When the Carolingian Abbot of Reichenau Walafrid Strabo wrote in a celebrated poem on his “Little Garden” (Hortulus, ca. 840s) that “the earth is as one house, a whole through each of its parts,” we may at first think we are in the presence of a refreshingly sensitive and modern unified systems approach toward the cosmos and its component parts. The increase of ecological awareness that has blossomed since the 1960s gives us a fresh appreciation for such holistic systems as Alexander Pope’s, who writes in An Essay on Man that “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.” The evolving Late Antique notion of a “Great Chain of Being” – originally a theological claim tied with the Emanation doctrine of the Neo-Platonists, and much later a driving scientific principle of the Renaissance and Enlightenment – can find facile resemblance to some modern ideologies that consider human disruptions of natural cycles violations of a predisposed, inherent order. When Pope cautioned against presumptuous humans wishing to step beyond their natural boundaries, however, he was thinking of moral boundaries rather than ecological ones:

Of course, Pope did not have ecological impact in mind, any more than he could have imagined an actual asteroid pounding into the earth, a literal colliding of world upon world. Pope simply meant that humankind should be happy with its subordinate, created state – poised halfway between brutes and angels, between mud and God. Likewise, given the current crisis of international trade as the flashpoint of globalization controversy, it is ironic to note that in claiming “each part of the world on another depends,” Walafrid Strabo had in mind not the interdependency of living systems within the delicate biosphere, nor the obligation of humans to respect natural boundaries, but purely and simply the need for humans to distribute local goods throughout the known civilized world. For him the “world” meant the “world of human affairs” and by dependency he meant trade.