Vernadsky’s philosophical legacy: A perspective from the Anthropocene

Vernadsky: Precursor of the notion of the Biosphere

Vernadsky is rightly associated with the seminal contemporary idea of the ‘Biosphere’, which rests on the realization that the world to which we belong must be studied and understood at a global scale. His eponymous book is indeed the first modern scientific contribution on the biogeochemical cycles of the Biosphere seen as a holistic concept (Vernadsky, 1929, 2007). For having forged this very concept and established its underlying basis, Vernadsky should be viewed today as the founder of global ecology in the later sense of Bolin (1979) or Budyko (1980).

In 1911 in Vienna, Vernadsky had met with Suess, who initially had coined the term biosphere (Suess, 1875) yet suggesting a different interpretation, that is, the unified sum of the living systems on Earth in the tradition of biology as ‘living bodies theory’ derived from Lamarck (see, e.g., Polunin and Grinevald, 1988). Despite speculations on more complex interpretations (Ghilarov, 1998), we owe to Vernadsky in the 1920s the idea of the Biosphere in the sense that Hutchinson (1970) would subsequently develop and ‘ecologize’, and which is now widely admitted within the international scientific community, that is ‘the thin external layer of our planet [where] life is concentrated’ such that the latter – life – ‘can be conceived of as an indivisible set in the mechanism’ of the former – the Biosphere – (Vernadsky, 2007: 150–152).

The story is well known (see, e.g., Bailes, 1990; Deléage, 1991; Grinevald, 1987), and the history of the development and subsequent dissemination of the biogeochemical Vernadskian renderings of the Biosphere concept has recently been highlighted again (Oldfield and Shaw, 2013). At the dawn of the 1920s, Vernadsky began to write in Ukraine on the relationships between geochemistry and what he called ‘living matter’ at the planetary scale. Invited by the Rector of Sorbonne University (Paul Appel), he came to Paris in the summer of 1922 and stayed there until the end of 1925. In Paris, Vernadsky met Teilhard de Chardin and Edouard Le Roy through whom he broadened his scientific concepts to a truly cosmic view of life on Earth. In 1924, he published in French La géochimie (Vernadsky, 1924, 2007) and in 1926, back at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, The Biosphere in Russian (French and German translations are from 1929 and 1930, respectively), which established the importance of an inquiry into the phenomena of life in the Biosphere with its indissoluble links to both cosmic and planetary geochemical processes.

Vernadsky: Precursor of the notion of the Anthropocene

Beyond this fundamental idea that ecology should be thought of at the planetary scale, Vernadsky also anticipated, among other things, the idea of an ‘Anthropocene’ as recently formulated as a label for the distinctive current geological epoch increasingly dominated by the geochemical actions of humankind (Crutzen, 2002; Oldfield et al., 2013; Steffen et al., 2007; Zalasiewicz et al., 2010).

Vernadsky’s role may be placed within the contemporary history of the first genuine scientific considerations on the growing influence of humankind on the environment (Steffen et al., 2011), that is about five decades after Marsh (1864, 1874) in the USA or Stoppani (1873) in Europe, but about three decades before the international interdisciplinary symposium of the Wenner-Gren Foundation held in Princeton on the evolution of the ‘face of the Earth’ as transformed by human impact (Thomas, 1956).

Chronologically, the latter, famous conference led to around three decades of global environmental scientific assessments (see, e.g., Turner et al., 1990) – including the International Geophysical Year (1957–1958) and subsequent satellite observations – which ultimately laid the foundations for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (see, e.g., Steffen et al., 2004), promoting in turn the ‘Anthropocene’ concept (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000).

From this point of view, the concept initially proposed by Crutzen and Stoermer to capture the idea of our species now so active and powerful that it rivals some great forces of nature (Crutzen, 2002) is clearly echoing a striking intuition of Vernadsky (1924, 2007: 219–221):

But in our geologic era, in the psychozoic era – the era of reason – a new geochemical factor of paramount importance appears. […] Man has introduced into the planet’s structure a new form of effect upon the exchange of atoms between living matter and inert matter […] With man, an enormous geological power has appeared on the surface of our planet’.

