ABSTRACT
Speculation on the interdependencies between natural phenomena and on the essential unity of all living things is probably as old as the human species. We know that by Classical times Herodotus and Plato thought that all life on earth acts in concert and maintains a stable condition. Plato envisaged a balance of nature in which the organisms are seen to be parts of an integrated whole, in the same way that organs or cells are integrated into a functioning organism itself. In his Timaeus, Plato wrote of how the creator made
The holistic unity of Nature was a theme that re-emerged in the medieval period and through the Renaissance. The idea of holism, in which Nature is seen as an indivisible unity, has waxed and waned with the relentlessness of lunar tides throughout the modern period. Holistic views were fashionable in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Johann Reinhold Forster, in his Observations made during a Voyage round the World (1778), presented the natural world as a unified and unifying whole, and attempted to weave into a coherent pattern the physical geography and climate of places with their plant life, and animal life, and human occupants (including agricultural practices, local manufactures, and customs). Gilbert White, author of the celebrated Natural History of Selbourne (1789), studied Nature as an interdependent whole rather than as a series of individual parts (Worster 1994:20). James Hutton saw the world as an organic whole, floating the interesting notion, not without its precursors, that the rock cycle is comparable to the life cycle of an organism: the circulation of blood, respiration, and digestion in animals and plants having their equivalents in terrestrial processes. The idea of an organic planet was embraced and elaborated by several German philosophers including Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Marshall 1992:289-94).
