Between 'biosphere' and 'Gaia': earth as a living organism in soviet geo-ecology. (2024)

RUSSIAN NATURALISM AND THE SYSTEMIC APPROACH IN THE STUDY OFNATURE. A CROSS-DISCIPLINARY FIELD

The interdisciplinary framework used by Russian naturalists datingback to the Age of Explorations partially informed the evolutionarysystems approach in natural sciences during the 20th Century. Naturalismin Russia had a powerful and glorious tradition, and "one of thestrongest areas of Russian science from the earliest days to the presenthas been that of geographical explorations." (2) These wereinitiated during the reign of Peter the Great (1689-1725) and continueduntil approximately the first half of 19th Century (Graham, 1993: 24).Thanks to the presence of vast uncontaminated lands, the expeditionswere an ideal opportunity to gather a rich variety of flora and fauna,to study the morphology of different soils and observe the interactiverelationship between organisms and their environment. New branches ofscience, such as systematics and taxonomy, arose during the Age ofDiscovery, attracting naturalists from all over the Europe to theRussian Academy of Science. (3) Geography, cartography and oceanographyalso received a boost in this period as disciplines necessary fororientation across the huge country and to locate conquerable areas.Expeditions had, in fact, a geopolitical, economic and militaryimportance, aiming to exploit natural sources, while competing withEuropean monarchies to achieve supremacy in the maritime trade on thePacific coast of Siberia. At the same time, "the scientific outputof these expeditions was enormous" (Graham, 1993: 25). The myriadof brilliant scientific results, the amount of volumes published between1700 and 1800, and the collections of specimens conserved at the Academyof Sciences of St. Petersburg, made this age one of the most successfulfor the dissemination of natural sciences. (4) Judging by the rapidgrowth of the number of scientific journals, papers and books, tworesearch fields in particular became very popular at the end of the Ageof Discovery: geology and biology. (5) Furthermore "the mostimportant result for Russia, was the creation of its impressivetradition in the earth and life sciences" that had its peak betweenthe end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century (Graham, 1993:25). Such a legacy produced a particular attitude among Russiannaturalists who adopted an uncommon method to investigate the history ofearth and the history of life on earth, treating it as an integratedsubject.

According to Vyacheslav and Balandin (2004), the idea of merginggeo-evolution and bio-evolution in a unified research pattern came atthe end of a long period dominated by a specific view of the planetearth and, especially, of its place within the cosmos. Thisinterpretation of earth, conceived as a mechanistic body subjected to afew mathematical and physical lows, no longer satisfied scientists'new achievements in the field of natural sciences. During the first halfof the 20th Century geography and geology which had been descriptivesciences of the physics of earth, exhausted their specific object ofinvestigation as all the major territories of the planet were describedin those terms. To discover new areas to investigate became fairlydifficult insomuch as it became clear that geography and geology couldno longer be only based upon geophysical studies (Vyacheslav et al.,2004). They had to extend the focus to their study to chemical reactionsthat occur on earth's surface. As a result, the new disciplineknown as geo-chemistry, whose founders were the mineralogist Vladimir I.Vernadsky (1863-1945) and the geologist Alexander E. Fersman (1883-1945)were founded. A few years later, the focus of geology shifted to thewhole biosphere--the environment of life.

Vernadskij characterised these two different interpretations of theearth tied to different images of the cosmos, in the preface of his bookZhivoe veshestvo (Living Matter, 1978) "The two images of thecosmos". Firstly, there is the physical and mechanicalrepresentation in terms of ether, energy, electrons, lines and particlesthat, according to Vernadskij, is completely foreign to us, havingnothing to do with living beings. On the other side, there is theconception summarised by the author:

In addition to this physical image of the cosmos there is thenaturalistic representation of it which is not split into geometricshapes. On the contrary, it is more complex, realistic and familiar toour thinking. This view is closely related, rather than to the wholecosmos as the previous one, to a part of it, namely to our planet, whoserepresentation may be understood by any naturalists who have studied thescientific descriptions of earth and its surroundings. In thisrepresentation there is an element always missed within the physicalconception of the cosmos: the living matter. Such representation ofnature is not less scientific than the first based onphysico-mathematical theories. Furthermore, it provides differentaspects of the cosmos, often left out of the abstract theories(Vernadskij, 1978: 15).

