Catastrophe Alert!
What Is to Be Done Against the Willful Destruction
of the Unity of Humanity and Nature?
September 2015
Second improved English Edition
Editorial Team Revolutionärer Weg
headed by Stefan Engel
Schmalhorststr. 1b, D-45899 Gelsenkirchen
Catastrophe Alert!
What Is to Be Done Against the Willful Destruction
of the Unity of Humanity and Nature?
First published in German in March 2014 in the series
Revolutionärer Weg, No. 35, 2014
First English Edition in Nepal 2014
© Verlag Neuer Weg
Mediengruppe Neuer Weg GmbH
Alte Bottroper Straße 42, D-45356 Essen, Germany
verlag@neuerweg.de,
www.neuerweg.de
© Cover photo: REUTERS/photographer:
Enny Nuraheni
Overall production:
Mediengruppe Neuer Weg GmbH
What Is to Be Done Against the
Willful Destruction of the Unity
of Humanity and Nature?
Class Struggle
and the Struggle for the
Unity of Humanity and Nature
Verlag Neuer Weg
Catastrophe Alert!
What Is to Be Done Against the
Willful Destruction
of the Unity of Humanity and Nature?
The environmental question undoubtedly has arrived in the public consciousness. The world over, concern for the state of the natural environment is growing. No serious politician, media professional, entrepreneur or trade-unionist can afford to ignore this question anymore. Too many local and regional ecological disasters meanwhile plague humanity.
The impression is created in the public eye that the problem of the environment is in good hands with the ruling powers and their governments. But in reality, since the environmental crisis arose in the early 1970s they have been neither willing nor able to undertake any effective action against it. Instead, humanity is drifting at an unabated – and even accelerated – pace towards a global environmental catastrophe which has the potential for destroying the foundations of all human existence. The responsibility for this development lies mainly with the international supermonopolies, which today control the entirety of world production and world trade as well as politics, economics and science in all countries.
A new environmental consciousness has awakened. But its level far from suffices to comprehend the threat to the existence of humankind in all its consequences. Public opinion one-sidedly focuses attention on individual factors of the environmental crisis – for example the threatening climate catastrophe. At the same time, other problems no less dramatic, such as the growing ozone hole and the destruction of the oceans’ ecosystems or the forests, are put out of mind or played down. Above all, the interconnections and interactions are largely ignored.
Is it at all conceivable that convincing arguments alone can get those in charge of the capitalist profit economy to stop this development? Is it conceivable that the ruling international monopolies suddenly will give up their dictatorship or their exorbitant profits just to save the environment?
This is not going to happen! Fully aware of the deadly risks they take the Earth to the brink of an environmental catastrophe! The circumstances of capitalist competition today demand of the international monopolies, under penalty of their ruin, that they carry the overexploitation of humans and nature to extremes.
The so-called environmental issue has long since become a highly political issue. What is the justification for a social order whose entire existence is based on a foundation which threatens humans and nature?
Instead of doing anything of significance to counter this threat, those in power have instituted a whole system of imperialist and petty-bourgeois environmentalism in order to manipulate the whole of humanity. With appeasement, lies, cover-ups and specious solutions they attempt to prevent active resistance by the masses or undermine it.
This book leaves no room for doubt that humanity must not leave the environmental issue up to the ruling social system. If it does, it will sink into capitalist barbarism!
On the basis of diverse concrete studies the book comes to the conclusion that humanity meanwhile finds itself in the middle of a progressing transition to a global environmental catastrophe. Resolving the environmental issue today calls for a society-changing struggle. Only an international socialist revolution can solve the social and ecological question. Only in a socialist society without exploitation of man by man do humans and nature form a fruitful unity. Only in a classless communist society will the “humanization of nature” and the “naturalization of humans” come to their relative completion, as Karl Marx formulated.
To accomplish this great goal, the environmental movement and the working-class movement must change. The revolutionaries all over the world must change, too; they must enlarge their political strategy and tactics and raise them to a higher level to reflect the new facts.
This will not be possible without serious discussions, without critical and self-critical assessment, and without advances in knowledge on the issue itself. This book is intended to provide help for this and contribute to the discussion. It is explicitly a polemic which intervenes in the strategy debate on the solution of the environmental question and takes an unequivocal position. It is a book that seeks to destroy illusions, but above all a book that wants to mobilize people and creatively outline the vision of a future society in which the environmental question indeed can been solved.
