The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change [Paperback]

Vaclav Smil (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2003

In his latest book, Vaclav Smil tells the story of the Earth?s biosphere from its origins to its near- and long-term future. He explains the workings of its parts and what is known about their interactions. With essay-like flair, he examines the biosphere?s physics, chemistry, biology, geology, oceanography, energy, climatology, and ecology, as well as the changes caused by human activity. He provides both the basics of the story and surprising asides illustrating critical but often neglected aspects of biospheric complexity.Smil begins with a history of the modern idea of the biosphere, focusing on the development of the concept by Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky. He explores the probability of life elsewhere in the universe, life?s evolution and metabolism, and the biosphere?s extent, mass, productivity, and grand-scale organization. Smil offers fresh approaches to such well-known phenomena as solar radiation and plate tectonics and introduces lesser-known topics such as the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolism across body sizes and metabolic pathways. He also examines two sets of fundamental relationships that have profoundly influenced the evolution of life and the persistence of the biosphere: symbiosis and the role of life?s complexity as a determinant of biomass productivity and resilience. And he voices concern about the future course of human-caused global environmental change, which could compromise the biosphere?s integrity and threaten the survival of modern civilization.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Smil, in a presentation marked by balance and clarity, synthesizes the field of science dealing with the biosphere. It is an interdisciplinary one, combining organic chemistry, geology, solar physics, microbiology, zoology, and more. Whatever characteristics the biosphere displays on a global scale depend on living matter's fundamental chemistry, so Smil diagrams the structural backbone of cells--molecules such as cellulose or DNA. Moving next through types of metabolism, such as the ATP cycle, Smil explains the resultant chemical products and how they become fixed or cycled through the ground, water, or atmosphere. Addressing concerns about human influences on the biosphere, Smil describes them, but he is a scientist to the core (at the University of Manitoba) and is hesitant to proclaim doom as the certain outcome. That scientific humility only enhances Smil's work. A superior, comprehensive survey. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Finally we have an accessible, highly integrated account of the environment: wise rather than clever, responsible rather than glib, comprehensive rather than confused, comprehensible rather than new. Smil's unique biospheric narrative, devoid of hype and patriotism, transcends academic apartheid. This immensely learned story of the past history and current state of the third planet is destined to become required reading for anyone who seeks the environmental context for human activity."--Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and recipient of the National Medal of SciencePlease note: Endorser does not give permission to excerpt from the quote.

"A lovely book, in both content and execution." Mitchell K. Hobish Science Books & Films

"A superior, comprehensive survey." Gilbert Taylor Booklist

"The breadth of discussion is remarkable... The Earth's Biosphere is unconventional." M. Cowell Annals of the Association of American Geographers

"... written by an author who does not allow facts to be obscured or overshadowed by politics." The New York Review of Books

"Thomashow's book provides value judgments about nature, based on nature. And one emerges from reading with a profound sense of one's place in the biosphere."--Lynn Margulis, Distinguished University Professor, Department of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and recipient of the National Medal of Science

"Vaclav Smil's scholarship on biospherics is unique. Few have the necessary interdisciplinary background to attempt a work of this nature. Smil has wisely selected from the staggering amount of material pertinent to this topic and organized his presentation in a thoughtful way. I know of no comparable work where the mastery of the technological, scientific, and historical material relevant to the subject is so seamlessly presented."--John Katzenberger, Director, Aspen Global Change Institute

"The book's magisterial coverage, richness of detail, and mastery of the most recent literature are its strengths."--David Schwartzman, Department of Biology, Howard University

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 356 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (August 11, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262692988
• ISBN-13: 978-0262692984
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #512,865 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Vaclav Smil is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. He completed his graduate studies at the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Carolinum University in Prague and at the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences of the Pennsylvania State University. His interdisciplinary research interests encompass a broad area of energy, environmental, food, population, economic, historical and public policy studies, and he had also applied these approaches to energy, food and environmental affairs of China.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (Science Academy) and the first non-American to receive the American Association for the Advancement of Science Award for Public Understanding of Science and Technology. He has been an invited speaker in more than 250 conferences and workshops in the USA, Canada, Europe, Asia and Africa, has lectured at many universities in North America, Europe and East Asia and has worked as a consultant for many US, EU and international institutions. His wife Eva is a physician and his son David is an organic synthetic chemist.

Official Website: www.vaslavsmil.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Masterful Survey, October 5, 2004

By 

James R. Mccall (Libertyville, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Paperback)

Vaclav Smil is a geographer, and tries to get some perspective on the life of our planet by taking the large view. This entails a sacrifice of depth to get the necessary breadth. But the task he has set himself is still to provide sufficient rigorous detail on the topics he includes (bichemistry, energetics, geology, geochemistry, etc.) to give the reader a basis for useful understanding of the complex thing that is the biosphere. It is necessary, as he asserts in his preface, to synthesize rather than specialize if we are to address the pressing questions about our living environment, which sprawls -- physically and intellectually -- over the whole world. And if you follow the references -- or just leaf through the bibliography -- you must come to realize the immense amount of learning and research that undergird this presentation.

The patron saint of this volume is the early 20th-century Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who was the first to use the term "biosphere" (actually, "biosphera") in the grand and inclusive way that the rest of the world is now getting around to doing. He calculated (or estimated or guessed) the primary productivity of the green world, the standing biomass divided into its varous categories of land and water autotrophs and heterotrophs, the interrelationships between life, the sun's energy, the composition and behaviors of sea and air, and the grand geochemical cycles. And Vernadsky was hopeful: he expected a planet-wide consciousness to arise that would manage the biosphere intelligently.

