I am not "officially" an ecologist, but have worked with ecologists for a large portion of my career as a scientist. My contibution to the projects was usually the computer models of large ecosystems, but I also worked on the theory behind those models. Right now I am reviewing a book by Dorion Sagan for Chelsea Green Publishing (the politics and practice of sustainable living) entitled: Notes from the Holocene{A Brief History of the Future}. I was contacted by them after someone on their staff read my diary Who cares about rain forests? right here on Daily Kos! I will not be citing lots of statistics about the demise of the planet and most things on it, but rather I'll try to go to the root problem in the center of the collective consiousness that has led us to where we are. Come along and see if my presentation can really say something new about this much discussed topic.
I have gotten to page 113 of 203 and I have to start putting my thoughts into written form before I go on. The book will take a number of diaries to cover and I have skimmed ahead so I have a good idea where the author is going. Right now thoughts are burning in my mind and I have to write this.
Let's start with background. Even that is not easy because I coukld easily fill the diary with just that. First, who is this person who would dare to write such a book named Dorion Sagan? He is the son of astronomer Carl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis and the publisher tells us:
Writer, editor, and sleight-of-hand artist Dorion Sagan’s articles have appeared in Wired, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Natural History, The Sciences, Pabular, Cabinet, and other magazines. His books include What is Life, Origins of Sex, and Into the Cool.
Since Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics and Life by Eric D. Schneider and Dorion Sagan is a book that I had a lot to do with, let me digress to tell you why and how it enhances my credentials for the story I will be telling you in this and subsequent diaries. Into the Cool was inspired by a paper that Eric wrote along with James Kay :"Life as a Manifestation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics" which was published in a special volume of Mathematical and Computer Modeling entitled Modeling Complex Biological Systems that I co-edited in 1994. The publisher of Into the Cool, The University of Chicago press, has this to tell us about Schneider:
Eric D. Schneider
is an interdisciplinary scientist whose thirty-year research program has been a synthesis of physics and biology at a most fundamental level. Specifically he studies the intersection of energy flow and thermodynamics with life. What he has found is that life is one of a continuum of processes that produce order from disorder. Highly organized nonliving physical and chemical systems are ordered by energy and chemical gradients. Life like these inanimate systems import high quality energy and give off low grade energy and are able to build structure, organization and biotic processes from this difference. The origin of life, the development of ecosystems, the direction seen in evolution and an insight into economic systems emerge from this paradigm. Among other things he has served as Senior Research Scientist; National Ocean Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, (NOAA) where he coordinated high latitude global climate research.
The coauthor of that 1994 paper, James Kay, was who really got me interested in a very new and exciting approach to ecosystems. We met across the table from each other at breakfast the first morning of a meeting entitled Ecosystem Theory for Biological Oceanography in 1984. James was a very special person. He died at a young age and we lost a great scientist and humanitarian. Here is some more information at Wikipedia.
That necessary digression into the background of these ideas should be a clue that what we are about to talk about is not the run of the mill approach to the environment. No, on the contrary, it is a revolutionary approach to the Earth as a system and it is part of a much broader revolution in science.
What I want to focus on in this first installment is the very deep idea that the earth system, for lack of a better term, is alive and can be viewed, in fact, as a very interesting kind of organism. Sagan's book is in large part devoted to convincing us of that. In my case, he is preaching to the clergy, since I used the Metabolism and Repair Model published in the late 1950s by Robert Rosen to show that the Earth system was an organism many years ago. If I were to worry about such things, I guess I should feel a little put out that Sagan never acknowledges this, but that is irrelevant. What is relevant is that many of us have independently come to share the view that Sagan expounds on in his book.
I'll spend the final part of this diary outlining the reasons we can make such an assertion and also relating Sagan's metaphors and analogies between the Earth as organism and an organism such as you or I.
In my work, the organism had to entail a number of important properties. The key to Rosen's Metabolism/Repair model is the dichotomy between the organism and the Cartesian machine metaphor so popular among scientists today. The mathematiical treatment involves Category Theory and is quite a formidable exercise. The result of this ellegant mathematical exercise ius a total separation between the organism and the machine. There is no overlap. We use the causal entailment of the functions that go on in the organism to show that it is completely closed to efficient causation in distinction from a machine which is causally impoverished and requires outside agents to manufacture key elements of its being.
It is almost trivial to make the jump from this abstract model used to demonstrate an important philosophical point, to the observation that the Earth system is totally like the model in its containment of all the important causality within its own system. Sagan goes an important distance further when he makes an analogy between the Earth system and our selves as living beings. He demonstrates conclusively that we can apply a kind of Turing test to the notion that the earth system is an organism by comparing it with ourselves as organisms. The result is startling.
Organisms, in distinction from machines, are not built to last. They, in fact, are constantly tearing themselves down in very well organized schemes in order that they may be constantly renewing themselves. Machines break and/or wear out because we don't know how to prevent that from happening no matter how hard we try. The organism's healing and growth are the product of their being in a constant cycle of tearing down in an orderly manner and then rebuilding. It is an ongoing process. The Earth system is now demonstrating its capability of exercising the same kind of metabolic restructuring that we have in our bodies. The Earth system has been seriously assaulted by one of its most influencial parts, namely, humanity ans its creations. The Earth system is now using the cyclic processes that it has as part of its metabolism to correct and/or adjust its physiology to what is taking place.
It will be interesting to see what the earth system will come up with and how kind it's solution will be to us. I will not live long enough to experience much of its response, but I can already see some of it. I will continue this story in a future series of diaries after I see how well I have made myself understood and what needs to be clarified from this introduction. Please ask hard questions and tell me what your views are. This is a work in progress.