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Those who funded the sciences of geology 150 years ago intuitively saw the Earth as a unified whole; the sciences have specialized into physics, chemistry, biology and geology - specialization that has brought advances, but has unfortunately obscured our view of the unique role that life and death play on our planet. Peter Westbroek, in this book, integrates our present knowledge of Earth in a holistic view. Ranging from the dykes of Holland to the Everglades of Florida, Westbroek shows how man has affected geological change and how geological change has influenced man's use of nature, leaving both vastly altered.
E-Book Content
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A volume of THE COMMONWEALTH FUND BOOK PROGRAM Under the editorship ofLewis Thomas, M.D.
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PETER WESTBROEK
Life as a Geological Force
Copyright © 1991 by Peter Westbroek. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. FIRST
EDITION
THE TEXT OF THIS BOOK is composed in Baskerville, with the display set in Typositor Cactus. Composition and manufacturing by The Maple Vail Book Manufacturing Group. Drawings by Ceesvan Nieuwburg. Book design by Marjorie j. Flock.
TOO U R TO Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Westbroek, P. (Pieter), 1937Life as a geological force: dynamics of the earth / by Peter Westbroek. p. cm.-(The Commonwealth Fund Book Program) 1. Geobiology. I. Title. II. Series: Commonwealth Fund Book Program (Series) QH343.4.W47 1991 551-dc20
90-34862 ISBN 0-393-02932-8
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 10 Coptic Street, London WCIA IPU 1234567890
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D AUG H T E R S MOTHER
CONTENTS 11
Foreword Preface
13 PROLOGUE
1. Peculiar Planet, Familiar Ground I.
Geology of the Planet Earth
Shifting Plates 3. Stability and Change 4. The Stylized World of Robert Garrels 2.
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I II.
47 69 89
Life, the Missing Link
5. Life and the Cycling of Rocks 6. The Power of the Small
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136
'YI CONTENTS
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7. A Rock Evolves 8. Humble Foundations
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147
166
Life at the Planetary Scale
9. Biospheres 10. Gaia and the Frankenstein Monsters
183 20 4
EPILOGUE
11. Global Change and the Melding of Sciences
Suggestions for Further Reading Index
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233
FOREWORD during just the past half century, has been an amazing achievement and a totally good thing for the human species, carrying all manner of promise for the years ahead." Assertions like this are made every day within the scientific community, and are taken for granted all around. But still there hangs in the public mind a set of misgivings about the whole enterprise: Where are these people taking us? What new technologies will they next be introducing to change the way we live? (And most troubling of all) Are they explaining away all the old mysteries, flattening out the beauty of nature, displacing strangeness by their reductionism? This book by Professor Westbroek provides, in my view, " T H E ADVANCE OF SCIENCE,
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FOREWORD
an exhilarating response. Because of the new geology and biology, the life of the earth has become a far stranger and more splendid puzzle than ever before. We are only beginning to comprehend how little we really know about it; we confront deeper mysteries at every bend as we begin learn about interactions among living things on the planet and their profound effects on the very structure of