From childhood, Vernadskij had spent all his spare time studyingnature. He took long walks across virgin Ukrainian lands with theastronomer Evgraf M. Korolenko who taught him to look at the earth as aliving organism (Grinevald, 1993). His main mentor was Vasilij V.Dokuchaev (1846-1903), a leading crystallographer and founding father ofpedology, the science of soil (Graham, 1993; Vucinich, 1963). Dokuchaevilluminated the role of life in the evolution and stability of theearth's crust that, in his eyes, was a product of living organisms.He became famous for the theory according to which the soil needs to beinvestigated as a complex system constituted by numerous partsinteracting with each other. He suggested investigating each aspect ofnature, never isolating them and never forgetting that their existencedepends on all external circ*mstances. Thanks to Dokuchaev'steachings, Vernadskij realised that "soil is a geobiologicalformation with an evolutionary history formed not only by the bedrockbut also by plant and animals" (Graham, 1993: 230). And a few yearslater he became convinced that the earth's crust is modified by theinteraction of living and inorganic matter--they exist and develop onlyin a close connection, as a multiplex evolving unity. Vernadskij notedthat specific features of the Russian soil, in particular itshom*ogeneous morphology, allowed us to vividly observe the influence ofthe climate on the formation of vegetation and mold. Crossing differentlandscapes one could find a rich variety of physical, geological andalso biological features according to the influence of differentmeteorological conditions upon flora and fauna. He concluded that soilis a bioinert body as it is neither completely organic nor completelyinorganic, referring to the interconnectedness of inorganic substances,such as minerals, and biological substances, such as microorganisms thatare continually crossed by chemical compounds, which for the most partare constituted by them. This characteristic of the soil led Vernadskijto use a cross-disciplinary method and adopt a bio-geo-chemical researchpattern to better appreciate the complexity of this relationship.

According to Vyacheslav and Balandin (2009), new achievements andtechnological progress made possible the discovery of new lands and seasas well the development of other fields, such as the aviation. Thelaunch of the Sputnik in 1957 opened up again the bio-geophysicalsciences as a way to comprehend the earth from a cosmic perspective. (6)Not surprisingly the interest in space research, in geology and thestudy of biosphere often advanced at the same time. Geologists becamealmost cult figures in Soviet society, standing on a par with cosmonautsand pilots (Bolotova, 2004). A good instance is Alexander L. Chizhevskij(1897-1964) with a background in the philosophy of space. He pioneeredthe national aircraft technology working with Konstantin E.Tsiol'kovskij (1857-1935), the philosophical founder ofCosmonautics. Although his commitments were mainly related to spacerocketry and technology studies (he was not a geologist by training),Chizhevskij is famous also for his theorisation of space ecology(Yagodinskij, 2005). In his suggestive view, life should not beconsidered a product of the earth's surface, but rather as a resultof the sun's radiation. (7)

In the second half of the 20th Century, geophysics was about to betransformed in a new research field in the Soviet Union, grounded in aholistic approach in which the role of living organisms was the mostsignificant for the evolution of earth and vice versa. But the interestin systems ecology lay not only on theoretical grounds: scientists whoendorsed this approach in earth sciences often took an active role inthe defence of the environment, despite Stalin's opposition to suchsensible policies.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECOLOGICAL BATTLE FOR ZAPOVEDNIKI

The concern over environmental problems was manifest in theconcrete activities of a group of intellectuals. It started beforeKhrushchev's time but scientific groups usually opposed industrialprojects on environmental grounds, especially after the 50s. (8)

The Independent Social Movements for the Protection of Nature, forexample, after 1924 was a real force in Russia and the Soviet Union,even with all the attempts which were made to cripple its environmentalactivities and prevent the international circulation of knowledge duringthe Cold War. The history of this has been treated in detail by DouglasWeiner, especially in his two books: Models of Nature (1988), and ALittle Corner of Freedom (1999). As he showed, the movement--that wasinstitutionalised in scientific societies of botanists, biologists,geologists and geographers--pursued the preservation of scientificnature reserves, in Russian Zapovedniki, conceived as absolutelyinviolable territories.