The book upholds a high scientific standard and is based on thorough investigation, on facts gained from bourgeois science, in order to critically wrest from them the essential findings and reveal the dialectical connections existing in the universal interaction between humans and nature.
The guiding principles of this book are the dialectical-materialist method and the theory of the fundamental unity of humanity and nature, developed 170 years ago by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. With the emergence of reformism in the working-class movement at the end of the nineteenth century, these fundamentals were rejected, disregarded, even systematically cast aside. This negatively influences the working-class and people’s movements to this day.
Along with the acknowledgment of the brilliant discoveries of Marx and Engels regarding the dialectics of humanity and nature, a hallmark of this book is the militant debate with modern anticommunism on the issue of the environment. Also, various forms of resignation, minimization, simplification or panic, which can be encountered in the environmental movement, are subjected to a philosophical critique.
The editorial collective thanks the more than 100 collaborators who made well-informed contributions to this book. They include Klaus Arnecke, architect; Günther Bittel, MD, anesthesiologist and general practitioner; Herbert Buchta, biologist and practical veterinarian; Werner Engelhardt, political scientist; Adelheid Erbslöh, biologist; Oskar Finkbohner, collaborator of the Society for the Promotion of Scientific Studies on the Working-Class Movement (GSA); Monika Gärtner-Engel, professional educator; Rainer Jäger, editor; Prof. Dr. Christian Jooss, physicist; Dr. Hans-Ulrich Jüttner, physicist; Christoph Klug, certified psychologist and science journalist; Prof. Dr. Josef Lutz, physicist; Willi Mast, MD, general practitioner; Roland Meister, lawyer; Dieter Stein, MD, general practitioner; Peter Weispfenning, lawyer; Gerd Zitzner, agricultural engineer.
Last, but not least, the book is a result of critical and self-critical discussions and cooperation with activists of the environmental movement and with revolutionaries from all over the world.
The title of the book edition – Catastrophe Alert! What Is to Be Done Against the Willful Destruction of the Unity of Humanity and Nature? – is intended to create awareness of the seriousness of the problems as well as of the urgent need for solving them.
This book is not the first occasion on which the Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany has concerned itself with the environmental issue. It carries on the Revolutionärer Weg series, which has dealt with the environmental crisis fundamentally and systematically from the standpoint of Marxism-Leninism since 1984. But it raises knowledge to a new level, reflecting the developments which meanwhile have materialized. Above all, the book is intended to help put the environmental issue firmly back on the agenda in the international revolutionary and working-class movement.
Stefan Engel, March 2014
Scientific concept of nature
In everyday use the term “nature” usually is restricted to individual phenomena in the human environment: the landscape, flora and fauna, or the weather. From the point of view of dialectical materialism, however, the concept of “nature” encompasses the entire universal reality.
Nature consists of an infinite multitude of forms of material motion and constantly changing material states of matter in motion. The best known forms of motion are change of place, friction, heat, light, electricity, magnetism, radioactive radiation, chemical reactions, biochemical metabolism, photosynthesis, etc. As to the material states we can distinguish between gases, solids and liquids or between organic and inorganic matter. These elements of nature mutually determine one another and simultaneously are in continual conflict with one another.
All the different forms of existence of matter are nothing but different natural processes. According to current knowledge these forms range from continuous matter through tiny subatomic particles in the microcosm to gigantic clusters of galaxies and even bigger superstructures in the macrocosm.
With the help of spectrum analysis it could be proved that galaxies and cosmic nebulae, stars and planets like our Earth consist of identical components: the atoms of the chemical elements and subatomic particles. All manifestations and stages of development of matter make up a system of universal coming into being and passing away.
Dialectical materialism takes as starting point that all nature is material – that is to say, exists objectively, independent of the consciousness and will of humans. The motion of matter is governed by dialectical laws of motion. The dialectics of nature can be understood to subsume material motion in its most general form.
At every stage of development of matter, qualitatively new forms and also new laws of motion arise, which humans can investigate, cognize and use. The progress of human knowledge becomes manifest in the degree to which humanity understands the dialectics of nature, as well as in its ability to consciously apply the dialectical method to nature, society, and human thinking, feeling and acting.
Bourgeois cosmology denies the infinity of matter. It considers only matter’s concrete forms and treats them as absolute. It has always searched tirelessly, but in vain, for a beginning and end of the universe. According to the prevailing doctrine, the “expansion” of the cosmos is supposed to have begun about 13 to 20 billion years ago out of “nothing,” with a “big bang.” Marxist-Leninists criticized this “creation story” of bourgeois cosmology from the very beginning; meanwhile it is a subject of very great controversy even among bourgeois scientists.
