Vernadsky's+Philosophical+Legacy

Jordan Mundell March 2nd, 2015 Annotation #4 //Vernadsky’s Philosophical Leagacy, //Bertrand Guillaume

This piece serves as an insight into the mind of Vernadsky, the scientist who popularized the term of the “Biosphere,” which, “acknowledges that the world we belong to is a functionally integrated, global phenomenon,” as well as the Noosphere, which would expand the idea to also include human thought. As a result, Vernadsky was one of the first people to help us transition into a more holistic, egocentric view of the world around us, rather than the human-centered philosophy that had been popular. From this approach, Vernadsky was also one of the first to anticipate the “Anthropocene,” the geological era marked by environmental impact as a direct result of human actions.

What was interesting about Vernadsky (who is doing most of his work in the early 20th century) is how revolutionary his ideas were taken to be. His popularizing of the biosphere “opened a new paradigm in ecology and life sciences,” putting him equivalent, in regards to scientific significance, with Darwin:

“As Margulis and Sagan suggested: ‘Vernadsky did for space what Darwin had done for time: as Darwin showed all life descended from a remote ancestor, so Vernadsky showed all life inhabited a materially unified place, the biosphere.’”

Vernadsky is also part of the transition from science based on theory and speculation, to science based on facts and empirical evidence:

“Vernadsky recommends a methodological approach of scientific generalizations founded on facts and empirical evidence, and not assumptions and theories.”

As a result, Vernadsky not only represented a new way of doing science, but a new way of thinking in general. However, it seems that Guillaume points out his overly optimistic mentality as a flaw in his thinking. I tend to agree as I see a more practical way of thinking as more rational, however Vernadsky’s methods were sufficient to usher in a new age of thinking.”

“…yet these [‘World War II horrors’] failed to damp his optimism right up to the time of his death.”

What Vernadsky’s optimistic approach did not account for was the ethical pendulum, that “technology, if prone to swing towards either the good or the bad, could inherently be transformed into a bad only through its growth.” He didn’t exactly predict that humans would focus more on technological advances than the world around them following WWII:

“As now illustrated by the case of climate change, the always enlarged nature of human action, with the magnitude of its works and their impact on the global future have new implications for ethical reflection”

The only thing that I didn’t agree with was that it seems that Vernadsky still had a mechanistic viewpoint of the world around him. It seemed that everything could be defined, boiled down to elementary sciences, and then solved accordingly:

“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 noösphere. So we can look at the future with confidence.”

In general, Verdasky was concerned with the big picture, and I’m not entirely sure that everyone sees our environment this way even today. Taking a holistic view of the world around us sure seems like the easy thing to do, but how do we do it? Is it possible to construct a biosphere that does not put human interests at the top of the food chain?