The society had been criticised by the Communist Party since the'50s because it did not provide any support for the great Plan forthe Transformation of Nature (9). Conservation, which represented athreat to Stalin's projects for the collectivisation andindustrialisation of the country, was late also mocked by Khrushchev(Haigh, 2003). This was not a surprise considering that immediatelyafter Stalin's death the scientists belonging to societiesorganised protests in order to demand the restoration of nature reserveseliminated earlier by Stalin, and even struggled to expand the network(Weiner, 1999). Environmental activists were nevertheless toleratedbecause "the regime dismissed environmentalists as cranks, ratherthan real dissidents" (Haigh, 2003: 556). As was revealed byWeiner's research, these movements indeed survived Stalin and allhis successors and were never entirely ignored by the Government. Evenbetter, VOOP (10) was the only institution that escaped elimination,reducing the pervasive effect of the Party control, throughecologists's refusal to endorse economic policies.

As Weiner showed, to establish contacts among Nature ProtectionOrganisations was dangerous, nevertheless these societies made attemptsto keep in touch each other. They prided themselves on their traditionof keeping foreign contacts and frequently asked for authorisation totravel to international conferences on Conservation. In turn, they oftenreceived photographs, package containing journals and letters expressingthe desire to receive information on wildlife in the Soviet Union, orasking for Soviet participation in the organisation of internationalsocieties. These requests, as documented by Weiner, came from theAustrian and Polish movements, among others. Refusal of permission fromthe Party blocked attempts to establish a bridge with the Western world,but the VOOP tried to turn the Cold War to their advantage. Since allthe contacts among activists in a divided world had to be handledthrough an agency charged with supervising contacts with foreigncountries, VOOP leaders pursued a strategy of keeping internationallinks open while remaining aside from Cold War campaigns to demonize theWest. As a matter of fact, the Nature protection movement aimed attranscending the struggle between the blocs; the international world ofscience had to be free from political interference. One the mostrelevant aspects of the movement, according to Weiner, was indeed thecivic involvement and the creation of a scientific public opinionindependent of the party seeking to maintain an internal democracy.

It is noteworthy that the commitment to nature protection, wherenature was conceived as a network of exchanging processes of matter andenergy occurring on the earth's surface, was summarised by the ideaof Zapovednik--namely, a Biosphere sanctuary. As Weiner wrote, this termwas first developed by Dokuchaev, meaning by it a land or a marineterritory forever wild, completely excluding economic use, protected bythe state (Weiner, 1999). Grounded in this view, ecologists began toconduct their study in these protected territories "which wereoff-limits to any uses except for scientific research onecological/evolutionary problems" (Weiner, 1999: 114). Theecological paradigms to which they referred in their studies werebasically two: the Biocenology and the Biogeocenology. The first oneinvoked by Vladimir V. Stanchinskij (1887-1947) was an energetics andthermodynamic paradigm based on the idea that the quantity of livingmatter depends on the amount of solar energy transformed by ecologicalcommunities at different trophic level of the food chain (Mirovitskaya,Ascher, 2002). Vernadskij preferred to use this term instead ofBiosphere although he considered them mostly as synonymous. The secondepistemological pattern was formulated by geobotanist Vladimir N.Sukachev (18801967) who was Vernadskij's friend and the Presidentof Moscow Naturalist Society from 1955 to 1967. "Sukachev stronglyopposed to Lysenko's forest planting methods in Russia's southand southeast which constituted an important element in Stalin'sPlan for the Transformation of Nature" (Weiner, 1999: 89). (11)According to the theory of Biogeocenology, the earth surface has beenshaped over time by the bio-geo-chemical correlation of all theprocesses occurring on it. But rather then simply a"correlation" of earth components, Biogeocenology introducedthe process of co-evolution, the result of which is the environmentalsynergy of all the elements, biotic and abiotic, of the ecosystem to astage not foreseeable by the mere sum of those elements at a previousstate. In other words this is what Odum would call later the EmergentProperty Principle in regard to a functioning ecological whole notreducible to the sum of its parts (2005).