The concrete natural phenomena are finite, while the universal motion of matter is infinite. The infiniteness of matter in motion is what constitutes its universal identity in the macrocosm and the microcosm.
The origination of matter and motion out of “nothing” is incompatible with the laws of nature. Matter in motion, or material motion, is uncreatable and indestructible. Frederick Engels wrote:
The whole of nature accessible to us forms a system, an interconnected totality of bodies, and by bodies we understand here all material existences extending from stars to atoms, indeed right to ether particles, in so far as one grants the existence of the last named. In the fact that these bodies are interconnected is already included that they react on one another, and it is precisely this mutual reaction that constitutes motion. It already becomes evident here that matter is unthinkable without motion. And if, in addition, matter confronts us as something given, equally uncreatable as indestructible, it follows that motion also is as uncreatable as indestructible. (“Dialectics of Nature,” in: Marx/Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 363)
The qualitative changes in nature proceed in leaps. “What distinguishes the dialectical transition from the undialectical transition?” Lenin asks and replies: “The leap. The contradiction. The interruption of gradualness.” (“Conspectus of Hegel’s Book Lectures on the History of Philosophy,” in: Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, p. 284)
It is absurd and wishful thinking when bourgeois scientists, philosophers or politicians favor gradual, evolutionary processes in nature, in society, or in human thinking, feeling and acting over the leaps of revolutionary processes. Both forms of motion, evolution and revolution, mutually determine one another in nature, proceed one from the other, and transform into one another in an infinitely continuing process. The gradual motion prepares the manifest change, the qualitative leap, and in turn is set in motion again by the leap, on an increasingly higher level.
These qualitative leaps can take place in just a fraction of a second, as they do in biological, chemical and electrical processes or in human thinking, feeling and acting. But they also may require billions of years as in the emergence and passing away of stars. These tremendous differences mislead vulgar materialists or empiricists to accept only perceptible changes. For them the world process consists of isolated phenomena, of eternally recurring cycles, or of processes which go through quantitative changes at most.
Qualitative leaps indicate their approach through accelerated quantitative changes and through intensification of the internal contradictions in things or processes. Based on scientific analyses of the speedup of global warming, the increase in extremely contradictory weather patterns, the accelerated extinction of species, the conspicuous acidification of the oceans, the destruction of the forests, the thinning of the ozone layer and the increase in regional environmental catastrophes since the 1990s, the MLPD came to the trenchant conclusion that in the process of the global environmental crisis a qualitative leap, the transformation into a global environmental catastrophe, already has been initiated. Further scientific observations meanwhile confirm that this process has broadened and accelerated. It is only the metaphysical methods of the bourgeois world outlook that prevent a realistic prediction of how the unity of humankind and nature will develop.
To study and generalize the infinite forms of motion of matter, the infinite processes of transformation from one form of matter to another, and to wrest from nature the concrete laws of motion effective here, and then to apply these laws – therein lies the foundation in world outlook for comprehending the unity of humanity and nature better and better and for the ever greater ability to shape this unity. Ultimately, only a social order which is guided by such a scientific proletarian, socialist and communist mode of thinking can ensure a sustainable and continually advancing unity of humanity and nature.
Dialectics of the macrocosm
Owing to the development of radio astronomy, human perception in the macrocosm today extends into the depths of the universe, to a distance of about 13.8 billion light years1. But this still is only a minute section of the endless expanses of the universe. Billions of star systems (galaxies) can be observed. They form clusters and superclusters, each containing up to a million galaxies. As with all forms of matter, there is struggle and unity, interaction and collision also between galaxies. They pass through different stages of development and can be absorbed by larger galaxies, can give rise to new galaxies, or disintegrate into lower forms of matter.
Our galaxy, the Milky Way, belongs to a cluster of about 30 galaxies. It contains 200 to 300 billion stars rotating in the form of a huge spiral around a center and partly forming globular clusters.
Our Sun moves in an area near the Milky Way’s rim, some 30,000 light years from the galactic center. It takes the Sun roughly 220 million years for one orbit around the galactic center.
Our solar system consists of the Sun, eight planets with their moons, planetoids2, comets and meteorites, gas and dust. 99.87 percent of the mass of the solar system is concentrated in the Sun, which is the reason why the other celestial objects rotate around the Sun in its gravitational field.
