Climate change resists treatment as a set of isolated variables. It is not reducible to emissions inventories, technological substitutions, or regional agreements. It is a whole system phenomenon, where every action is bound into the larger field, and every tension is a projection of the system itself. The key property is not in the fragments but in the unity through which they appear.
Holism provides the necessary orientation. To think holistically is not simply to collect the parts together under one view, but to recognise that the parts only exist because of the whole. David Bohm’s notion of the holomovement describes this: the manifest world is not built from fragments but is an unfolding of an implicate order, a continuous process in which each aspect reflects the whole (Bohm, 1980). Climate is such a process. Stability and disruption, mitigation and adaptation, abundance and scarcity—these are not separate states but expressions of a single unfolding.
Complex systems science echoes this insight. Ecosystems endure not because they exclude disturbance but because disturbance is folded into cycles of persistence (Holling, 1973). Fire regenerates forests; floods sustain wetlands. Stability is not the absence of instability but its transformation. What appears as opposition is, in fact, the circulation of the whole through its phases. Climate governance fails when it tries to stabilise fragments. It must instead learn to sustain the cycles that make persistence possible.
Logic, too, points toward holism. Gödel showed that no formal system can demonstrate its own coherence (Gödel, 1931). Yet coherence is presupposed in every act of reasoning. The whole cannot be contained in the parts, but the parts cannot be thought without the whole. Kant described the idea of totality as a necessary condition of reason (Kant, 1781/1998). Climate science embodies this paradox: every model presupposes the global system it cannot enclose. Holism is not a choice but the ground of intelligibility.
Physics brings this into sharper focus. In the path integral formulation, the actual path of a particle arises from the interference of all possible paths (Feynman & Hibbs, 1965). The whole trajectory is not a single line but the sum of the ensemble. Climate, too, is shaped not only by realised policies but by those avoided, displaced, or deferred. The unrealised remains active. The Poisson spot demonstrates that exclusion itself generates coherence: a bright dot appears at the centre of shadow. Attempts to suppress systemic effects do not erase them; they reorganise the whole.
Biology teaches the same lesson. Evolution is not optimisation toward a single form but the exploration of adjacent possibilities under constraint (Kauffman, 1993). Diversity, redundancy, and variation are not excesses but conditions of persistence. Holism means recognising that resilience lies not in uniform solutions but in sustaining multiplicity. Climate resilience requires plural strategies, multiple energy sources, and a diversity of cultural practices. The whole endures through variation.
Mathematics frames holism in topology. Cobordism shows how two apparently separate surfaces may be boundaries of the same higher-dimensional manifold. Climate’s “safe” and “dangerous” futures, its cycles of stability and turbulence, are not independent states but projections of a hidden coherence. From within, this coherence appears as contradiction. From the perspective of the whole, it is necessity.
To apply holism to climate governance is to accept that contradiction and displacement are not errors but features of the system. Completeness is impossible. The whole cannot be known in full, but it shapes every fragment. Policies must be adaptive, revisable, and designed to hold opposites in relation. Governance must measure success not by erasing tension but by sustaining the viability of the whole field.
This is not a call to mysticism but to intellectual honesty. Climate is not an adversary to be mastered nor a background to be ignored. It is the holomovement in which persistence occurs. To acknowledge this is to accept that the unity of the system precedes the fragments we encounter. Our task is not to repair pieces but to act within the coherence that binds them, to live as though the whole were real—because it is.
References
- Bohm, D. (1980). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Routledge.
- Feynman, R. P., & Hibbs, A. R. (1965). Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals. New York: McGraw-Hill.
- Gödel, K. (1931). Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I. Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, 38, 173–198.
- Holling, C. S. (1973). Resilience and stability of ecological systems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1–23.
- Kant, I. (1781/1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer & A. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Kauffman, S. A. (1993). The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Plato. Parmenides. Trans. M. Gill & P. Ryan (1996). Indianapolis: Hackett.
- Weyl, H. (1952). Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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