Biosphere:

There is nothing universally true in the notion that the growth and prosperity of an advanced civilization—humanity— is possible only through the detriment and degradation of life and its environment.

Nor is it true that there is some fixed ideal state that the climate and environment should exist in. The biosphere and the accompanying climate and environment have been evolving and changing in dramatic and profound ways from the beginning, so to speak. The earth’s climate has been punctuated by mass extinctions and radical swings in global temperatures (I.e.: average global temperature was 73*F 55 million years ago, compared to 59*F average today. It was as low as -50*F during what is known as the snowball earth period 600 million years ago.)

Along the way, byproducts of living processes have fundamentally changed the chemical composition of the atmospheres and oceans, effectively mapping out a history of dynamic interplay between the evolution of life and corresponding/reflective non-linear, dramatic transformations of the environment. The most dramatic of such life driven transformations occurred ~2.5 billion years ago when bacterial-life liberated vast amounts oxygen from the oceans, changing the atmosphere and oceans forever. In a similar vein, recent evidence strongly suggest that mountain formation 2 billion years ago was made possible by depositing layers of graphite resulting from the accumulation of dead plankton, which provided the lubrication for tectonic plates to slip under each other, transforming the earth’s surface.

It is within that upward evolving manifold that we must view the emergence of human civilization as a natural phenomenon, imbued with a power to thrive, by way of an ever-increasing understanding of physical principles and universal law, as such increase manifests in a corresponding enhancement of the dynamic earth system. Thus, history speaks to increasing the power of the non-biotic and biotic biosphere in conjunction with the growth of the noösphere, in order to effect a more ordered geosphere.

Vernadsky’s Biosphere, Geosphere & Noösphere

With this perspective in mind, we look to the scientific discoveries of the great Russian-Ukrainian scientist V. I. Vernadsky, who developed and revolutionized a scientific understanding of the dynamics and differentiation of the Biosphere, Geosphere, and Noösphere. Throughout his work, we find a powerful argument for why processes on Earth, and in the Universe, are organized according to a top-down principle of life, and, even higher, human cognition — those being the connected envelops of living processes, non-living mechanical forces, and the emerging globally connected activity and influence of Human Civilization.