In this book entitled "The Biosphere", researchers from all regions of the world report on their findings to explore the origins, evolution, ecosystems and resource utilization patterns of the biosphere. Some describe the complexities and challenges that humanity faces in its efforts to experiment and establish a new partnership with nature in places designated as biosphere reserves by UNESCO under its Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Programme. At the dawn of the 21st century humanity is ever more aware and conscious of the adverse consequences that it has brought upon global climate change and biodiversity loss. We are at a critical moment of reflection and action to work out a new compact with the biosphere that sustains our own wellbeing and that of our planetary companions. This book is a modest attempt to enrich and enable that special moment and its march ahead in human history.

"Vladimir Vernadsky was a brilliant and prescient scholar-a true scientific visionary who saw the deep connections between life on Earth and the rest of the planet and understood the profound implications for life as a cosmic phenomenon." -DAVID H. GRINSPOON, AUTHOR OF VENUS REVEALED "The Biosphere should be required reading for all entry level students in earth and planetary sciences." -ERIC D. SCHNEIDER, AUTHOR OF INTO THE COOL: THE NEW THERMODYNAMICS OF CREATIVE DESTRUCTION

How the Biosphere Works: Fresh Views Discovered While Growing Peppers offers a simple and novel theoretical approach to understanding the history of the biosphere, including humanity’s place within it. It also helps to clarify what the possibilities and limitations are for future action. This is a subject of wide interest because today we are facing a great many environmental issues, many of which may appear unconnected. Yet all these issues are part of our biosphere. For making plans for the future and addressing our long-term survival and well-being, an integrated knowledge of our biosphere and its history is therefore indispensable. Key Features Documents what the biosphere is, and what our position as humans within it is today. Describes how the biosphere has become the way it is. Summarizes the novel simple theoretical model proposed in the book, and thus, how the biosphere functions. Predicts what the possibilities and limitations are for future human action Emphasizes how simple but careful observations can lead to far-reaching theoretical implications.

Reider tells the tangled tale of the creation, and eventual disintegration, of the experimental eco-utopia known as Biosphere 2.

A guide for understanding the ecological and existential aspects of global environmental change. This book shows how to make global environmental problems more tangible, so that they become an integral part of everyday awareness. At its core is a simple assumption: that the best way to learn to perceive the biosphere is to pay close attention to our immediate surroundings. Through local natural history observations, imagination and memory, and spiritual contemplation, we develop a place-based environmental view that can be expanded to encompass the biosphere. Interweaving global change science, personal narrative, and commentary on a wide range of scientific and literary works, the book explores both the ecological and existential aspects of urgent issues such as the loss of biodiversity and global climate change. Written in a warm, engaging style, Bringing the Biosphere Home considers the perceptual connections between the local and global, how the ecological news of the community is of interest to the world, and how the global movement of people, species, and weather systems affects the local community. It shows how global environmental change can become the province of numerous educational initiatives—from the classroom to the Internet, from community forums to international conferences, from the backyard to the biosphere. It explains important scientific concepts in clear, nontechnical language and provides dozens of ideas for learning how to practice biospheric perception.

The Reader is the first comprehensive history of the noosphere and biosphere. Drawing on classical influences, modern parallels, and insights into the future, the Reader traces the emergence of noosphere and biosphere concepts within the concept of environmental change. Reproducing material from seminla works, both past and present, key ideas and writings of prominent thinkers are presented, including Bergson, Vernadsky, Lovelock, Russell, Needham, Huxley, Medawar, Toynbee and Boulding, and extensive introductory pieces bu the editors drawattention to common themes and competing ideas. Focussing on issues of origins, theories, parallels and potential, the discussions place issues in a broad context, compare and contrast central concepts with those of the Gaia hypothesis, sustainability and global change, and examine the potential application of noospheric ideas to current debates about culture, education and technology in such realms as the Internet, space exploration, and the emergence of super-consciousness. Literally the `sphere of mind or intellect', the noosphere is aprt of the `realm of the possible' in human affairs, where there is a conscious effort to tackle global issues The noosphere concept captures a number of key contemporary issues - social evolution, global ecology, Gaia, deep ecology and global environmental change - contributing to ongoing debates concerning the implications of emerging technologies.

Yhteenveto. - Sammanfattning. - Kokkuvõte. - Rezûme.

This four-part monograph traces the dialectical development of economic thought from the Physiocrats through Marx to the present. It is a broad treatment of the history of intellectual thought that bridges economic and the social sciences on the one hand, with natural science and biology in particular on the other. The author is concerned with systems theory and treats the economy from the perspective of the biophysical thermodynamic dimensions of the economic processes. He closes his analysis with a discussion of organizational theory that relates to the formation of institutions and the issues of freedom in a technically dominated society. The book comes full circle in examining the moral and ethical concerns that first influenced the Physiocrats and other founding fathers of economic science.

This book considers the principle of ‘sustainable development’ which is currently facing a growing environmental crisis. A new mode of thinking and positioning the ecological imperative is the major input of this volume. The prism of co-viability is not the economics of political agencies that carry the ideology of the dominant/conventional economic schools, but rather an opening of innovation perspectives through science. This volume, through its four parts, more than 40 chapters and a hundred authors, gives birth to a paradigm which crystallizes within a concept that will support in overcoming the ecological emergency deadlock.