Passage: 
      Ecosphere thinking 
      Although in theory every educated person knows that the world is more than people, resources, and a vague environment to be protected, the very fact of seeing it as one spherical air-water-land system gives it a new and different reality. From a vantage point outside our home, a revealing perspective has shown us the planet for what it really is; a ball of living star dust, a four-and-one-billion year old miracle. 
      Perhaps the strange human desire to fly away from the planet, to “ slip the surly bonds of earth,” is a necessary impulse for discovering who we are. Perhaps we can never be satisfied on earth until we have traveled away in space and come back home, back to our roots, to where we belong. 
      To the question, “what is the world?” the answers still tend to be ambiguous. In the traditional sense, the earth remains the supportive environment for humanity; merely the means for enhancement of the one animal “made in God's image.” To physical science that has denatured reality the world is a material place of molecules and atoms, of solids, liquids and gases, of atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere. For biological science it is a scene wherein mechanistic organisms compete for survival, driven by selfish genes. To the economist it is raw materials and resources, valueless until transformed by the “innovative genius of man” into marketable commodities. There are our humanistic homo-centred legacies — no longer reasonable. 
      In the profounder ecological sense, the world is now known as a unity. The various spheres — atom, hydro, litho, and bio — are intertwined and related, both in the historical evolutionary sense and in the present functional sense. Organic tissues of living things are fashioned from the elements of air, water and soil which in turn bear the imprints of life. Thus, the nutrient composition of sea water is maintained by organisms which also stabilize the improbable composition of the atmosphere. Plants and animals formed the limestone in mountains whose sediments make our bones. Our blood and sea water are akin. On the earth's surface the artificial divisions that we have made between living and non-living, biotic and abiotic, organic and inorganic, are not only false but mischievous. 
      The reality of the world is not people and separate “other things”. Nor is the earth a machine whose secrets lie in its fragmented parts. It is — beyond all understanding — an integrated ecosphere of marvelous creativity.
The root meaning of “eco” is “home”, and the revealed ecosphere is the home-sphere from which all life came and in which all life exists. Thanks to NASA, ecology — which means study of the home — has had its eyes opened to the reality of the Home of all homes. 
      Ecology needs to escape its obsession with organisms — the legitimate subject matter of biology — and fasten its attention on the larger whole in which organisms, including people, function as parts. Ecology's natural subject of interest is the earth-home, the ecosphere, not its fragmentary compositional parts. Ecology studies the whole; biology studies the organic constituents of the whole that are no more important than air, water and soil.