integrated science, such as ecology, which brought us into the ecosphere with a deep affection.