In philosophy, it is difficult not to think of Bergson – quoted by Vernadsky in the original French text of La Géochimie – for at least two reasons: first Vernadsky’s core argument is nothing more than the role of Bergsonian Homo Faber in the transformations of the Biosphere; second, Bergson himself had explicitly prophesied this very consequence of the industrial revolution:

A century has elapsed since the invention of the steam engine, and we are only just beginning to feel the depths of the shock it gave us […] but the steam engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-historic times: it will serve to define an age. (Bergson, 1907, 1911: 153)

Philosophical implications of Vernadskian thought: Epistemology

This two-fold legacy of Vernadsky’s thought, underpinning the concept of the Biosphere and anticipating the dawn of the Anthropocene, seems today underexplored when it comes to its philosophical implications. I shall here consider briefly the issue of epistemology associated with the planetary and cosmic view that Vernadsky had of the role of ecological and biological organization in the great geochemical cycles of the Earth (including the role of humankind).

In the reference book of the Soviet Academy of Science, one can read the following terms next to the name of Vernadsky in the column ‘area of research’: geochemistry; mineralogy; biogeochemistry; geology; radio-geology and meteoritics. Each term already suggests a broad area of knowledge in Earth Sciences, but the list is still incomplete, for Vernadsky deployed an even broader and more multiform range of scientific concerns (Baranovskaya, personal communication, 2013).

Against reductionism, Vernadsky developed a systemic approach through pedology, the general science of soil conceived by his former mentor Dokuchaev as a ‘natural body’. In the framework of the holistic philosophy of nature characteristic of global ecology, he examined the ‘mysterious circle of organic life at the surface of the globe’ considered by Dumas and Boussingault (Dumas, 1842: 7). He immediately embraced the reciprocal interrelationships of both inert and living matters in the metabolism of the Earth within the solar system, as well as the bonds unifying the ‘wonderful circulation between the three kingdoms’ (animal, mineral and vegetal) so important to Lavoisier (Berthelot, 1890: 168) and humankind as a framework for understanding key aspects of the Earth System’s functioning.

One could say that while the biosphere of Suess (1875) allowed the switchover from a natural trinity (mineral versus vegetal versus animal) to a binary world (organic versus inorganic), the Biosphere of Vernadsky (1929, 2007) aspired to re-establish the ‘unity of nature’ in the great tradition of Humbolt, whose well-named Kosmos (von Humbolt, 1845–1862, 1866) Vernadsky had read as a teenager.

As Deléage (1991) noted, Vernadsky was probably able to integrate such different disciplines because he was himself at their intersections, allowing him to deploy an unprecedented vision of a terrestrial and cosmic mechanism that gathers together the biological and the geological, and would later open the road to both the contemporary ‘ecologized’ Hutchinsonian interpretation of the Biosphere and the Lovelockian view of a living ‘super-ecosystem’ deeply intertwined with its abiotic environment. From this point of view, the conception of Vernadsky was a genuine scientific revolution (Grinevald, 1998). His elaboration of the concept of the biosphere opened a new paradigm in ecology and life sciences (Smil, 2002), and in this respect we may view his key ideas as a breakthrough of equal significance to that of Darwin. As Margulis and Sagan (2000: 51) 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 decided – as stated in his preface to the Russian edition of The Biosphere (Vernadsky, 1998: 39–41) – not to choose between, on the one hand, different and complex geological phenomena conceived simply as ‘a string of accidents’, that is to say, singularities that can only be studied with a situated casuistic approach and, on the other hand, general theories insufficiently based on empirical results therefore prone to ‘philosophical and cosmogonal hypotheses that cannot be founded on facts’. To resolve this dilemma, and embrace the functionally integrated nature of what we now term the Earth System in a trans-disciplinary – yet truly scientific – manner within which it is possible to identify some regularity in the interrelation of complex phenomena and their organization, Vernadsky recommends a methodological approach of scientific generalizations founded on facts and empirical evidence, and not assumptions and theories. This, he suggests, would allow for an holistic view of the phenomena connected with life by regarding as a scientific phenomenon the systemic mechanism underpinning their detailed operation.

Eventually, while mostly ‘invisible’ before its revival with scientific and philosophical discussions about the Gaïa hypothesis (see Lovelock and Margulis, 1974 and e.g. Lovelock, 1979), the so-called Vernadskian revolution (Grinevald, 1998) seems quite obvious today. It appears, retrospectively, as having allowed a modern macroscopic look at the Earth (Schnellnhuber, 1999), so as to perceive its specificity, complexity and unique dynamics as a ‘living planet’ within the solar system.

