Vladimir Vernadsky Views
Just as all educated westerners have heard of Albert Einstein, Gregor Mendel, and Charles Darwin, so all educated Russians know of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945). He is widely celebrated in Russia and the Ukraine. A Vernadsky Avenue in Moscow is rivaled by a monument in his memory in Kiev. His portrait appears on Russian national stamps, air letters, and even memorial coins (Margulis et al., 1998, p. 14).
However, the main reason for the appreciation of his work is our urgent necessity of a complex holistic conceptual approach to the problems of increasingly and rapidly deteriorating environment and impending global ecological crisis (Yanshin, 1993). Today, the word biosphere is a common word in our language; it is widely used by mass media and by ordinary people. How many people, though, associate this term with Vladimir Vernadsky? What does it really mean? Where did it originally come from?
The term biosphere was coined in 1875 by the famous Austrian geologist Eduard Suess (1831-1914). In fact, Suess literally tossed the new term away, just once and without an explicit definition, in his pioneering book on the genesis of the Alps (Suess 1875) (Smil, 2002). In his interpretation, the biosphere is an envelope of life, which is limited to a determined zone at the surface of the lithosphere . The term was never given a definition or elaborated upon until Vladimir Vernadsky.
According to the German philosopher and educator, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), the kind of philosophy a person chooses depends on the kind of person one is. A philosophical system is not a lifeless piece of furniture that can be accepted or discarded, according to how we feel. Rather, a philosophy is given its soul by the soul of the person who possesses it (translation and personal communication by Lenore Bronson). These words are totally true for Vladimir Vernadsky, both as a professional and a personality.
Vladimir Vernadsky Images