One aspect that could be inferred by the wide picture described byWeiner, is that policy on Nature reserves in the Soviet Union shows thatthe interest in ecological research and the commitments overenvironmentalism in some cases go together. Species and landscapespreservation and a multidisciplinary scientific research in holisticecology were necessary for both tasks. Russian Zapovedniky were seen asself-organizing systems in which ecological communities lived in ahomeostatic equilibrium. The mechanism of feedback--that exists in thosecases in which each part of the system affects the other and each partacts in different ways according to the stimulus received--would playthe leading role in identifying the extent of this equilibrium (Odum,1983). In Russia, nature conservation policy and related scientificresearch that investigated the self-regulating structure of biocenosisas a whole system was an established approach since the first decades ofthe Twentieth Century. Here the systemic view of earth did not need toappeal to cybernetics to develop. In the United States, conversely, thenotion of "homeostasis" as well "feedback" could beapplied to the Biosphere to better understand environmental issues onlyonce Cybernetics and information technology were officially born in the50s.

BIOSPHERE AND GAIA. UNITED IDEOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS AND DIVIDEDCONCEPTUAL DEVELOPMENTS

Cybernetics revolutionised not only the field of informationtechnology, but also the way in which ecologists saw the earth itself.Its founder, the mathematician Norbert Wiener, brought about arevolution, announcing his new science in 1948 after having worked onthe problem of destroying enemy airplanes (Galison, 1994). Indeed Wienercame to the conclusion that through his work on the construction of theAntiaircraft Predictor designed to intercept the position of theenemy's plane by anticipating the pilot's zigzagging flight,he had founded a new paradigm (Galison, 1994). Seeking to expand theepistemological validity of his researches, he "postulated thatcontrol via feedback and communication via information exchangeconstituted universal mechanisms of purposeful behaviour for both livingorganisms and self-regulating machines" (Gerovitch, 2001: 546). Hisbook, Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and theMachine published in 1948, was the manifesto of this new revolution.(12) Cybernetics provided new principles to investigate complex systemsfrom the viewpoint of the relationship between input--the informationcoming from the environment into a system--and output--the informationreleased by a system into the environment, whereas systems could beboth, artificial and natural. However, while in the United States theearth began to be interpreted as a whole system only after theconvergence with technological models exploited by cybernetics had beenestablished --which is what Bryant, to elucidate the connection betweenecology and technology in the US postwar period (2006), called a"techno-ecological system"--in the Soviet Union the systemicidea of earth preexisted to the appearance of cybernetics. Nevertheless,Cybernetics in the Soviet Union was immediately embraced as a disciplineof crucial importance in relation to ecology and environmental studiesin which the new concept of the flow of information was by now a keyresearch topic (Graham, 1987). Cybernetics achieved widespreadapplication: as Gerovitch pointed out, "Soviet cyberneticstranscended the domain of engineering and fashioned itself as ascience--a systematic study of the laws of nature" (2002: 177). Asa result, it "enjoyed more prestige in the Soviet Union in the1960's than in any other country in the world" (1972: 324).