In a conference at the French Society for Astronomy, Poincaré (1903) claimed that astronomy ‘gave us a soul capable of understanding nature’. Long before pictures were taken from space by man-made devices, Vernadsky gave a new impetus to this assertion when, using the power of his imagination, he stepped outside the terrestrial globe to provide a panoramic view of it – as Suess (1883, 1904: 1) had done earlier in describing the ‘peak shape of continents’. Consequently, in his evocation opening the first part of The Biosphere, Vernadsky offers the vision of a unique planet, separated from the endless space of the cosmos by its atmosphere. With an operating procedure of his own, this would allow him to develop a trans-disciplinary analysis, such as the one now widely used in Earth System Science based on advanced observation, modelling and computation techniques. For this reason, The Biosphere is, as Deléage (1997: 22) rightly argued ‘a magnificent example of the trans-disciplinary widening necessity to reveal issues properly invisible in a narrow disciplinary operation’. A remaining challenge for the most recent international initiatives (e.g. ‘Future Earth’) that have followed in the wake of Vernadsky’s pioneering vision is to better integrate the humanities in their programmes.

Philosophical implications of Vernadskian thought: Ethics

Any inquiry into the facts–values articulation in Vernadsky is a difficult task, for he seems to make every effort to maintain a distance between the two. It seems, however, possible to sketch the essential elements of his personal journey via his scientific ecology to a general ethics of science and technology, and to provide a modest comparative historical perspective. What should one conclude from ‘the extreme increase of the pressure of life in the biosphere caused by the appearance of the evolved homo sapiens’ emphasized in the appendix to the French translation of The Biosphere entitled ‘The evolution of species and living matter’ (Vernadsky, 1929) when it comes to the moral responsibility of humanity?

On reading Vernadsky, it becomes clear that he believed humans had come to bear some (new) responsibility, but he did not subscribe to the type of environmental ethics based on the ‘rights’ of the Biosphere that the US tradition would later develop. His views appear to have been closer to humanistic anthropocentrism and resonate with the Jonassian motto of the future of humankind as a ‘primary obligation’, for he actually attributes to science a truly social function for the good of humanity. There is obviously not complete convergence between the views of Vernadsky the geochemist and Jonas the philosopher: the former held to an optimistic view of progress, whereas the latter was more pessimistic. Vernadsky is not satisfied with pollution from the productive activities needed for the economical modernization of his country (with which purpose he was so strongly engaged), and he highlights unfortunate delays between scientific developments and the social and political understanding required to deal with their consequences (Deléage, 1997). However, his whole research orientation is largely turned towards the study of natural resources and their productive use for his people (Deléage, 1997), and is convinced of the inescapable potential of science and knowledge to point civilization in the direction of universal progress.

Yet he seems to take for granted that the required level of human responsibility will occur as a natural consequence of scientific progress, because of the immanent direction of the biogeological processes themselves towards the advent of the Noösphere – a term that Vernadsky coined along with French colleagues Teilhard de Chardin and Le Roy to suggest a Biosphere in which not only human action, but also human thought would come to play a critical role (see Vernadsky, 1945, 2007: 161–190). He considered that this creative development in the Biosphere called the Noösphere ‘in the form of scientific knowledge and its technological application, is – like its parent stock, living matter – a planetary phenomenon’ (Callicott, 2013: 193). This optimist philosophy of the future goes along with a proportionate attachment to constitutional freedoms and to the democratic value of science, confirming the hostility of Vernadsky to autocracy, though Jonas (1979, 1990) later suggests that, with regard to ecology, autocracy can have its advantages as a counter to liberal capitalism.

Likewise, for Vernadsky, the diffusion and multiplication of terrestrial life do not operate ‘in the abstract and unbounded time and space of mathematics, but in the finite dimensions of the planet and the boundaries imposed by the physical and chemical constitution of its living environment’ (Deléage, 1997). Yet he shows a strong belief in the power of adaptation, an ability he judges ‘immense’ for living organisms, and whose limits ‘are unknown, but are increasing with time on a planetary scale’, all the more for man ‘endowed with understanding and the ability to direct his will’, so that ‘the question of unchanging limits of life in the biosphere must be treated with caution’ (Vernadsky, 1998: 118–119).

