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 other elements in the built
environment. Michael Spens
