The biosphere is the part of the Earth’s upper shell in which living matter exists or is capable of existing. The biosphere usually includes the atmosphere, the hydrosphere (seas, oceans, rivers, and other bodies of water), and the upper part of the Earth’s solid surface. The biosphere is not, and has never been, in a state of equilibrium. It receives energy from the Sun and, in turn, radiates a certain amount of energy into space. These energies have different properties (quality). What the Earth receives is short-wave radiation – light, which, by transforming, warms up the Earth. And from the Earth goes into space long-wave thermal radiation. And the balance of these energies is not observed: the Earth radiates into space a little less energy than it receives from the Sun. This difference – a small fraction of a percent – is absorbed by the Earth, or rather its biosphere, which is always accumulating energy. This small amount of stored energy turns out to be enough to sustain all the grandiose processes of the planet’s development. This energy turned out to be enough for life to burst out one day on the surface of our planet and the biosphere to emerge, so that in the process of the development of the biosphere, man appeared and the Mind emerged.
So, the biosphere is a living evolving system, a system open to the cosmos – to the flows of its energy and matter.
And the first basic, practically very important task of human ecology is to cognize the mechanisms of development of the biosphere and those processes that occur in it.
These are complex processes of interaction between the atmosphere, ocean, and biota, processes that are fundamentally non-equilibrium. The latter means that the circulation of substances is not closed here: some material substance is continuously added, and something is precipitated, eventually forming huge columns of sedimentary rocks. And the planet itself is not an inert body. Its bowels keep releasing various gases into the atmosphere and ocean, above all carbon dioxide and hydrogen. They are included in the circulation of substances in nature. Finally, man himself, as Vernadsky said, has a decisive influence on the structure of geochemical cycles – on the cycle of substances.
The study of the biosphere, as an integral system, was called global ecology – a completely new direction in science. Existing methods of experimental study of Nature are unsuitable for it: the biosphere cannot be studied under a microscope, like a butterfly. The biosphere is a unique object that exists in a single specimen. And besides, today it is not the same as yesterday, and tomorrow it will not be the same as today. And so any experiments with the biosphere are inadmissible, just in principle inadmissible. We can only observe what is happening, think, reason, study computer models. And if we carry out experiments, then only local ones, allowing us to study only certain regional features of biospheric processes.
That’s why the only way to study global ecology problems is to use methods of mathematical modeling and analysis of previous stages of nature’s development. The first significant steps on this path have already been made. And in the last quarter of a century much has been understood. And most importantly, the need for such study has become universally recognized.
Interaction of the biosphere and society
Vernadsky was the first, at the very beginning of the twentieth century, to understand that man is becoming the “main geological forming force of the planet” and the problem of interaction between man and nature should be included among the main fundamental problems of modern science. Vernadsky is not an accidental phenomenon in the line of remarkable Russian naturalists. He had teachers, predecessors, and, most importantly, traditions. Of his teachers, one must remember first of all V. V. Dokuchaev, who solved the mystery of our southern chernozems and laid the foundation for soil science. Thanks to Dokuchaev, today we understand that the basis of the entire biosphere, its connecting link, is soils with their microflora. The life, the processes that occur in soils determine all features of the cycle of substances in nature.
At the end of the 1960s, Jay Forrester, a well-known American computer scientist and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, developed simplified methods for describing dynamic processes using computers. Forrester’s student Meadows applied these approaches to studying the processes of changing biosphere characteristics and human activity. He published his calculations in a book he called The Limits of Growth.
Using very simple mathematical models that could in no way be considered scientifically valid, he made calculations that allowed him to compare the prospects for industrial development, population growth, and pollution.