During the Cold War, technology's dependence on cyberneticpatterns had an important effect on the emergence of globalenvironmentalism. In the Soviet Union in 1970 this concern led to theconstruction of a computing system that simulated, with the help ofseveral devices, all the functions of the biosphere as an integratedsystem. The prototype placed at the Computational Centre of the SovietAcademy of Sciences reproduced in part consequences that would be causedby the war involving nuclear weapons (Moiseev, 1998). After World War IIprocesses of "mutual civilisation"--a term by which Moiseevmeans the creation in the last decades of the twentieth century of acontemporary paradigm of global awareness--and the constitution oftransnational corporations concerned with the global economy, made clearwhy the health of our planet should come before all else. On this view amultidisciplinary study of the earth was an essential task because theworld in which we live requires a common effort coordinating analogouspractices (Moiseev, 1998). The global understanding of the whole earthwas encapsulated in popular metaphors like "Spaceship Earth"or "Mother Earth" that, in some ways, reveals the connectionsbetween Cold War technologies, space travel, cybernetics, and the birthof the first global environmentalist movement. These concepts invitedpeople to look beyond the struggle of the Cold War and imagine a commonfuture for all living things on the planet (Deese, 2009). In thegeo-ecology field, Gaia was a metaphor that received a particularattention, despite the fact that its founder, the British chemist andenvironmentalist James Lovelock was considered a maverick, and did notgain immediately the favour of the scientific community. His theory, TheGaia hypothesis, has been at the same time influential andcontroversial. It described the planet as a super self-regulatingorganism in which biosphere, atmosphere, oceans and soil interact,self-organizing their functions in order to maintain stability of thewhole (Lovelock, 1979). Not surprisingly, Lovelock's theory hasbeen linked to Vernadskj's several times by historians of ecology(Grinevald, 1993; Margalef, 1997; Odum, 1983). The Russian geochemist isin turn widely considered as the most important of the"pre-Gaian" thinkers (Gribbin, 2009). Gaia was a living planetin the same way as Vernadskij's Biosphere. However, Lovelock didnot recognise the similarity between his theory and that formulated byVernadskij. He thought he was the first to introduce new cyberneticmethods in the field of ecology and declared that his use of"feedback" made the difference between his theory and the oneelaborated by Vernadskij. The British scientist did not citeVernadskij's biogeochemistry in his book Gaia: New Look at Life onEarth (1979), although there were many occasions in which Lovelock couldhave learned of the Russian scientist's work. As much as he praisedVernadskij's insights many years later, Lovelock said "I defyyou to find, anywhere in Vernadskij's writings, a clear statementof the importance of feedbacks involving life in maintaining conditionssuitable for life on Earth"--namely the key concept of Gaia Theory(Gribbin, 2009: 1004). Lovelock was eager to protect his claim to theoriginality of his ideas, and it is out of this discussion the twoperspectives are held to be distinct in many ways. (13) However,Vernadskij's theory of the biosphere anticipated in several aspectsLovelock's attempt to invoke feedback in relation to thepossibility that organisms regulate the external environment (forinstance, the composition of the atmosphere) for their own benefit.Vernadskij recognised the value of self-regulating processes involvingLife's tendency toward its own expansion. Moreover, this issuecharacterised also Stanchinskij's studies on energy transformationin the biocenosis, accompanying the establishment of ecological researchin protected zapovedniki. According to Vernadskij, Life on Earth dependson solar energy and the biosphere is that region in which solar energyis converted by living components in order to feed the planet so thatlife is able to evolve and expand itself. Life is a planetary force thathas transformed its environment on earth to a considerable extent(Aksenov, 20'2). Vernadskij not only was aware of the role Lifeplayed in creating an environment suitable for its own evolution, but,even better his biogeochemical paradigm had the merit to describeco-evolutionary processes involving Life and its environment as anemergent phenomenon, instead of as an interaction between two separatedentities. In this way, Vernadskij's theory surpassed the implicitdualism connected to the notions of input and output that featuredAmerican cybernetics so prominently. The problem of the origin of Lifewas for Vernadskij the problem of the origin of the Biosphere.

The breakthrough brought by Vernadskij's theory had such animpact for the development of the study of biosphere that even George E.Hutchinson, the father of modern systems ecology, realised thatVernadskij had established a speculative tradition which has proved tohave immense stimulatory power (Bailes, 1981). Not surprisingly,Hutchinson was one of the main sources of Lovelock's Hypothesis anda great admirer of Russian geochemist, whose articles he managed toobtain through Vernadskij's son at Yale University where they bothworked. Vernadskij first formulated questions that were crucial forunderstanding the earth's evolution and the entanglement betweenliving matter and the inert matter of biosphere. In Vernadskij'stime the interest in bio-geo-chemistry and the branch of study known asenergetics were receiving notable attention also by Americanmathematician Alfred Lotka (18801949). Lotka was working on his Elementsof Physical Biology (1925), a book published in the USA that appearedjust one year before Vernadskij wrote the Biosphere. Lotka was not onlyone of Vernadskij's contemporary born in the current Ukraine whereVernadskij set up his laboratory in Kiev, but also the foremost sourcefor the Gaia theory, as Lovelock acknowledged. His volume also describedthe transformation of energy and its role in shaping the evolution ofearth, bringing attention to systems ecology. Although Gribbin wrotethat they knew nothing of each other's work at that time, Lotkacited Vernadskij in the first edition of his book, suggesting in a noteto read his work in order to know more about the "distribution ofthe chemical elements in organic nature", apologising for havingreceived his text too late to provide the readers with a deeperdescription (Lotka, 1925: 203). Vernadskij and Lotka had a similar view:organisms and environments constituted one system--a complex livingorganism seen as a whole. It is not the organisms or the species thatevolve, but the entire system in which its parts are inseparable.Furthermore, Lovelock praised Lotka because he had predicted theenvironmental effects of industrial achievements based on theexploitation of fossil fuel (Gribbin, 2009). Also in this case, theawareness of the influence that human's activities have on earthrepresented a further meeting of minds between the American biophysicistand the Russian geo-chemist. Vernadskij, in fact, introduced the termNoosphere to denote the evolutionary stage of Biosphere in which theearth's crust changes its "face" because of theincreasing impact of humanity's science and technology (Vernadskij,1944). Not surprisingly, since 1960, with the growth of environmentalistmovements, Soviet interest in Vernadskij's ideas received asignificant revival (Bailes, 1990). As Bailes wrote, citing A. I.Perelman:

