13 research outputs found

    La perspectiva Gaia de l'ecologia

    Get PDF

    Gaia versus the Anthropocene: Untimely Thoughts on the Current Eco-Catastrophe

    No full text
    Embracing science but suggesting an alternate explanation for global warming, the essay provides a thermodynamic and historical perspective on eco-destruction. From a long-term evolutionary perspective, caution is raised about the repetition of human exceptionalism implied by the popular term “Anthropocene,” which hyperbolically frames humankind as the first organism in evolutionary history, and uniquely dangerous at that, to threaten global life. In fact, cyanobacteria preceded technological humanity, altering Earth's atmospheric composition orders of magnitude more than humanity has. The extreme resilience of Gaia, planetary life taken as an open thermodynamic system with environmentally regulative tendencies, has undergone dramatic changes in the past, such as the production of an oxygen-rich atmosphere. Genetically nimble life, recycling matter on a planetary level, has evolved means of tempering the tendency of organisms to exponentially reproduce. Ironically, these means, some which appear to have evolved to titrate hypergrowth in animal clades via senescence, have so far escaped ecologically rapacious humans. Thermodynamically, modern technological humanity, for all its self-regard as an intelligent life form, resembles a ravaging fire or intrinsically short-lived storm system. Lon

    biospheres : metamorphosis of planet earth

    No full text
    vii, 198 p.; 20 cm

    Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution

    No full text
    Microcosmos brings together the remarkable discoveries of microbiology in the later decades of the 20th century and the pioneering research of Dr. Margulis to create a vivid new picture of the world that is crucial to our understanding of the future of the planet. Addressed to general readers, the book provides a beautifully written view of evolution as a process based on interdependency and their interconnectedness of all life on the planet.https://scholar.dominican.edu/cynthia-stokes-brown-books-personal-research/1114/thumbnail.jp

    Into the Cool : Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life

    No full text
    Into the Cool : Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Lif
    corecore