The Sun is a star, a luminous gas sphere of great mass and high temperatures. Inside the Sun, plasma, consisting of hydrogen and helium nuclei, free electrons and two percent heavier elements, glows with a temperature of more than 15 million degrees Celsius.
The Sun’s energy originates mainly from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei. In this fusion, part of the nuclei’s mass is transformed into energy and released in the form of radiation.
The Sun is surrounded by the photosphere – an outer layer no more than 300 kilometers wide. The temperature there is only about 5,700 degrees. From there, the greatest part of the solar energy is radiated outward. Moreover, every second around one million tons of solar material gush from the Sun’s corona into space at supersonic speed. The end of our Sun as the energy source of our solar system can be calculated to come in roughly five billion years.
The Sun’s radiation consists of electromagnetic waves and charged particles. Only a small part of them reach the Earth and are absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere in different ways or reflected.
With its mass of six sextillion tons and a diameter of 12,756 kilometers at the equator, from a macrocosmic viewpoint the Earth is a tiny celestial object. It rotates around its own axis, which gives rise to alternating day and night and influences air movements and ocean currents.
The almost circular course of the Earth around the Sun guarantees an approximately even supply of energy. The inclination of the Earth’s axis by an angle of 66.5 degrees relative to the plane of its solar orbit produces the differences in the seasons. The Moon’s gravity acts upon the oceans and gives rise to the tides.
Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago from gaseous and dustlike particles of matter. They repeatedly collided, whereby they became hot and fused. The internal pressure and high temperature and the heat caused by the decay processes of radioactive materials made the Earth molten at first.
The Earth’s crust, the solid mantle, formed only gradually. Underneath the crust is the Earth’s core, which mainly consists of red-hot iron. The Earth’s crust and the upper mantle to a depth of 250 kilometers contain liquid magma. The movement of this magma is the reason why the tectonic plates of the Earth’s crust constantly remain in motion, giving rise to repeated earthquakes or volcano eruptions. The Earth’s core begins at a depth of 2,900 kilometers; a temperature between 4,000 and 6,000 degrees Celsius prevails there.
Since the Earth formed, gases issued from its interior. The Earth was heavy enough to partly attract these gases, retain them and so develop an atmosphere. Because of this the Earth cooled down considerably slower than otherwise was to be expected. This was an important condition for the origination of life.
In the primordial atmosphere of Earth, with the help of solar energy and volcanic activity, larger amounts of organic materials were able to form. From this organic matter, first living organisms developed in the primeval oceans in approximately a billion years. The biosphere emerged. As culmination point of an evolutionary process lasting roughly 3.5 billion years, the first humans began to develop there, along with the natural environment suitable for their existence.
Dialectics of the laws of nature
The law of gravity is a fundamental law of nature. It describes the forces acting between masses in nature. Gravitation influences matter in diverse ways. For example, it changes the path and frequency of light as well as the speed of microscopic movements in atoms and molecules. In the mechanical world view, gravitation is treated as an attractive force between celestial bodies. From the standpoint of his dialectical-materialist conception of nature, Frederick Engels criticized the absolutization of this aspect of gravitation:
All natural processes are two-sided, they are based on the relation of at least two operative parts, action and reaction.… But attraction and repulsion are as inseparable as positive and negative, and hence from dialectics itself it can already be predicted that the true theory of matter must assign as important a place to repulsion as to attraction, and that a theory of matter based on mere attraction is false, inadequate, and one-sided.… The whole theory of gravitation rests on saying that attraction is the essence of matter. This is necessarily false. Where there is attraction, it must be complemented by repulsion. (“Dialectics of Nature,” op. cit., pp. 373 and 523)
The idealist-metaphysical conception of nature absolutizes the validity of individual laws of nature or individual aspects thereof. It regards natural laws as “eternal,” as “placed in nature from outside” and therefore as “standing above nature.” In reality, the various laws of motion are merely expressions of the qualitatively different processes at the different stages of development of matter.
The construction of atoms is excellent proof of the two-sided character of nature. The mass of an atom is concentrated in the atomic nucleus, whose positive electric charge exerts an attractive force on the negatively charged electrons of the atomic shell. The kinetic energy of the electrons prevents them falling into the positively charged atomic nucleus and neutralizing it. The electron shell therefore results in relative shielding of the electrical field of the positively charged atomic nucleus. More energy-efficient shells can be achieved through combination with the electron shells of other elements or the same element. This is why most elements in nature almost exclusively are found bound up in molecules or in crystals.
