The Hopi of Arizona have made a home in what most people would consider a desert wasteland. Not only have they been living off the land for a millennium, they have, by necessity, learned how to co-exist with their natural landscape by understanding their role in the natural systems of the desert southwest.

The Hopi subsist on a meager omnivorous diet. They plant their corn in such a manner as to take advantage of the slightest amount of moisture, placing the seed in a small indention at the bottom of a larger hole of loosened soil, designed to direct and retain moisture within reach of the seed. They take advantage of the natural landscape to direct the flow of wind and water and to protect their crop from the effects of weather and sun. They think systemically and holistically, understanding that each and every action they take has a reciprocal action elsewhere in the system.

Things haven’t changed much where the Hopi live in the last five or six centuries. They are still there doing things the way they always have. But isn’t that the point? The Hopi balance their requirements with those of nature.

My friend Anna is a Martha Stewart wannabe. Anna is constantly looking for new ways to make her little mid-town apartment more inviting. She puts ribbon around her kitchen faucet and has her shampoos in pretty glass bottles on the windowsill next to her tub. She’s headed for the deep end, but that’s just my opinion.

I joke and tease her and she’s a good sport, which is why I was puzzled when she called me a while back asking about ladybugs. Apparently she had read an article that having ladybugs in one’s garden is a good sign. She was calling because she could not find a single ladybug in her balcony garden box. I tried to console her but made the mistake of telling her that one could find pretty much anything on the Internet. She found a guy who would sell her 500 ladybugs on the Internet. Two days later there was a box at her door, full of little red ladybugs. She took the box outside and before she knew it there were a gazillion ladybugs in and around her garden. The next morning she took her bagel and coffee outside to see her new friends, but they were gone. She was on her hands and knees, looking under every leaf, but no ladybugs were there.

What Anna hadn’t taken into account was why it is good to have ladybugs in your garden. Ladybugs are a natural form of pest control – they eat harmful bugs like aphids that damage plants. So, in one sense, having ladybugs is great because it means you will have fewer pests. However, if you don’t have a pest problem to begin with, the ladybugs won’t have anything to eat, and they aren’t likely to hang around for long where they don’t have food.

What this example says to me is that nothing in nature operates in a vacuum. Whether we’re talking about ladybugs or Hopi corn, we can’t look at one aspect of the (aptly-named) ecosystem without taking into account other factors that affect the process. In the vast networks of interconnected links that make up our world, we can’t hope to make significant progress on environmental issues without looking below the surface to discover the root causes of the problems. Similarly, we can’t afford to ignore the possible repercussions of our actions as they propagate further into the system.