THE BIOSPHERE 



DANIEL A. LIVINGSTONE 



Department of Zoology, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina 



When the prospectus of this meeting first appeared, I noted with wry amusement 

 that the symposium on carbon and the biosphere was to consist of two 

 parts — one lecture on the biosphere by my old friend Jack Vallentyne and 19 

 lectures on carbon by the other participants. I was looking forward with interest 

 to how he would handle this unequal division of responsibility until George 

 Woodwell called to say that discretion had belatedly overcome the usual 

 Vallentyne elan, and that he hoped I would introduce the meeting in Jack's 

 place. 



So I spent the last 3 days before the symposium with encyclopedias and 

 textbooks, collecting the conventional wisdom about the biogeochemistry of 

 carbon to see where we stood before the Brookhaven symposium of 1972. The 

 current compendium of settled scientific matters is the McGraw-Hill Encyclo- 

 pedia of Science and Technology, and there I discovered no general agreement 

 even about what the biosphere is. Of two entries for the subject, a brief one is by 

 our missing speaker, Dr. Vallentyne, 1 who defines the biosphere as that part of 

 the earth inhabited by living things and regrets an alternative misguided usage in 

 which "biosphere" refers to the sum total of all plants and animals rather than 

 the place in which they live. The second entry is a three-page account based on 

 just this alternative usage (Mueller). 2 



My own inclination is to follow Vallentyne and regard the biosphere as the 

 place where organisms live rather than the total of all organisms. By either 

 definition the concept of a biosphere embraces two separate ideas: that 

 organisms are important in geochemistry and that the earth is an integrated 

 geochemical system. The first idea was familiar to De Saussure, 3 and the second 

 idea is now standard mental equipment for every reader of Time magazine. 

 "Biosphere" is no longer the rallying cry of a small in-group with a private and 

 exciting view of the world. Still, it quite adequately distinguishes the subject of 

 our symposium from other aspects of the study of carbon. 



