• DOI:10.1086/418982
• Corpus ID: 85258634

Vernadsky's Biosphere Concept: An Historical Perspective

@article{Ghilarov1995VernadskysBC,
  title={Vernadsky's Biosphere Concept: An Historical Perspective},
  author={Alexej M. Ghilarov},
  journal={The Quarterly Review of Biology},
  year={1995},
  volume={70},
  pages={193 - 203}
}

• A. M. Ghilarov
• Published 1 June 1995
• Geology
• The Quarterly Review of Biology

PERHAPS it is no accident that as we approach the end of this century, some ideas that had emerged at its beginning are being reexamined by the scientific community. Although they are rarely embraced in their original form, one can consider them at least as interesting and even as stimulating as more recent hypotheses. Thus Williams (1992), discussing some aspects of the Gaia concept (Lovelock, 1979, 1988), reminded us of an old book, The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties ofMatter, by Lawrence J. Henderson (1913), in which the central idea is the remarkable suitability of Earth's environment (especially because of the properties of water) for living organisms. The reference to Henderson's book was repeated recently by Sagan et al. (1993), in a paper on the capabilities of the Galileo spacecraft used to search for life on Earth. Among older works, however, are some that have much stronger associations with the present-day studies of global life activity. I refer primarily to the concept of the biosphere proposed in the late 1920s by the Russian scientist, Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945). In fact, his ideas about how our living planet functions are in many respects similar to the concept of Gaia, although they were put forward fifty years earlier. Unfortunately, the scientific community's current opinion of Vernadsky can be characterized as unbalanced. Despite some prominent exceptions (e.g., Hutchinson, 1970, 1979; Odum, 1971), Western scientists for a long time have undervalued or ignored Vernadsky's concept, perhaps partly because of linguistic barriers. This neglect of Vernadsky (despite growing interest in Lovelock's Gaia concept) has been offset recently by enthusiastic approval (Grinevald, 1987, 1993, 1994; Charvolin, 1994). In Russia and in the former USSR, on the other hand, Vemadsky was always highly respected by the scientific ommunity and, to a limited degree, by the authorities. Nowadays there is even a tendency in Russia to mention Vernadsky in almost every publication on the biosphere or global ecology. This practice can be partly explained, however, by the normative character of Soviet science, and the long tradition of quoting the "classics" for support of any statement. For instance, from the 1920s up to the time of Gorbachev's "perestroika," it was impossible to publish an article or a book on philosophy in the USSR with-