This series is stimulated by Dorion Sagan's book Notes from the Holocene {A Brief History of the Future} The first of the series My first Eco-diary: The earth is Alive? stirred up some calls for more so here it is. I've provided the link for those who missed the first installment and I'll also make this as self contained as possible. For the more rigid scientific types, Sagan has the following warning
WARNING: This book contains wild speculations:
READ AT YOUR OWN RISK*
*This statement has not been verified by the FDA, MDA, USDA, APA, DEA, GSA, CIA, NSA, AA, AAA, or AAAA
Let us look a little further into this man's very innovative mind. Again, we are here to try out some ideas not to cull through data.
Just to continue in the spirit of Sagan's warning, his first page has this:
To anticipate, I conclude that life has a physical purpose, that there are many universes, that the Earth is an organized system that may be conscious, and that it already has begun a process of reproduction that may take its offspring-including, perhaps, us-to the stars. I conclude that linear time and free will are possibly illusions, and that the typical notion of God is hopelessly naive.
Having read that you are now set up to reject everything he has to say about the Earth system and that is too bad if it is true. In fact, the book is very well grounded in factual science and provides a very much needed systems view of the state of our planet. In the first diary I linked his speculations about the usefulness of metaphorically seeing the Earth system as something that loosely compares to a living organism, to my own demonstration that the Earth system was an orgainism as defined by Robert Rosen using a category theory model called a "Metabolism/Repair" system.
Since these ideas are going to split the audience into two camps,it is important to face that split head on. One group will find nothing wrong with seeing the Earth system framed by this metaphor while another will shut down immediately when confronted with the idea. I'd like to try to get everyone to go beyond that initial reaction because the discussion has some important things to bring out about the Earth system.
If you are wondering why I can be so sure about the two camps reacting in the way I predict, it is simply because I have been at this for a long time. Among other things, I taught about these ideas to undergraduate honors students for over fifteen years.
In his book coauthored with Mark Johnson Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought George Lakoff teaches us that:
Most thought is unconscious
Abstract concepts are mostly metaphorical
Mind is embodied
Everyone at this site is in some way involved in politics and therefore may be familiar with how Lakoff applies these ideas to the framing of issues in politics. He has had some success. My attempts to convince my scientific colleagues that issues have also been framed for us in science have been met with even greater resisitance. This is because science, mainly through physics, has created a surrogate world that most people accept in place of the real, very complex world without even knowing that this is what they have been taught to do. Hence your reaction to the notion that the earth system is like a living organism in some very important ways will depend on the unconscious reaction resulting from how related ideas were framed for you as you were educated.
If you have stayed with me this far, we might be ready to suspend judgement temporarily and see where this is going. I promise that it will go somewhere both interesting and useful. So here is where Sagan wants to take us:
I am interested in provisional answers to some of the deepest, most persistent questions we can ask ourselves. I look to science but also to the speculations of science fiction, the revelations of mystics, and the logic of philosophers.....Let us start with the most basic thing- the Earth, the living part of which is called the biosphere.
At the risk of being too concerned with the unconscious framing we might be calling upon at this point, let me point out that this singling out the "living" part of the Earth system is a reduction that leads us away from understanding the entire system temporarily. This can and will be remedied soon. Sagan is aware of this as he goes on to say:
The very word biosphere is subtly subversive, undermining the nationalistic mind-set. Mere mention of it provides a clue that our ultimate allegance is beyond politics and race
You may now wonder why I am writing about this here and now, given the topics of most of the other diaries. I think that you are clever enough to sense that the point is just that. The juxtaposition is an important one in the context of here and now as we shall see.
The concept dawns that we belong to the biosphere, and not just the biosphere of the Earth but of the Cosmos, as well. The nationless, mapless perspective of Earth seen by an astronaught in space-in which human beings are visible, if at all, only by the lights of our cities at night-puts us in our place.
He ponders the effect of viewing our planet from space and then goes on to the point of all this:
As it turns out there is plenty of evidence for what must seem a bizarre science-fiction idea-that Earth is a giant living being, perhaps a superorganism as far beyond us as we are beyond our constituent cells.
Careful study reveals that the chemistry and temperature of the atmosphere, oceans, and sediments- the surface of the earth- is under active control
As a physiologist, I have to remind you that this is what we call "homeostasis", the central dogma of physiology at the level of multicellular organisms we are familiar with. He goes on to develop this idea with many, many well chosen snapshots of conditions and processes that contribute to this global "homeostasis".
The four major divisions of the book are:
Earth
Water
Air
Fire
hence the title of this diary. We have had a glimpse at the first. It is time to pause again and discuss what we are thinking at this point. That discussion will pave the way for how I shall proceed in the next installment. That is if people want a next installment. What I will promise is that the case Sagan makes for his views has lots of good science behind it. The more sceptical you are the more reason to see what that is. In another installment we will look at the concept of "Ecosystem Health" that is used in ecology and follows a line of reasoning Sagan has made use of in this book.