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A Tapestry of Essays
by
Robin Wilding
“Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching
the breath, is that it is alive.” Lewis Thomas.
Global self-regulation
Some insight into the extent to which life has altered the earth, is offered by tracing the
early interactions between the family of minerals and gases which have become an essential
part of life, and their regulation by and for life, from the time of the archaean earth to the
present.
The young Archaean Earth, more than 3 billion years (3 eons) ago would have cooler
than it is today, warmed gently by a younger sun radiating 25% less heat than it does today.
The would have been a pale red in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide, ammonia, sulphur
dioxide and methane, all outgassings from the frequent volcanic activity. The sea would have
been brown, reflecting the red sky, just as out green sea today reflects the blue sky. The
brown colour would have ben due to silt washed of newly exposed rock, like an African river
in flood. The sea would have been acidic due to dissolved atmospheric gases.
The sun is warming up all the time. If earth had been just another planet, without life, it
would today have an average temperature of about 40 degrees centigrade, instead of the
current 15. It would have lost its water at this temperature and be heating up rapidly, much
In this process of rock weathering carbon is drawn out of the atmosphere and seeps
into the ground as bicarbonate salts or is washed out to sea, where the calcium and carbon
form an important mineral source for the coccolithosphores. They combine the calcium with
atmospheric carbon which eventually lands on the sea bed as a sediment of dead organisms.
This sediment will eventually turn inot chalk like the cliffs so visible around the port of Dover.
The cumulative affect of millions of years of carbon burial has been to reduce the
atmospheric carbon dioxide to its current low levels of about 0.03 % . Carbon dioxide is a
powerful greenhouse gas, that is its molecular weight is high enough to act as a barrier to
reflected solar heat from the Earth's surface. Thus marine algae, and to a lesser extent land
plants, have provided levels of atmospheric oxygen which support the entire respiring biota of
the Earth. The levels of oxygen have been surprisingly constant at about 21% for millions of
years. This stability is against the thermodynamic expectations of a powerful oxidising gas in
the presence of an inflammable gas, methane and another less reactive but plentiful
atmospheric gas, nitrogen. The level of 21% is just sufficient for adequate respiration and not
so high as to cause spontaneous combustion or to poison the metabolic processes which are
sensitive to the potentially lethal affects of free oxygen radicals.
Summary
In no part of the conventional story of evolution does life create its environment. The
environment is a fixture to which life adapts, or dies. Yet it is obvious that bacterial aggregates
in biofilms, whether on rocks around a sulphur geyser, or in the gut of a termite, control the
crucial variables such as pH, oxygen tension, diffusion rates, macro architectures and many
more feature to suit their lifestyle. The interactions are complex enough for unplanned,
uncontroled, unpredictable properties to emerge. Organisms have not adapted to a given fixed
environment but altered it and in the process become altered themselves.
A definition of life is not easy to come by. None of the conventional biological versions
captures the irreducible wholeness of the "living" and the "non-living". Our school teachers ask
pupils to focus on the differences between a frog and the rock it sits on. Not so the Eastern
teacher who wants the pupils to see both rock and frog as possessing a spirit. The Western
religions have planted dualism securely in our mythology. Is the earth alive? Is a tree alive?
Lovelock answers, yes, (to both questions), although most of it is by strict definition dead. One
could add that even a dead stricken tree was yet alive. For within and on it live worms, beetles,