The Earth's Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change 1st Edition
by Vaclav Smil (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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Received Honorable Mention in the category of Geography and Earth Science in the 2002 Professional/Scholarly Publishing Annual Awards Competition presented by the Association of American Publishers, Inc.
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.
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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
Review
"A lovely book, in both content and execution."
— Mitchell K. Hobish, Science Books & Films
"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
"A superior, comprehensive survey."
— Gilbert Taylor, Booklist
"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 Science
"This extremely comprehensive book is more than an encyclopedia. It presents integrative, selective, and good quality information with a point of view informed by up-to-date sources and spanning a dazzling array of fields. I doubt anyone other than Vaclav Smil could have produced such a work."
—Martin Hoffert, Professor of Physics, New York University
About the Author
Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor at the University of Manitoba and the author of many books, including Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (2005), Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (2007), Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next Fifty Years (2008), and Why America Is Not a New Rome (2010), all published by the MIT Press. He was awarded the 2007 Olivia Schieffelin Nordberg Award for excellence in writing and editing in the population sciences.
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Product details
Publisher : The MIT Press; 1st edition (July 21, 2002)
Language : English
Hardcover : 356 pages
ISBN-10 : 0262194724
ISBN-13 : 978-0262194723
Item Weight : 1.85 pounds
Dimensions : 8 x 1 x 9 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #2,303,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#394 in Organic Evolution
#987 in Ecology (Books)
#1,773 in Environmental Studies
Customer Reviews: 4.2 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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Biography
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
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earth and its biosphere life on earth human smil cycles biomass living science understanding atmosphere dynamics energy evolution oceans planet research species chapter chemical geology
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rif79
5.0 out of 5 stars This book is very detailed and meaty; it has taught me a lot!
Reviewed in the United States on November 3, 2013
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I'm reading this as a textbook for a course in my Master's program but it would be an interesting read anyways. It's very "meaty" with detailed descriptions of Earth's processes and human impacts on them. Highly recommend!
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Mr. B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Ties together all the chemical reactions making life possible.
Reviewed in the United States on January 5, 2016
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Book should be read by every human on the planet. The biosphere is a living organism which we are harming to our own demise.
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Hans W Decker
5.0 out of 5 stars how does it all hang together
Reviewed in the United States on November 7, 2018
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perfect
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Oliver Twist
5.0 out of 5 stars The World we live in-will it survive?
Reviewed in the United States on January 30, 2014
This rather slim book (271 pages of text) is a comprehensive overview of the Earth's Biosphere, a detailed accounting of our planet from the atmosphere to the oceans and the earth's crust, everything that in any way affects life on Earth, from the smallest viral particles to sperm whales, from tiny spores to giant sequoias.
It begins with the history of our understanding of the biosphere and goes on to talk about the basic building blocks of living organisms and how the elements that compose them are continually recycling. It tells us about their diversity, their resilience to change, how energy is stored and transferred, the importance of water, and the inter-dependance of all living things. And finally it tells us about the dynamics of change, how the earth's biosphere is transformed by human action.
The author has done an excellent job of summarizing the latest knowledge and research from a wide variety of scientific fields and the text is liberally interspersed with many diagrams, illustrations and graphs. I would say a basic interest in science is a pre-requisite to understanding most of the information, the scope of this project spans many different fields from basic physics, chemistry and geology to genetics and microbiology. Sadly, this will mean that many readers will be lost during some of the text, which is unfortunate because the topic is so important to the very survival of our species that this should be essential reading for every human being.
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James R. Mccall
4.0 out of 5 stars A Masterful Survey
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2004
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.
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Danny Cote
4.0 out of 5 stars Time to get real on our future on earth
Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2011
The Earth's Biosphere brings a lot of scientific facts on the table, (molecular/chemical combinations, geophysical evolution, biomass estimation, ...). Every aspects of the cycles of life on earth is approached in a scientific generalist manner, without "parti pris", but just by stating the facts.
I could not miss the fact that our mere existence is in fact a based on a extremely unlikely element of chance, and that the current lifespan of the human specie is quite small compared to "what happen before us".
An interesting book to glance through, with a strong reminiscence in the epilogue on the need to address the effect of the human species influence on our biosphere to continue our lucky run...