Vernadskij saw what a huge geological force humanity had become,how quickly it was transforming the planet, how it was changing in abasic way the migration of chemical elements. He emphasised that man isartificially creating processes which never before existed in thebiosphere and are alien to it. He issued a call for the study of thesephenomena from the view point of geochemistry, to analyze them, to studythe long-range consequences of economic activities [...]. The ideas ofthe founder of geochemistry will continue to illuminate the path ofresearch of these important problems for years head, (Bailes, 1990:182).

An interesting epistemological aspect emerges from the fact thatLotka, actually, did not become famous in the United States for histheorisation of the "whole earth system". He was mostlyrecognised as one of the pioneers of population dynamics and the studyof the relationship between predators and prey (Gribbin, 2009). Thisreveals a shortcoming and systematic bias in Western science. The studyof the biosphere was doomed to marginalization by a growingspecialisation connected with the epistemological bias towardsreductionism against holism. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, when itwas first put forward, was met with hostility from mainstreamscientists, and it was a long time before the significance ofLotka's theories was properly recognised.

Russian approaches to ecology are distinctive, in large part,because of their distinctive broader intellectual and naturalistictraditions. It is the holistic and ecological underpinning of theseapproaches--related to their particular approach to the study of land,climate and nature which has developed since the Age of Discovery --thatprovides the basis for the systemic and interdisciplinary attitude thatdistinguishes Russian 'whole earth' science. Russians did notanticipate all aspects of the Gaia hypothesis, but they were in a goodposition to embrace it and further develop it.

By giving a place to holistic thinkers who crossed disciplinaryboundaries fostering a systemic approach decades before systems ecologydeveloped in Europe and the United States, Russian science opened newvistas to which Western science tends to be blind.

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(1) This article is a developed version of the conference paper Idelivered at the 24th Congress for the History of Science, Technologyand Medicine in Manchester on July 26, 2013.

(2) As the Soviet geologist Alexander Fersman claimed "ourgeography is the work of tens of thousands of people participating inexpeditions which have traversed our country in different directions andrecorded remarkable discoveries" (1944: 38).

(3) "The eighteenth-century expeditions involved hundreds ofmen organized in whole constellations of activities. The best known wasthe first Kamchatka expeditions (1725-9), under the leadership of theDane Vitus Bering; the second Kamchatka, or Great Northern Expeditions(1734-43) directed by the Admiralty; and the academy expeditions of1768-74 guided primarily by Peter Simon Pallas, the great Germannaturalist who became a member of St. Petersburg Academy and spent manyyears in Russia. The great Northern Expedition included many wellqualified scientists, including the astronomer Louis Delisle, de laCroyere, the naturalists Johann Gmelin and George Steller, the historianGerhard Muller, and the young Russian naturalist Krasheninnikov"(Graham, 1993: 25).

(4) The basic contributions to these expeditions are contained involumes most of which attracted the immediate attention of scholarseverywhere. This material enriched every branch of natural science(Vucinich, 1963).

