The publication of Vladimir I. Vernadsky’s, Essays on Geochemistry, including a translation of the third Russian edition of his classic, The Biosphere, is a most welcome effort to enlarge our understanding through giving us a genuinely integrative and holistic perception of our role in the processes of the natural order and in the evolutionary scheme of things.
This first English translation of Vernadksy’s comprehensive study is very lucid, and translator Olga Barash is to be highly commended for it. Reading the Essays on Geochemistry is like entering into a prolonged meditation on the chemical interactions of the Earth’s crust, including the relation of the biosphere’s living matter to inert matter. In fact, the perspective Vernadsky provides is often startlingly fresh. Even those not initiated into the intricacies of chemistry will find many points of reflection, not the least of them being the consideration of life as living matter.
As Vernadsky points out, this living matter, so vital in the effects it creates through its dynamic of chemical cycles involving the inert order of reality, accounts for only 0.1% of the mass of the Earth’s crust. Yet, the entirety of the appearance of the surface of the Earth is due to the wondrous chemical transformations of this minute mass.
Even more wondrous then, is to consider how much of that mass of living matter is accounted for the totality of the human population. Scarcely more than 0.1% of that 0.1%! And yet, through the application of its thinking process to produce a machine technology and the creation of the technosphere, that human component has irrevocably altered the Earth’s biosphere and provoked a planetary mutation geologically epic in scale.
That the third edition of The Biosphere concludes with a set of 13 expanded postulates on the Noosphere allows us to take in the spectrum of Vernadsky’s thought: from Earth’s geochemistry to the consideration of living matter and the creation of the biosphere, to the alterations introduced by the human species to the biosphere, and finally to the noosphere, the consequence, in a geological and evolutionary sense, of the human impact on the natural order.
While many westerners may be aware of the noosphere as a result of the popularity of the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, very few know that Vernadsky and de Chardin were acquainted in Paris in 1926, when, through the lesser known philosopher, Édouard Le Roy, they were simultaneously exposed to the term noosphere. This was a word Édouard Le Roy coined to describe the thinking element introduced by the human species into the whole evolutionary equation. As Vernadsky puts it,
“Mankind’s power is not connected with its matter, but with its brain and its work guided by its mind. In the geological history of the biosphere, a great future is opened to Man if he realizes it and does not direct his mind and work to self-destruction …
“Mankind taken as a whole is becoming a powerful geological force. Humanity’s mind and work face the problem of reconstructing the biosphere in the interests of freely thinking mankind as a single entity. This new state of the biosphere that we are approaching without noticing it is the ‘Noosphere.’” (p.414)
These are important points to reflect and give us a greater perspective on what is going in our world today. As we now see and feel the effects of human thought on the environment in the form of global warming, and continually bear witness to humanity’s tendency toward self-destruction, to consider that we are actually bringing about the noosphere is both a comfort and a cause for the upleveling of our minds. Vernadsky concludes in a reflection that seems even more appropriate now than when he wrote these words at the end of the Second World War:
“Now we are going through a new geological evolutionary change of the biosphere. We are entering the noosphere. We are entering this new spontaneous process at a terrible time, at the end of a destructive world war. But the important thing for us is the fact that the ideals of our democracy correspond to a spontaneous geological process, to natural laws – the noosphere. So we can look at the future with confidence. It is in our hands. We shall not let it go.” (p. 417)
Vernadsky’s profundity of thought is a much needed resource in understanding ourselves as integral components of the natural order. We should be very thankful for this excellent translation of his Essays on Geochemistry and The Biosphere. By reading and studying these texts well, we will be able to consider even better how we can participate in more spontaneous, creative and harmonious ways to bring about the noosphere.
José Argüelles, Ph.D.
Director of Research
Galactic Research Institute
NS1.19.8.16
Gregorian: February 22, 2007
New Zealand