Notwithstanding all dialectically-materialistically obtained individual pieces of knowledge, bourgeois science remains dominated by the metaphysical-idealist world outlook. The metaphysical method breaks up the universal interconnection of the processes of metabolic interchange between humans and nature into a flood of isolated individual findings. The result is wrong interpretations and practical mistakes usually at the expense of humans and the natural environment.
The determinative driving force behind bourgeois science is to translate the knowledge of nature as quickly and directly as possible into a maximum profit yielding production of commodities. This is dictated by the fierce capitalist competition at the stage of internationalized production. This narrow-minded motivation increasingly limits the horizon of science and has led to a crisis in the development of the modern natural sciences.
Only in conformity with the laws of nature can the unity of humanity and nature be consciously shaped and developed to higher levels. Frederick Engels writes:
Dialectics, so-called objective dialectics, prevails throughout nature, and so-called subjective dialectics, dialectical thought, is only the reflection of the motion through opposites which asserts itself everywhere in nature, and which by the continual conflict of the opposites and their final passage into one another, or into higher forms, determines the life of nature. (“Dialectics of Nature,” op. cit., p. 492)
The materialist-dialectical mode of thinking is essential for the development of modern science. It is the only method which elucidates the processes of development, interconnections and transitions in nature between one field of study and another.
1 A light year is 9.5 trillion kilometers.
2 Planetoid: small planet
All life is intimately and indissolubly connected in a complex manner with the inanimate environment. In natural science, the part of the Earth that makes life possible and contains life forms is called the biosphere3.
Some science textbooks define the biosphere one-sidedly as the totality of all living beings on Earth or as the sum of all ecosystems on Earth. For ecology professor Hartmut Bick, for example, the biosphere is “the region on planet Earth inhabitable by organisms” (Ökologie, p. 8).
But such a view is one-sided, simplifies matters and is misleading. It sees animate and inanimate worlds as rigid opposites and mutually isolated phenomena. The essence of life, however, reveals itself precisely in its incessant active interchange of matter with inanimate nature. Frederick Engels criticized the metaphysical way of looking at nature:
In nature nothing takes place in isolation. Everything affects and is affected by every other thing, and it is mostly because this manifold motion and interaction is forgotten that our natural scientists are prevented from gaining a clear insight into the simplest things. (“Dialectics of Nature,” op. cit., p. 459)
In agreement with this dialectical-materialist view of nature, the Russian geoscientist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863–1945) developed an appropriate definition of the biosphere: the totality of earthly organisms including the inanimate matter which surrounds them, with which they are involved in an unending exchange of matter, and which they help to shape and determine.
Vernadsky emphasized the active role of life in the system of the biosphere, in particular the role of humans endowed with consciousness. Humans can lastingly and deeply reshape their animate and inanimate environment and are influenced by this environment; they are a part of the biosphere. That includes the possibility of changing the natural environment in such a negative way that the natural conditions of human existence are very extensively deformed or even destroyed.
In this respect it is scientifically entirely correct to speak today of the “destruction of the natural environment of human beings.” In contrast, the generalizing notion of the “destruction of nature,” sometimes used colloquially in the environmental movement, must be rejected as unscientific from the dialectical-materialist viewpoint, and appears to be a product of panic. Nature and the universe can be neither created nor destroyed, but only changed.
The system of the biosphere
Except for the Earth, to date no other celestial body has been discovered that shows evidence of life or adequate conditions for life. Because of the universal validity of the laws of nature, extraterrestrial life is basically possible – wherever in the infinite universe the necessary natural conditions for it exist.
The biosphere is a rather thin envelope compared with the overall volume of the Earth. It extends from approximately 60 kilometers above the Earth’s surface to five kilometers beneath it. It comprises the uppermost layer of the Earth’s crust, including the system of water-covered areas and the lower layers of the atmosphere.