In the context of the Biosphere and the Noösphere, Vernadsky (2007: 414) therefore favoured a future of growing creative possibilities rather than of self-destruction. His diagnosis again echoes the Bergsonian one. As the French philosopher puts it: ‘What we need are new reserves of potential energy – moral energy this time [for] the body, now larger’ of humankind (Bergson, 1932, 1935: 268) ‘half crushed beneath the weight of its own progress. Men do not sufficiently realize that their future is in their own hands’ (Bergson, 1932, 1935: 275). In the words of the Russian scientist: ‘If man understands [that the strength of mankind is derived from its brain] an immense future is open before him in the geological history of the biosphere. […] we may face the future with confidence. It is in our hands’ (Vernadsky, 1945).

Vernadsky took here a risky gamble, convinced that human wisdom and joint solidarity, as a planetary phenomenon, would inevitably and irreversibly unfold from globalized progress in the Noösphere. Certainly, the worst threats of our actions were not completely known to him, neither in the form of occasional surges of concentrated power (he died in January 1945, before Hiroshima, but long after the horrors of the Second World War had become well known, yet even these failed to damp his optimism right up to the time of his death), nor in the form of the more gradual accumulation of diffused pollution – e.g. the depletion of the ozone layer the role of which he understood as including protection ‘from the harmful short-wavelength radiation of celestial bodies’ (Vernadsky, 1998: 118–119), or the anthropogenic forcing of the climate.

It was only with Hutchinson (1970) that the metabolic, evolving vision of Vernadsky became more troubled by acquiring a physiological, functional component (Callicott, 2013: 196) which, in turn, provided the basis, within global ecology, for the ‘ugly questions’ of Fosdick (1928), which Millikan (1930) had previously caricatured: ‘Is man to be the master of the civilization he has created, or is he to be its victim? […] Have we spiritual assets enough to counterbalance the new forces?’.

Definitely, Vernadsky realized that technology would exceed all that people had previously done to the natural world around them, as a result of which they would necessarily bear some responsibility for its consequences. Yet, from this point of view, and with regard to the consequences of its action, the Noösphere – as ‘the latest and greatest morphological development in the evolution of living matter’ (Callicott, 2013: 191) – should, by its nature, necessarily promote the emergence of an awareness of human responsibilities in such a way as to regulate its activity within the Biosphere. Vernadsky did not (and maybe could not) see the Jonassian ethical turn, namely the idea that technology, if prone to swing towards either the good or the bad, could inherently be transformed into a bad only through its growth:

Modern technology […] has enhanced human power beyond anything known or even dreamed of before. It is a power over matter, over life on earth, and over man itself […]. Its unfettered exercise for about two centuries now has raised the material estate of its wielders and main beneficiaries, the industrial ‘West,’ to heights equally unknown in the history of mankind. […] But lately, the other side of the triumphal advance has begun to show its face, disturbing the euphoria of success with threats that are as novel as its welcomed fruits. […] The net total of these threats is the overtaxing of nature, environmental and (perhaps) human as well. Thresholds may be reached in one direction or another, points of no return, where processes initiated by us will run away from us in their own momentum – and toward disaster. (Jonas, 1979; 1990: ix)

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. As stated by Krakoff (2011), the implications of human action in the Anthropocene are ‘quite different than in previous eras, when human activity was capable only of the most ephemeral effects on the world’. Yet, while some facts he had himself established were about to become sources of worry and pessimism for the future – obviously illustrating the excess of our power with regard to our capacity of prevision – Vernadsky wrote:

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. (Vernadsky, 2007: 417)

Philosophical implications of Vernadskian thought: Metaphysics

With regards to Vernadsky’s legacy, and in a more speculative way, let me now explore some of his ‘metaphysical passions’ (Callicott, 2013: 186). This dimension could appear surprising for such a realist scientist as Vernadsky. One can nonetheless, I believe, raise the issue of the metaphysics of his philosophy of science and technology at two different levels (Bailes, 1990 ignores Vernadksy’s religion philosophy, but see, e.g., Valliere, 2007 and Hagemeister, 1997).

The first level involves the transformative power of the ‘living matter’ – for which Vernadsky had a ‘quasi-religious veneration’ according to Callicott (2013: 186) – and the question of the direction in which evolution must proceed. In an already well-established Russian tradition (see, e.g., Timiriazeff, 1903–1904), he conceived of the Biosphere not as an accidental phenomenon but as a mechanism or a process of cosmic essence which changes only in form, the unalterable function of life on Earth being to transform the solar energy flow into terrestrial active energy and, simultaneously, to increasingly expand the biogenic migration of atoms in the Biosphere. This ultimately led Vernadsky to speculate on metaphysical features inherent to life by suggesting a direction for evolutionary processes (Clark et al., 2004). Life expands its domain not only through the processes of evolution ‘in quantity’ – as a colonizing force into inert matter – but also ‘in quality’ – towards higher levels of consciousness. From this point of view, the Noösphere ‘in the form of scientific knowledge and its technological application’ (Callicott, 2013: 193) would appear as a ‘strategy’ of life, and the emergence of ‘civilized’ man as the result of paleontological evolution (Deléage, 1997: 28).

