Charles Darwin presented
the concepts of interrelation and interdependence, and
the idea of equilibrium, when he discusses the relationships arising from competition
and the struggle for survival. In the long run the forces are 'so nicely balanced that
the face of nature remains for a long time uniform, though assuredly the merest trifle
would give the victory to one organic being over another'.
Intricacy of relationships
is another dominant theme, and Darwin remarks that 'plants
and animals, remote in the scale of nature, are bound together by a web of complex
relations'.
The dependency of an organic being on another, as of a parasite on its prey, lies
generally
between beings remote in the scale of nature...the structure of every organic being is related, in
the most essential yet often hidden manner, to that of all the other organic beings with which it
comes into competition for food or residence, or from which it has to escape, or on which it
preys...
And we are greatly
ignorant about the 'mutual relations of all organic beings...', partly
because of the complexity of the relationships, which are harder to establish than are
those governing non-organic objects:
"Throw up a handful of feathers, and all fall to the ground according to definite
laws; but how
simple is the problem where each shall fall compared to that of action and reaction of the
innumerable plants and animals which have determined, in the course of centuries, the
proportional numbers and kinds of trees now growing on the old Indian ruins".
Darwin's ideas were
developed into Haeckel's new science of 'ecology' - a term used
in 1869 -.'and that they culminated in Tansley's idea of the ecosystem. Darwin's
particular contribution to the development of the idea of a 'web of life' was that he
included man in it - the obvious implications of his evolutionary theory were that man
had a common origin with the rest of nature. From about 1910, the term 'human
ecology' was used for the study of man and environment together - not in the sense
of suggesting that man was determined by his environment, but in implying that he
was not apart from nature; that he had a place in the web of life or the 'economy of
nature'.
Geography as 'people
in place' saw the region and later the state as a living
organism - another application of the organic analogy that runs through from
medieval perceptions of nature to 18th-century neo-classical notions of senescence,
to the 20th-century ecocentric revival of 'Gaia'.
Place is an organic
ecosystem possessed 'properties of organisation of constituent
components into a functionally related, mutually independent complex. In spite of
continuous flows of energy and matter place maintains apparent equilibrium, and
possesses properties as a whole which are more than the sum of the parts. Here is
a reference to such intangibles as regional or national flavour and landscape
character.
The characteristics
of a systems approach to the natural environment stresses that
each part of the natural environment is related to each other part. The five
subsystems - weather/climate; water; landforms; soils; living things, are parts of a
larger system, whose overall characteristics amount to more than just the sum of the
characteristics of the parts. To these five subsystems we need to add the notional
frameworks of history and other value structures. Rather than seeking to break the
'landscape machine' into its component parts, we should seek to study how the parts
work together.
The importance of
the solace of landscape is only gradually being recognised as of
primary signficance, over and above otehr elements in the built environment.
Michael Spens