The emergence of life 3.5 billion years ago is the result of the infinite changeability of the forms of motion of inanimate and animate matter. In his book, Der Geist fiel nicht vom Himmel (The Mind Did Not Fall from the Sky), Hoimar von Ditfurth described the process by which the first primitive life originated:
The first step in life thus was an act of gaining independence, of breaking away from the surroundings, which then objectively became the external world.… This almost self-evident demand now is confronted in a seemingly paradoxical way with an exactly opposed necessity which creates a compulsion to maintain the link with the same external world uninterruptedly.… The solution can only lie in the creation of a really “qualified” link with the external world. This must be a link which has a selective character. (pp. 32 and 33)
Life’s gaining of independence vis-à-vis its environment, and the interchange of matter between living beings and their environment which consequently developed, were dialectical processes which developed in spirals, advancing from primitive to higher life forms.
At first, Earth’s atmosphere was still devoid of pure oxygen. It was heavily saturated with water vapor and contained, among other elements, ammonia, methane, hydrogen as well as carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
Meanwhile, under artificial conditions akin to those in the primordial atmosphere, it has been possible to produce important building blocks of life (including amino acids and mononucleotides) and combine them into nucleic acids and proteins. With that, proof was provided of the natural origin of the essential building blocks of organic metabolism and heredity.
Frederick Engels accurately defined “life” as “the mode of existence of albuminous bodies, and this mode of existence essentially consists in the constant self-renewal of the chemical constituents of these bodies.” (“Anti-Dühring,” in: Marx/ Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 76)
Modern genetic research meanwhile has delivered proof that genes develop in a law-governed way and in dialectical unity with the changing environment.
To gain an understanding of the whole complexity of the biosphere, it is reasonable first to choose the scientific method of analyzing the biosphere’s essential component parts. Frederick Engels described this method:
In order to understand the separate phenomena, we have to tear them out of the general inter-connection and consider them in isolation.… (“Dialectics of Nature,” op. cit., p. 512)
For this reason the biosphere normally is divided into three subunits following the definition of Austrian geologist Eduard Suess (1831–1914):
• the lithosphere, the layer of rock and soil;
• the hydrosphere, the water-covered areas of the Earth, and
• the atmosphere, the mass of air enveloping the Earth.
These spheres are not sharply separated from each other, but parts of a connected global system which interact dialectically.
The lithosphere
One of the most important ecological functions of the rock of the Earth’s crust is to provide weathered minerals as starting material for soil formation. Together with organic materials stemming from dead living organisms, they form the more or less fertile soils which are one of the indispensable foundations of all human civilization. Another function of the lithosphere is the collection and conditioning of drinking water.
The Earth’s crust is a habitat of its own. Without a huge variety of soil organisms, the process of soil formation would be completely unthinkable. In the soil, the dead organic matter is decomposed into its constituents. Carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen compounds and other salts then are available to the plants again as nutrients. A large number of synthetic processes (construction and conversion processes) also take place there, without which the formation of humus, for example, would be impossible.
The great naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) found out that the common earthworm (there are many earthworm species in the world) is chiefly responsible for the formation of fertile arable soil and therefore indispensable to human existence. The textbook Ökosysteme by Frank A. Klötzli tells us:
Per hectare and year, between one and 20 tons of soil wander through the bodies of earthworms. In deciduous forests, in this way the topsoil is turned over to a depth of 50 centimeters once every 200–300 years; in the steppes, the top 30 centimeters in 100 to 150 years. (p. 253)
The soil fauna and flora consist of worms of all kinds, arachnids, tiny insects, algae, fungi and bacteria. In the layers of soil, they incessantly exchange matter with the mineral, organic and gaseous fractions of the lithosphere.
The soil organisms are responsible for most of the transition and conversion processes from animate to inanimate matter and vice versa. This exchange of matter is an essential foundation of all life.
Mineral deposits created by geochemical processes lasting millions of years belong to the nonrenewable resources. The deposits of fossil fuels like peat, coal, petroleum and natural gas also must be classified among them. However, the term “nonrenewable” is not very exact, because the raw materials described as such are of organic origin, and their formation continues. But these processes are so protracted that these materials will not regenerate in the relatively short period of human history. Stefan Rahmstorf and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber write in their book Der Klimawandel (Climate Change):
The quantity combusted each year is about equivalent to the amount which formed in roughly one million years during the period in which the oil and coal deposits originated. (pp. 33 f.)
From the standpoint of the importance which raw materials from the natural environment have for human life, the term “nonrenewable” definitely makes sense.
The hydrosphere
The hydrosphere comprises the Earth’s surface and subsurface water resources. The blue color of planet Earth as seen from outer space comes from the water. The oceans cover more than seven tenths of the Earth’s surface. But the hydrosphere also comprises groundwater, seepage water, water locked in minerals, inland waters as well as continental ice sheets and pack ice.