We know also that Vernadsky believed in the principle of a strict biogenesis. Following Pasteur, whose works on so-called chirality (a property of asymmetry of objects or systems, see, e.g., Flack, 2009, for an inquiry into the discovery of this property for natural molecules) perfectly matched his asymmetrical conception of the world – gravitational in (physical) space, and thermodynamic in (biological) time – Vernadsky proposed a fundamental antithesis between ‘inert matter’ and ‘living matter’. He also attributed differentiated geometries to them, Euclidian and Riemannian, respectively (Callicott, 2013: 182–183). Indeed, Vernadsky always thought that life existed in the universe from all eternity, and – as far as both ideas rely upon the same foundations – did not preclude speculation on its possible extraterrestrial origin, meteorites having for instance brought life from deep space onto Earth, before it develops there, thrives and evolves finally according to the universal laws of evolution towards the Noösphere.

The proximity to Bergson is here again striking, for in the Bergsonian view of evolution, on the one hand, chance is replaced by the invention of life, whose essence ‘is everywhere the same, a slow accumulation of potential energy to be spent suddenly in free action’, and on the other hand ‘the appearance amid the plants and animals that people the earth of a living creature such as man […], while not predetermined, was not accidental either’ (Bergson, 1932, 1935: 219). In the same strand, clearly echoing Vernadsky and the Russian philosophical thought at that time, Bergson (1932, 1935: 218) finally claims: ‘And it is to this very conclusion that the philosopher who holds to the mystical experience must come. Creation will appear to him as God undertaking to create creators’.

This brings us to the second metaphysical aspect of the Vernadskian legacy, which consists of wondering where the flow of this biogeocosmic evolution leads us. While a more ecological interpretation would authorize another option (e.g. rediscover, as anthropology teaches us, the wisdom of ‘cold societies’ living without disturbing the great cycles of nature, see Lévi-Strauss, 1965), Vernadsky seems to suggest more frankly that there is no such alternative: our destiny is to be Promethean.

In his most elaborated version of the Noösphere notion, Vernadsky (2007) accordingly emphasizes the development of humanity on Earth since the inaugural mastery of fire, even going as far as indicating new options in the universe, namely to extend the realm of human activity into space. One can see here another echo of Bergson (1932, 1935: 268), that

mechanism should mean mysticism. The origins of the process of mechanization are indeed more mystical than we might imagine. Machinery will find its true vocation again, it will render services in proportion to its power, only if mankind, which it has bowed still lower to the earth, can succeed, through it, in standing erect and looking heavenwards.

This famous look at the sky, announced by both Bergson and Vernadsky (however in a different style), prefigures the notorious conclusion of The Two Sources, which ultimately raises today the fundamental issue underlying the thought of these two giants: that of a mysticism deifying humankind. The wonderful words of Bergson (1932, 1935: 275) sound at first as a warning, but then offer a choice:

Theirs is the task of determining first of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for fulfilling, even on their refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for the making of gods.

Reading Vernadsky again, it seems clear that he had made his own choice in the direction of technical development (regarding biogeochemistry and genetic engineering, see e.g. Vernadsky, 1925). Indeed, Vernadsky doubtless conceived of the co-evolution of humankind with the Biosphere on an inevitable, irreversible and extreme process, that of building the world and mastering nature. As Vernadsky (2007: 414) puts it, presaging the notion of the Anthropocene: ‘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’.

At a time when there is serious consideration of geoengineering as a response to the threat of climate change, Vernadsky’s concept of the future role of humanity vis-a-vis the Earth System is not the most implausible one. It underlines, retrospectively, the potentially hubristic tendencies already embedded in the pioneering programs promoting the idea of so-called ‘rational’ management of nature and ‘sustainable development’, such as the MAB programme (Man and the Biosphere) established by UNESCO in 1971. As a warning, one may recall that Queen MAB – referred to in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet – used to be the fairies’ midwife, who brought dreams to men, but delusional dreams, because her name is derived from the old Irish and means inebriety.