Earth's Local Ecosystems and Global Environment

"Walk in nature and feel the healing power of the trees" - Anthony William

Earth's global ecosystem is the entire environment and community of living organisms, plants, animals and microbes, interacting with their physical environment, including non-living elements like soil, water, and air. Since life evolved on earth eons ago, these interactions have operated in harmony and balanced as a holistic system sharing energy and nutrients and their flow between all the different aspects making up the global ecosystem.

The path to wholeness requires that we also live in harmony with our local and global external environment less we destroy ourselves and all other creatures with which we share this earth.

Humanity is a part of this planetary wide ecosystem. We didn't drop in here from somewhere else. Our ancestors evolved in this environment over the millennia. For most of that time we lived in harmony with the environment that sustained us. Unfortunately, since the start of industrial revolution and the large increase in population, our technologies as well as greed and the lust for power, humanity has upset the balance that nature evolved that has kept us healthy over the eons. We are now at the point where this imbalance is threatening not only the survival of humanity, but also most of the living creature on earth.

It is beyond the scope of this website to address all the issues that have upset the balance of nature on earth's ecosystem. Some of the causes and the consequences of those imbalances are described on the "sustainability section" of this website. There are many other resources available on the Internet and elsewhere that are readily available that address these very serious issues in much more detail. Our focus is primarily on the individual and collective health and wellbeing of all of us as well as of the local environment and ecosystem in which we are all a part. However, as the saying goes "think globally, but act locally." To the extent that we can accomplish it, that is the focus of this website.

Taking a Systems Approach to Our Relationship to Nature

As a product of Nature and everything within it, and as a species that is still dependent upon it, humanity must utilize a systems approach to live in balance and harmony with the entire environment that nature has placed us within – our global ecosystem. This perspective must be taken to understand and analyze our relationship to our entire ecosystem by viewing it as made up of interconnected and interdependent parts, rather than as isolated components. It must emphasize all the relationships and interactions within the natural environment and between all of its component parts. Humanity must recognize that the global ecosystem and its properties cannot be fully understood by simply breaking it down into parts as that which is typically done in a reductionist approach. With the large population of humanity that now exists on earth combined with its modern powerful technologies and vulnerabilities, failure to understand this will threaten the very thing that sustains us on planet earth.

Key aspects of a taking a systems perspective of humanity’s global ecosystem includes:

Our global ecosystem must be viewed as a cohesive whole, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts due to emergent properties that arise from interactions among components and aspects of it.
Our ecosystem must be studied in relation to all interacting components, acknowledging that many factors and interactions influence its behavior.
It is necessary to focus is on how all parts of our global ecosystem interact and affect each other, generating complex dynamics and feedback loops.
Our global ecosystem often exhibits unpredictable or emergent behaviors that cannot be understood by analyzing individual parts alone, such as that resulting from the pollution or degradation of the natural environment caused by human activity.

Adopting a systems perspective to the global ecosystem and the environment in which we find ourselves within, is essential to our well-being and sustainability. It means taking the long-term view and solving problems or making decisions by considering all aspects of the global ecosystem’s structure and functions rather than what appears to be its isolated and independent components and elements of it.