Vladimir Vernadskiy
(This article is an abbreviated translation of M. M. Novikov ‘Великаны российского естествознания’ (‘Velikany rossiyskogo estestvoznaniya’), Posev, 1960: pp.87-98; supplemented by information from the Wikipedia article on Vernadsky, and other sources.)
Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (or, in Ukrainian, Volodymyr Evanovych) was born in 1863 in St Petersburg. His father (believed to be of Zaporozhian Cossack descent) was an economics professor, and his mother was a music teacher. The family moved to Kharkiv in 1868, where Vladimir went to school. Although he had dual ‘Russian-Ukrainian’ identity he declined to become a Ukrainian citizen in 1918. In 1885 he completed a course in the physics-mathematics faculty in St Petersburg University, where he studied under the famous soil scientist Dokuchayev. In 1891 he defended his masters degree in the same university, followed by a doctoral dissertation in 1897. From 1892 he lectured in Moscow University on mineralogy & crystallography, and in 1898 was named an ‘extraordinary professor’ of Moscow University.
In 1911, in connection with a conflict between the university & a government minister (Kasso), Vernadsky stopped teaching in Moscow and moved back to St Petersburg, where he was able to continue his research at the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. By this time he had already embarked on the main pursuit of his life, which was to use geology & chemistry to understand the physico-chemical conditions of the formation of minerals. From 1908 he studied the chemical elements of Earth’s crust, so creating the discipline of geochemistry, and his first biogeochemical studies (involving biology as well as geochemistry) were published in 1916.
Vernadsky also played a role in politics, and was an active member of the Constitutional-Democratic Party. From 1892 he was a councillor in Morshanskiy Uyezd Zemstvo, and later in Tambov Zemstvo. In 1906 he was elected member of the State Council from the Russian universities & Academy of Sciences. After 1917 he served as assistant minister of education in the provisional government. Although he was an atheist, he was interested in Hinduism & Rigveda. His son, George, was born in 1887, and later emigrated to the US where he published books on medieval & modern Russian history; he died in 1973.
Soon after the Bolshevik Revolution, in November 1917, Vernadsky moved south, first to Poltava, and soon after to Kiev, where he participated in organizing the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences; it opened in 1918 and he became its president. In the following year he moved to Simferopol in the Crimea, where he became rector of Tavrinsky University. However, he soon tired of the nomadic life and in 1921 returned to the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. There, alongside researchers in geochemistry & natural resources, he organized the State Radium Institute, considering it essential for the continuation of geochemical research
Since life under the Bolshevik regime did not suit him, he took advantage of his scientific status and requested an overseas posting. In 1922 he delivered lectures in Prague, and in later years in Paris, everywhere explaining the foundations of geochemistry and emphasizing the role of living things in the composition of the Earth’s crust. These lectures resulted in his book Geochemistry, published in Paris in 1924.
Vernadsky did not however sever relations with the Academy of Sciences, and in 1926 he returned to Leningrad (as St Petersburg was re-named). Since the Soviet government valued his international scientific reputation (like that of another academic, Pavlov) and was using him for its own publicity, it was reconciled to the independence of his political views. He was advised to move to Western Europe where, however, he was expected to observe the greatest care in his relations with his emigrant colleagues.
Novikov recalled how, late one evening, he & Vernadsky were discussing scientific matters for some hours, which he described as an ‘amusing mental game’: once, in order to clarify the role of living organisms, Vernadsky declared, to make a point, “See, here is a beautiful violet: but really it is just a drop of water with a small admixture of material substances.” In his scientific researches, Vernadsky avoided hypotheses or speculative suggestions, preferring instead empirical generalizations to study the chemical structure of the Earth’s crust.
1926 saw the publication, in Russian, of his important book ‘Biosfera‘. (The term ‘biosphere’ was first used by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess in 1875; he & Vernadskiy met in 1911.) Around this time at the Academy of Sciences a Commission for the History of Knowledge was set up, under Vernadskiy’s chairmanship; and in 1929 a Biogeochemical Laboratory was established at the Academy of Sciences, a large part of the work of which (up to the start of World War II) was the study of marine organisms – representing the living component of the sea.
He returned to Moscow in 1943. The following year on 25th December he suffered a brain haemorrhage, from which he died on 6th January 1945. An English translation (by his son George) of his essay ‘The Biosphere & the Noosphere’ was published in American Scientist, 33(1) in January 1945, with his death being announced in a footnote on p.1.
