Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
tion of life and its non-living material environment. As a boy, Vernadsky had been
greatly influenced by his uncle, the philosopher Yevgraf Maximovitch Korolenko, to be-
lieve that the Earth was a living organism, and perhaps this led Vernadsky to see life as
a “geological force” because of its ability to move matter in ways which geology alone
could not. For Vernadsky, birds were nothing more than flying dispersers of phosphor-
us and other chemical elements, and human technology was an important part of nature
because it increased the flow of matter and materials through the Earth's geology. Ver-
nadsky thought that the smallest living beings—the bacteria—had the greatest influen-
ce on the chemistry and geology of our planet. These microbes could alter the Earth's
crust, but, in the words of author Connie Barlow, “Only multicellular creatures are able
to move matter in ways which wind and water refuse to carry it.” Vernadsky didn't have
any notion that the Earth might be self-regulating, but he did coin the term 'biogeochem-
istry', and his ideas gave rise to the Russian concept of the ecosystem, known as the
biogeocoenose.
Lovelock, however, was the first to take the idea of a self-regulating earth far beyond
the preliminary speculations of his predecessors, and was the first scientist to write
topics and scientific papers on the theme of Gaia. Lovelock's first mention of the Earth
as a self-regulating system was in a scientific paper in 1968, before his crucial walk with
William Golding. The first paper in which Gaia was explicitly used as the name for the
self-regulating Earth was published in 1972. Further papers on Gaia were written with
the help of Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s, and in these papers Lovelock and Mar-
gulis made bold statements such as “. . . life, or the biosphere, regulates or maintains the
climate and the atmospheric composition at an optimum for itself.” Lovelock called this
initial formulation of his insight the
Gaia hypothesis
, because it was a tentative propos-
al which at that stage had very little data or theoretical underpinning to back it up. By
suggesting that the biota were 'in charge' of the global environment, Lovelock and Mar-
gulis had turned the conventional scientific wisdom on its head, for as far as mainstream
science was concerned, life was far from being in control—it was, in fact, nothing more
than a second-class citizen on a ship captained entirely by the random forces of geology,
physics and chemistry.
In this classical view, living beings had to either adapt to the environmental condi-
tions set up for them by these great forces or be consigned to oblivion—they had no say
whatsoever in where the ship was going. Later, when more data had become available,
and after Lovelock had developed ways of modelling Gaia mathematically, the Gaia hy-
pothesis evolved into
Gaia theory.
The key insight of the theory is wonderfully holistic
and nonhierarchical: it suggests that it is the
Gaian system as a whole
that does the reg-
ulating, that the sum of all the complex feedbacks between life, atmosphere, rocks and
