Many of us who would deny strenuously that we believe the world is a machine, or that we ourselves are parts in a machine, nonetheless run our lives according to these assumptions. We struggle with the notion that our lives should have a mission and a purpose within some larger mission and purpose of the world as a whole. We seek after a vision of the ideal world and our ideal place in it. We sense every divergence from this ideal (either our own or someone else's) as a wrongness that should be fixed. We tolerate (within bounds) others who fit into our vision poorly, but deep in our hearts we hold them responsible for the fact that the world does not work the way it ought to.
Ecology knows nothing of such narrowly-defined ideals or missions or purposes. Each individual and each species in an ecology is trying to survive, but no one knows what the ecology itself is trying to do, if anything. Some years see droughts and others floods, but in either case nothing has gone wrong--it is just the way of things. Some years there are not enough rabbits for the foxes and some years there are not enough foxes to keep the rabbits under control, but nothing needs to be fixed. There is no ideal number of rabbits and foxes in a forest, and the actual numbers will vary wildly as conditions change. There is also no ideal individual rabbit or fox. Some years favor large foxes and some favor small. Those individuals poorly adapted to the present circumstances are the species' insurance against a change in those circumstances.
While from a mechanistic view it is sometimes preferable to tolerate diversity rather than risk shutting down the machine to fix it, from an ecological point of view diversity actually has value. The new metaphor will encourage us to appreciate those diverse parts of ourselves and our communities that we now only tolerate grudgingly.