Geochemistry directs attention to the sum total of organisms as living matter; it is interested not in the morphology or physiology of individual organisms, but only in what they comprise en masse – namely chemical compounds & energy. From the geochemical point of view organisms are an essential part of the Earth’s crust, where they exert an enormous influence: with their help our planet is actively connected with cosmic space, through the transformation of the sun’s thermal energy into Earth’s free chemical energy. As a result the passive substance of the biosphere is to a large extent a product of life. So life should not be regarded as merely an incidental, chance phenomenon: instead it is intimately involved in the composition & processes of Earth’s crust, fulfilling a vital function without which the whole system could not exist.
The biogeochemical energy of living matter is closely linked with three fundamental features of the biosphere – the unity of the whole mass of living material, the continual release of effective energy by organisms, and their colonization of the biosphere – the last being the most important. Each form of living matter could, in theory, occupy the whole planet within a given specific period which is different for each species. The greatest speed is seen in bacteria – a population of which is capable in theory of expanding so fast that it could occupy the whole surface of the planet in just 24-36 hours (in practice, of course, this does not happen). By contrast, the weakest biogeochemical energy is manifest in the elephant, which could in theory colonize the planet through reproduction & mass migration in only about ten centuries. Vernadsky called the capacity to occupy all available space ‘life pressure’ (mentioned 11 times in Biosfera as ‘давлфение (жизни)’, and once as ‘упругость’). In practice populations are limited by mortality; for example, of the thousands of seeds & seedlings produced by a tree, or the thousands of fry produced by a female fish, the vast majority die before they can reproduce. The spectacular expansion of the human population in recent centuries is a striking illustration of Vernadsky’s ‘life pressure’, and we must expect it eventually to be limited in much the same way as in other species: Homo sapiens is, after all, an animal, much like any other. There can hardly be a more obvious expression of ‘life pressure’ than the apparently serious intention of some people to colonize the Moon and/or Mars. Current consequences of unregulated ‘life pressure’ among humans include environmental disruption, famine, epidemics, mass migration, & conflict, all of which may result in mortality. It seems that most political actors & theorists are unaware of this basic biological concept, or else choose to ignore it, despite current events in the Middle East, Sudan & elsewhere.
The maximum speed with which a given species could occupy the whole planet can be considered a measure of its ‘biological energy’. In Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere, the main role of life pressure consists in the intensity & variety of ways in which solar energy is converted into terrestrial forms of energy, along with the consequences for the chemical composition of the biosphere. Today an additional force – the technological activity of humans – is emerging in the biosphere, and capable of significantly altering its character. In future it could bring about a new geological state of the biosphere – termed by Vernadsky the noosphere (not Teilhard de Chardin’s concept with the same name, although the two men discussed their ideas in Paris). Already the chemical constitution of the Earth’s crust is changing under the influence of human technology. For example, several metals – e.g aluminium, magnesium, calcium – which did not previously exist in a free form, are now being extracted in large quantities; and plant & animal life is radically changing under the influence of cultivation. The planet’s surface is acquiring a new character.
Vernadsky’s ‘biosphere’ is in many ways similar to the ‘Gaia‘ of James Lovelock & Lynn Margulis (who incidentally was a co-author of the introduction to the 1998 English translation of The Biosphere). The Gaia theory was first published in 1972, when Lovelock was still unaware of Vernadsky’s work. The significance of his work was summed up by Jacques Grinevald: “The revolutionary character of the Vernadskian science of the Biosphere was long hidden by the reductionist, overspecialized & compartmentalized scientific knowledge of our time.” (Grinevald ‘The Invisibility of the Vernadskian Revolution’, introduction to The Biosphere, Copernicus, 1998, p.27). Perhaps the same comment applies to political science.
Selected works: Geochemistry, published in Russian 1924; The Biosphere, first published in Russian in 1926, followed by a French translation in 1929. English translations: ‘The Biosphere & the Noosphere’, American Scientist, 33(1) January 1945; The Biosphere Oracle, AZ, Synergetic Press, 1986, ISBN0-907791-11-5, 86 pp (abridged translation); The Biosphere tr. David B. Langmuir (complete translation), ed. Mark A. S. McMenamin, New York, Copernicus, 1998, ISBN0-387-98268-X, 192 pp; Essays on Geochemistry & the Biosphere, tr. Olga Barash, Santa Fe, NM, Synergetic Press, ISBN0-907791-36-0, 2006.