(5) As Grigoriev and Graham indicated, geology developed such astrong tradition in Russia that later on, during the 20th century,geological branch comprised more than 10,000 specialists with highereducation in 1947, while by the early 1950s geologists accounted forabout one half of the total number of geologists in the entire world(see Bolotova, 2004). However, "other distinguishedeighteenth-century researches, both foreign and Russian, in the relatedfields of geology, biology included J. Gmelin, G. Steller, S. P.Krasheninnikov, M. V. Lomonosov, V. M. Severgin, A. I. Chirikov, I. I.Lepekhin, I. A. Guldenstadt and N. Ia. Ozeretskovskij" (Graham,1993: 31).

(6) According to Vyacheslav, through the Sputnik it was possible todiscover important and useful mineral deposits that from the earth,because of its complex morphology, would have been difficult toidentify. One of the pioneers on this topic of research that came to beknown as cosmogeology, the Soviet geochemist Kirill P. Florenskyexperienced in planetology and earth science, was a student ofVernadskij and son of the philosopher and mathematician PavelAlexandrovich. Florensky noticed that the craters on some planets mightreveal, or at least help to guess, geological stages of earth(Vyacheslav et.al, 2004).

(7) As he wrote, "We usually used to refer to rough, narrow,anti-philosophical conceptions of life as a mere result of random playsexercised by land forces. This is surely incorrect. Life, as we see it,in a broader sense, is a cosmic phenomenon rather than a terrestrialone. Life has been created by the activity of the cosmos upon the inertmatter of the earth. Life lives the dynamics of these forces and everybeat of this organic impulse is correlated to the cosmic heartbeat, in agreat whole made of clouds, stars, sun and planets" (Chizhevskij,1976: 22).

(8) As Medvedev observed, it was the geneticists who set the fireamong Khrushchev, nuclear physicists and aerospace scientists, bringinginto focus environmental problems in the 50s. The best-known case inwhich Khrushchev was opposed by the academy was the project for thecellulose pulp mill on Lake Baikal that he decided to carry out despitestrong scientific objections based on the damage that might be caused tothe environment and to the pollution of the extremely pure water of thisspecial lake (See Medvedev, 1979).

(9) The stress on the transformation of Russian lands thatStalin's Great Plan and other projects aimed to realize wasreflected even in literature. During the Stalinist era every field ofstudy was dominated by the metaphor of the "struggle withnature" (Shtil'mark 1992, Bolotova, 2004). The colonization ofwild areas by the new Soviet man was described as a glorious mission. Itis not simply a case that as a result of the disruptive Soviet policy,as Bolotova wrote: "Numerous territories in today's Russia areconsidered 'environmental disaster areas'--another consequenceof the hegemonic discourse of conquering nature" (2004: 115).

(10) "Vserossiskoe obshestvo okhrany prirody" (The allRussian Societies for the Protection of Nature).

(11) Lysenko's triumph in the frame of 1948 Academy sessionwas a profitable occasion for him to attack the movements for Natureprotection. Several years before, in 1930, Isack I. Prezent,Lysenko's mentor, moved from ecology, the first field he ruined, toSoviet biology. He had surprised people during a Stanchinskij talk heemerged as a critic of biocenology, expressing doubts aboutecology's right to call itself a science (Weiner, 1989).

(12) When the Russian scientist Alexander Bogdanov, nowadaysrecognized as one of the pioneers of cybernetics and systems thinking,wrote his Tektology, General Science of Organization (1913-1924), timeswere not ready to accept his explosive insights. Norbert Wiener, thefather of cybernetics, did not mention Bogdanov's work althoughmost likely he knew it since Bogdanov's Tektology had beentranslated into German and published in Germany in 1928 where Wieneroften lived by that time (See Biggart et al, 1998 and Pushkin et al.,1994).

(13) As J. and M. Gribbin highlighted in their book (2009), animportant difference between Vernadskij and Lovelock is that, accordingto the Russian scientist, living organisms have to be studiedempirically as a particular body that cannot be understood in terms ofknown physic-chemical systems. They cannot be reduced to nothing butknown physics-chemical systems. Lovelock, conversely, believes thatearth system can be understood in terms of known physical-chemicalsystems and that the interactions between the living and non-livingcomponents maintains conditions beneficial to life.

Giulia Rispoli

The University of Rome La Sapienza

[emailprotected]