Reductionism only works well on dead stuff, and even then...

My earliest memory of environmental angst came when encountered the statement: 'We can only shit in our nest just so long before we're nesting in our shit.' An oldie, but a goodie slogan wise, projection wise too. The consumer culture hurtles along casting its crap and by-products, externalities, behind them for others to pay. But there's already so much 'by-product' lining our cultural freeway we're seeing the blow back here and now.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." - Aristotle. Reductionism was another huge pothole on my freeway. Reductionism, the logical basis of all the hard sciences, says that if you incinerate a duck and capture 100% of the gases, ashes and bits, this pile is the same as the duck. To which i answer 'QUACK'. The magic of life is in the quack not the ashes. "We milk the cow of the world, and as we do We whisper in her ear, 'You are not true.'" - Richard Wilbur

Holism understands that it is impossible to isolate and study one individual component in a living-interconnected-evolving system because its one variable dependent on other variables. Holism is an antidote to the illusion at the center of our worldview, the illusion that we are separate from our surroundings. This illusion of separateness allows us to further delude ourselves into clutching onto the delusion of dominion over creation.

The illusion that certain humans have a 'special' relationship with the divine. The illusion that all of creation was created as a resource for the true believers of some anthropogenic creed are at the heart of our abandonment the The Great Mother and the wanton destruction of, and shitting into, our nest. Reductionism only works well on dead stuff, and even then...

"The Goddess in all her manifestations was a symbol of the unity of all life in Nature. Her power was in water and stone, in tomb and cave, in animals and birds, snakes and fish, hill, trees, and flowers." - Marija Gimbutas