The entire volume of water on Earth is estimated at 1.4 billion cubic kilometers. The salt water of the oceans alone accounts for 97 percent of it, two percent is bound in the form of ice, and only 0.7 percent is freshwater on dry land.
It is peculiar to the Earth that temperatures occur on its surface at which water can change between solid, liquid and gaseous states. All biological processes on Earth require water in liquid form. Authors Hans Knodel and Ulrich Kull write:
Virtually all processes in the cells of organisms take place in a watery environment. In all living organisms water is the principal material component (usually to more than 70 percent), and many organisms live exclusively in water. (Ökologie und Umweltschutz [Ecology and Environmental Protection], p. 4)
In the oceans and inland waters (rivers, lakes, etc.) the hydrosphere harbors habitats for a vast number of organisms which are among the most important suppliers of protein in the food chain (fish, crustaceans, etc.). Freshwater, the lifeblood of the flora and fauna on dry land, collects in the big reservoirs of deep water and groundwater.
Water owes its outstanding significance for life to a number of specific properties (anomalies). In comparison with similar molecules like hydrogen sulfide, water would be expected to have a melting point of about minus 150 degrees Celsius and a boiling point of minus 80 degrees Celsius. But water has a much higher melting point of zero degrees Celsius and does not vaporize until its temperature reaches 100 degrees Celsius. That is the decisive condition for the existence of lakes and rivers.
Moreover, water, again unlike other substances, does not increase in density as it gets colder. It attains its greatest density at four degrees Celsius, which is why the lighter ice floats on the liquid water and the water organisms beneath can survive. Finally, the heat storage capacity of water is much higher than that of other molecules of equivalent size. Water molecules can take on different structures, which also transform into one another. Water therefore is the ideal solvent for all biochemical life processes. It also has the ability to stabilize other molecules, for instance the vital proteins or the genetic material DNA.
The Earth’s hydrosphere is not a unified space, but a multiply subdivided dynamic system of water reservoirs. This system is powered by the Sun, whose radiation causes glaciers, snow and ice to melt and water from the oceans, lakes and rivers, from the soil and from organisms to evaporate. In the atmosphere the water vapor is distributed around the Earth until it cools again and falls back to Earth as precipitation (dew, rain, snow, hail). One of the most important ecological functions of the solar-powered water system is to make freshwater form again from the vast salt water reservoirs of the oceans.
The hydrosphere has special significance for the development of the climate. As water has a high heat storage capacity, oceans and lakes have a balancing effect on their climatic regions.
The atmosphere
The gaseous envelope surrounding the Earth is Earth’s atmosphere. It comprises several horizontally superimposed layers.
The atmospheric layers belong to the essential foundations of life of plants, animals and human beings. The lower layer nearest to the Earth, the troposphere, contains 90 percent of the total air as well as almost all the water vapor of the atmosphere. The troposphere extends upward at the poles for about eight kilometers, at the equator a good 18 kilometers. There is sufficient oxygen to support the life of higher animal species and humans only in the lower part of the troposphere.
The Earth’s atmosphere, referred to as “air,” consists of 78.1 percent nitrogen, 20.9 percent oxygen and 0.9 percent argon, an inert gas. The remaining 0.1 percent is divided among a large number of “trace gases.” Carbon dioxide, with currently 0.04 percent, is the most well-known and most important trace gas, not least of all because, despite its small percentage share, it is one of the most important natural greenhouse gases. The greenhouse gases ensure that the surface temperatures of the Earth vary within a life-sustaining range.
All the weather activity, including winds and cloud formation, takes place in the troposphere. Since the troposphere is heated mainly by the Earth, its outer layers cool off rapidly (by about 6.5 degrees Celsius per kilometer altitude). Temperatures as low as minus 55 degrees Celsius prevail there.
Above the troposphere is the stratosphere. There we find the ozone layer, which is vital to earthly life. The ozone molecule (O3) consists of three atoms of oxygen and is able to absorb most of the high-energy ultraviolet radiation of the Sun (UV-B, UV-C). Under an intact ozone layer, only energy-poorer UV-A radiation reaches the surface of the Earth unfiltered.
Above the stratosphere, at an altitude of about 50 kilometers and more, the mesosphere begins, where temperatures fall to minus 90 degrees Celsius. There we find the last outposts of earthly life in the form of extremely robust bacterial spores.
