Ecosystem Design Vision Paper, Ch. 3:
The word ecosystem comes from the field of biology. In nature, a healthy ecosystem is a combination of elements organic or inorganic, wet or dry, living or dead that interact in intricate ways to sustain life. When an ecosystem is functioning well, one barely notices the mechanisms that keep the circle of life going. It is when conditions suddenly change due to the introduction of a predatory species, a shock in the freshwater supply, or a contagious disease spreading through a population, for instance and the ecosystem stops working well that one understands how it functioned before and considers how it may function better in the future.
Read more of the Vision Paper:
https://cardstack.com/vision/chapter-3