Since then, hope has waned as our knowledge and power have grown. Humanity is stressing the systems of life as much, perhaps, as any catastophe in Earth's long history. Yet this book is a hopeful gesture: it is an attempt to get a grip on the issues in play so we can act with some effect to reverse or slow the degradation of the air, land, and waters, and to restore nature to a state of robust health -- or at least to give nature some breathing room. Smil has chosen to treat in detail the questions of the origins of life, its possible existence elsewhere, and its fundamental biochemistry. He talks about life in the mass -- as a storehouse for sunlight, and as a participant in the great cycles of material through the atmosphere, waters, within the mantle of the earth, and out again. He talks about the physical constraints on life's productivity, the dynamics and organization of the biosphere. And always he is concerned with magnitudes and their relationships: it is not enough to discuss the amount of plankton in the oceans as an isolated fact. Rather, its mass and its turnover, its powers of energy sequestration, should be compared to those of land plants, and productive and unproductive sea areas contrasted.

It is implicit in this approach that the numbers matter. We must know the size and extent of things that we wish to affect or to stop adversely affecting. After all, without some sense of the magnitude of the particular flows of material or requirements of particular facets of the living world, we can waste our efforts on what amount to side issues. However, I wish the presentation had been more user-friendly: many of the charts and graphs were lifted from technical publications, and the others had that feel. The ultimate goal of all this numerizing should be -- let's face it -- a sort of pictoral understanding. To that end, I would have liked some synthesizing graphics that showed (maybe with fat arrows and thin arrows, big, little and even teeny-tiny barrels (or trees or bugs...)) how facets of the system compared, and at a glance showed the relative "importance" of things.

I know that mere magnitude is not always a safe guide to how important something is in the workings of the world. A rather small quantity of CFC's in the stratosphere has had immense effect, for counterexample. Small amounts of bottleneck chemicals like phosphorous control the richness of life in otherwise productive areas. And how unimportant is a rare -- and biospherically useless -- species?

Anyway, I cheer this parade of fact backed by much research and aided immensely by our current generation of planet-spanning monitoring devices. This is hard science, and it gives us baselines and error ranges, without which all discussion finally devolves into opinion and political posturing. Yet, when the last graph is in place, we go right on despoiling the world. The problem is not so much a technical difficulty as it is a matter of societal will. Smil admits as much in his last chapter. All that has gone before is not even really prelude. Without the active cooperation of the political entities that partition this vast human herd the environment cannot be saved. This is the hard part. It is rather a letdown, getting to this point in the book, to realize that science is powerless in the face of a desire to ignore it.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A very useful reference on the Earth's biosphere, January 2, 2005

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Hardcover)

This is a very readable book about the history and nature of the Earth's biosphere, and ideas about its future.

Smil begins with some fascinating material on the the nature and origin of early life on Earth. That includes a discussion of stromatolites (early life), and some interesting comments about guesses of the odds of life appearing in a stellar system in the Galaxy. While estimates that hold the chances to be small are taken seriously, Fred Hoyle's argument that the chance is outrageously small is shown to be silly.

The author then describes the nature and diversity of life in general, and its resiliance to a variety of natural catastrophes, including bolide impacts and supernovae.

Smil tells us about how the biosphere is energized, by solar radiation and the Earth's internal heat. And we then see the flows of water and materials, including carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, and other mineral cycles. The next two chapters deal with the extent of the biosphere and the biosphere's mass and productivity. There are organisms that range up to 50 km above the surface of our planet, or to the bottom of the oceans, nearly 11 km down. To tens of meters below the land surface. And at temperatures ranging from 110 degrees Celsius to minus 50. pH ranges can be from 1 to 11. Meanwhile, the biomass may be anywhere from 2200 to 4000 Gigatons of Carbon.

There is a chapter on the dynamics and organization of the biosphere, including the quarter-power scaling of animal and plant metabolism "that applies across an entire range of body sizes and metabolic pathways."

After that, Smil discusses the transformation of the biosphere due to human actions, such as the release of sulfur, nitrogen, and carbon into the atmosphere. The book concludes with some ideas about the future of the biosphere. He speculates that the Earth's population will stabilize at well below 10 billion people and that there needs to be a transition "from fossil fuels to solar radiation as the dominant source of human energy needs." Meanwhile, there are problems to face: we humans are awfully prone to violence, there may be a new ice age, we could be hit by a big bolide, and so forth. Still, the author is mentions that the biosphere might prove surprisingly resiliant to what is being done to it at present.

There are a few useful appendices, covering milestones in the evolution of the Earth and its biosphere, sizes and masses of organisms, chemical reactions in the carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur cycles, and ocean and land estimates of the biosphere's phytomass, heterotrophic biomass, and net primary productivity, There's also a list of useful websites.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic.

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich with connections between ideas, January 4, 2004

By 

Wignall "Wigs" (Hobart, IN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Hardcover)

This is less a review of the book then a plea for more people to read it. Like an idiot, I loaned my new copy of this book to a friend after just reading through it once. I'll be buying another, and keeping it.

Smil connects so many ideas together here that you might find yourself thinking that the dynamics of an interconnected biosphere are obvious. I suppose that's the highest praise I can offer. Complex interactions within geology, geography, chemistry and evolution are made clear in this book. The writing is bright, interesting and yet dense with information. This is large scale popular science writing at its best.