Visualizing Ecology

“Any whole, be it an individual life or the entire ecological order, is a system of paired tensions working against each other, non surmounting its opposite, each in its own existence implying the existence of each other” (Worester, 107) Acknowledging the existence of two tensions does not necessarily imply that these tensions have any need to be working against each other. If both exist, then they both work for the whole of the system. Two systems may be said to be opposing forces, but one individual is never entirely separate from the whole. In a system all parts work for the benefit of the system even if the cause may seem to be conflicting. As in ecology, there may be microcosms within the system, but the smaller systems still make up the whole. One organism may be struggling against the force of another to survive, but the success of the organism helps make it better adapted to its environment. The successes and failures of species can have the succeeding species proliferate and be more dominant than the lesser species. In this way, the excess or lack of organisms in an area still works in some way to benefit the area. Implying that all systems are contradictions of even greater contradictions and are equal to each other is not consistent with the succession of life often seen. From what we see of the systems that make up various ecology networks, the greater systems of life are not absolute. These systems are “interrelated and whose whole is completed by individual parts working in unison. It is too simple to see all life process as being distinctly opposing forces. The fact that all components of life are related makes trying to study any particular system difficult. By simplifying the “mechanics” of life to one or another is disregarding the whole. Worester in some way acknowledges the whole, but still sees the individual forces at work as contradictions before being compromised. “ …that all experience is complex to be captured in a single vision, and at the same time that all apparent contradictions are resolvable at last in a larger organic union.” (Worester, 108) The only way to be inclusive of this whole is to acknowledge that all parts of life work together and effect each other entirely.