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Wignall
5.0 out of 5 stars Rich with connections between ideas
Reviewed in the United States on January 4, 2004
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.
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Ushan
Dec 24, 2010Ushan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
This is a survey of biology (from cell biology to biome-scale ecology) and geography as pertaining to the earth's biosphere - where life on earth came from (as far as it can be known), how it will end, where it has spread, how life affects the natural cycles of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur and other elements, what are the scaling laws for animals and plants, what is the total biomass of wild mammals, domesticated bovids and humans, and so on. So far as a nonbiologist can understand it, this is very interesting stuff.
The last chapter is about the human influence on the biosphere - human-introduced invasive species (99% of the biomass of the San Francisco Bay), air and water pollution, deforestation and global warming via anthropogenic emission of fossil carbon. I didn't know that the answer to a great many questions about global warming is, "We have no idea", since there are dozens of feedback cycles, both positive and negative, around the increased concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide and its consequences. Will plants photosynthesize more because of greater concentration of carbon dioxide? Some will, some won't. Will the warmer oceans cause the methane hydrates on the ocean floor to melt, releasing large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere? Fortunately, we cannot destroy the biosphere; unfortunately, it is within our capabilities to alter it in such a way as to make the earth unlivable for billions of humans.
Smil's Energies is one of the best popular science books I have ever read. (less)
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Chuck Kollars
Oct 18, 2016Chuck Kollars rated it liked it
As with all of Vaclav Smil's books, very full of numbers and conversant with a very wide range of fields that may at first seem only distantly related.
To keep his books (including this one) down to a reasonable length, he uses abbreviations very heavily. His abbreviation system turns out to be quite simple, but might seem incredibly obscure to some who aren't familiar with it. All number dimensions are metric (much more than just gram-centimeter-second, uses commonly used measures like "tons"). As the numbers can be quite large, the metric prefixes (milli, micro, mega, giga, etc.) are used extensively. Most of the things quantified are named by their chemical element name (C, P, etc.) or molecular formula (CO2, O3, etc.). A few are either inferred from context, or use a very common acronym other than the chemical formula (DMS for Di-Methyl-Sulfide, etc.). The only one that initially tripped me up was 'a', which means 'annum' or in the vernacular 'year'. So 4.2 Ga means 4.2 Billion years (the probable age of the earth:-), and 6Mt C means 6 million tons of Carbon, etc.) The notation system is thoroughly explained in appendices in _some_ of his books ...but not this particular one. If you're not already familiar with his notation system, this book will likely be incomprehensible, and you unfortunately may not perceive much recourse.
In this book professor Smil sets out to approach some sort of "forecasting", something he's normally extremely reluctant to do. He makes so many compromises on just what "forecasting" actually means, and even then is somewhat uncomfortable with the result, that this book is less satisfying than many of his others.
As usual he sticks to numbers, staying as far away from "politics" (and even "shoulds") as possible. As usual for his books, this book is most definitely not anything like a "polemic". It's very nice to read such an even-handed and thorough approach. (On the other hand, it will probably inevitably be judged unsatisfactory by any reader with a strong commitment to one position or another.)
As usual for his books, the depth of information is astounding. Numbers seem to go *tens *of *times* deeper (in all cases, not just one particular case) than anything else you've ever read. (less)
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Jake
Jul 03, 2019Jake rated it really liked it
Shelves: ecology, biology, complexity
A very solid comprehensive introduction to the concept of the biosphere - the macro ecological system of which we arise from, are supported by, and are a participant in.
Understanding the concept of the biosphere is of upmost importance to understanding what exactly is at stake in climate change. And dont worry. The big rock we are standing on will be fine invariably. The ecological web, less so.
Reading smil is never a smooth walk in the park. His erudition is superb as he spans between a ton of subjects with a clear comprehension beyond that of the classic journalist. He is very much an academic. At times his words come at you like a storm of rocks numbers and quantities, at time it will hurt to move through the many numbers, charts and words, BUT to simply be able to encounter an individual so well read in so many things is quite rare.
In short, this is a great book. Painful at times as it would be nice if he had a bit better if he played with the melody of language rather than giving straight facts. But alas, he does what he says he would do in the title.
Recommended for those interested in:
Climate change
Evolution
Ecology
Gaia theory
Systems thinkers (less)
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