What is the value or character and the importance of the life we are protecting?
Part One | Answers | Text | Wilson | Conclusions | What is wrong with this question ?
Glacier National Park: "Riding to the Sun Road"
"One is led to conclude that bacterial abundance is a ubiquitous and constant feature of the Earth's surface."
Vernadsky, p. 8.
"But Living matter is not an accidental creation"
Vernadsky, p. 9.
- Life is a gift
- Life is a useful commodity
- Life is an inspiration
- Life forms this planet's biomes
Albert Bierstadt's, "Among the Sierra Nevada Mountains, California" (1868) , National Gallery of American Art, Washington.
Life-forms are too varied, diverse, and strange to us to generalize about except they are dependent one on upon another in discernible and crucial ways for our coexistence.
" A single coral head in Indonesia can harbor hundreds of crustaceans, polychaete worms, and other invertebrate, plus a fish or two."
"You do not have to visit distant places, or even rise from your seat, to experience the luxuriance of biodiversity. You. yourself are a rainforest of a kind."
"the vast majority of cells in your body are not your own; they belong to bacterial and other microorganismic species."
Wilson p. 20.
"Such is the biosphere membrane that covers Earth, and you and me. And our tragedy, because a large part of it is being lost forever before we learn what it is and the best means by which it can be savored and used."
Wilson, p. 21.
Life is a functional contributor to the planet's temperate, atmospheric, lithic, resilient, and far from equilibrium conditions.
Vernadsky's nine principle biochemical functions of the biosphere are:
1-3, atmospheric regulation
1. The gas function: or biogenic formation of the atmosphere -- trace CO-2
2. An oxygen function or formation of 0-2 by bacteria and plants -- breathing (respiration)
3. Oxygenating function producing many inorganic compounds -- silica dioxide
4. binding of calcium to compounds -- essential to limestone and bone formation.
5. formation and reuse of sulfides -- essential for shape (and function) or proteins
6. organic concentration of compounds from diffuse concentrations in their surroundings
7-8, decomposition
7. decomposition forming carbon dioxide by plants, fungi and bacteria.
8. decomposition forming hydrogen sulfide and methane by bacteria.
9. respiration based metabolism or biosynthesis and movement of essential compounds are related to this respiration cycle.
Life, in the aggregate, modulates the planet's extreme conditions by means of concentration, recycling and dispersal of nutrients based on a capture and degradation of free energy.
Part One | Answers | Text | Wilson | Conclusions | What is wrong with this question?