The mesosphere, together with the cold regions of the troposphere, serves an important function for the entire biosphere: the water vapor of the atmosphere freezes there to form ice crystals that fall back to Earth. Were this not so, the water vapor ultimately would drift further out into space and disintegrate. Earth would have long since lost its water and all life would have ceased.
Flora and fauna
The living substance of the biosphere consists of organisms, the many species of animals and plants, including human beings. They form systemic biological communities (biocenoses) and inhabit specific habitats (biotopes), each with a specific identity. The species are interlinked with each other and with the inanimate components of the biosphere in a close, interactive connection; they form an ecosystem.
Simplifying matters, conventional ecology distinguishes between three main functions of the organisms in an ecosystem: producers, consumers and decomposers. This classification of organisms according to the three functions is expedient, but not absolute, because basically they all produce, consume and decompose. The only purpose of this classification is to point out which of these natural functions is dominant.
The producers include all green plants, algae and some bacteria. They might be more accurately described as biological primary producers or “biotransformers” for primary organic production. They are the only organisms able to make sugar (glucose) out of carbon dioxide and water with the help of sunlight, i.e., to convert inorganic matter into organic nutrients. This biochemical reaction is called photosynthesis.
Photosynthesis can only occur where certain pigments, such as the chlorophyll of green plants, can absorb sunlight. In essence, photosynthesis is a sun-powered transformation system: the solar energy is first transformed into electric energy, then into chemical energy (energy-rich compounds), with the help of which sugar, that is to say carbohydrates, are synthesized.
The sugar produced in plants is the universal starting material for obtaining energy in living things and for producing more complex organic substances, from which all animals exist. In addition, during photosynthesis free oxygen is produced and released into the atmosphere, where it provides a vital basis for the life of air-breathing organisms as well as the base material for the ozone layer.
Around the globe each year roughly 175 billion tons of organic matter are synthesized through photosynthesis – 120 billion tons on dry land and 55 billion tons in the oceans.
Since 1979, ecosystems have been studied even on the ocean floor; in 2012 one was discovered at a record depth of 5,000 meters. Here the transformation of inorganic matter into organic nutrients does not take place through photosynthesis, but chemosynthesis. The suppliers of energy here are water heated by volcanic activity and sulfurous compounds.
The second large group, the consumers, cannot perform primary production themselves. They must take in organic matter as food in order to obtain energy and compounds vital to their metabolism. This group includes all animals and humans as well. We can distinguish between plant eaters (herbivores), meat eaters (carnivores) and omnivores (eat both animal and vegetable substances). The herbivores as primary consumers directly benefit from plant primary production and in turn serve as food for carnivorous animals (secondary consumers). Many animal species and humans as well are variable in what they feed on (omnivores).
The group of decomposers, finally, reduces the organic matter of dead organisms to simpler substances. We can distinguish two main groups: detritus feeders and mineralizers. The first group includes many small animals of the soil, for example worms, insects and isopods. They reduce the organic matter to small pieces. Since the nutritional value of their food is rather low, they have high turnover rates. The most important mineralizers are fungi and bacteria. They utilize the organic residues, reducing them to humus and ultimately to water, carbon dioxide and mineral salts. This prevents the planet from being suffocated by vast quantities of accumulated dead biomass.
For their photosynthesis the plants utilize only about one to three percent of the solar energy impinging on them. Of the total volume of organic matter produced (gross primary production) a part is consumed to supply the plants themselves with energy. The remaining excess (net primary production) serves effective plant growth and is available to the consumers as food.
The organic growth produced by the plants and the energy stored in it are distributed over various consumer levels by repeated “eating and being eaten.” As a rule, a species feeds on a number of different species. In an ecosystem, typically a complex web of food chains is thus formed.
The food taken in by humans and animals is never completely utilized. Every time energy is transformed, a part is converted into thermal energy, which either is used to maintain body temperature or is given off to the environment as heat loss. Thus, with every level the quantity of energy passed on with the food diminishes. The production of meat involves the expenditure of a particularly great amount of energy because domestic animals use most of the digested biomass themselves.
Due to the continuous loss of heat, the energy flow can only be maintained in the ecosystem through the permanent supply of energy in the form of solar radiation. The material components pass through the food webs in the form of many compounds, and through excretion or mineralization again find their way into the nonliving realm of the biosphere. There they are available once again to organisms as starting materials for organic synthesis.