Crises by Nature: How Humanity Saved the Biosphere

Graphic 1: multi-facet views of the Earth’s Atmo-Bio-Hydro-Litho-Spher[e][oidal] Cumulum

Crises by Nature
How Humanity Saved The Biosphere

by
Capitalist Crisis Studies

Table of Contents

The whole tenor of the ferment which has come to be called the “ecology movement” has accustomed many of us to think of ourselves as the scourge of the biosphere; virtual intruders in Nature, whose unwelcome visitation has contributed only disruption and destruction to an otherwise perfectly self-regulated natural harmony, and which visitation can do nothing else. The best we can hope for, we are told, is to minimize the damage by consuming less, and producing less — especially less of ourselves.

Many of us, especially socialists ^p1, have smelled a rat in this rap right from its first airing. The time has come to confront this ideology squarely with the Marxian theory of social evolution, and with certain salient discoveries of the bourgeois science of ecology itself, discoveries which the “ecology movement” has chosen to ignore, or is unable to discern by virtue of ideological blockage.

I - The Tendency of the Rate of Photosynthesis to Fall

“Does the amount of carbon dioxide in our present atmosphere limit the rate of photosynthesis? Most authorities agree that it does. The present carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is believed to be very low compared with concentrations of past ages. Some plants, however, will grow much more rapidly and luxuriantly in an atmosphere that contains five to ten times the present carbon dioxide concentration. Florists, in fact, sometimes release carbon dioxide in greenhouses to promote plant growth. Why should the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere of past ages have been higher than it is today? And what evidence do we have that this might be so? Prior to the evolution of large numbers of plants, there would have been few users of carbon dioxide on earth [ed: Earth]. As plants evolved and eventually occupied all the waters and covered most of the land of the earth [ed: Earth], the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere could have been gradually lowered by the photosynthetic activity of these plants. Thus over great periods of time the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere could have been gradually reduced. The great coal deposits of the earth [ed: Earth] give testimony to a period of especially rapid and luxuriant plant growth. This period of enormous plant growth is called the Carboniferous Age.... The growth and death rates were so rapid that the luxuriant plant growth often led to the formation of peat bogs which were 200 to 300 feet in depth. These deposits of dead plant life were gradually compressed through movements of the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] crust to produce great coal deposits that we mine today. It is reasonable to assume that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere may have been higher at that time to support such rapid and luxuriant plant growth. Evidence of such growth in other periods of the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] history has not been found.” ^c1

(1) The rate of photosynthesis for the biosphere as a whole is proportional to, is a function of, the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere, so long as CO₂ concentration is the limiting factor on the rate of photosynthesis (i.e., so long as CO₂ concentration is less than optimum).^c2

(2) The rate of photosynthesis fundamentally determines what ecologists call the “productivity” of the whole biosphere, that is, the rate of production of new living matter, which later serves as both the food and the bodily substance of all living organisms, not just plants. Photosynthesis has been the very basis of the biosphere; the process that supplies the free energy [negentropy] for the entire superstructure of animal and microbial life. Thus the rate of photosynthesis of new biomatter fundamentally limits the size and health of the whole planetary bio-system.^c3

The pattern that begins to be disclosed via this juxtaposition has the following features: Photosynthesis, the foundation of the production of all biomatter, that is of the reproduction of the entire planetary biosphere (whose substance is biomass) occurs at a rate which is determined by, among other conditions, the parts-per-million of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere. But photosynthesis progressively depletes the atmosphere of carbon in its oxidized gaseous form (CO₂) and gradually accumulates much of it in a non-gaseous form, a form unavailable for photosynthesis. That is, this non-gaseous form of carbon is ‘entropy’ for photosynthesis — ‘entropy’ from the standpoint of, or relative to, photosynthesis considered as the leading form of ‘biospheric power’, i.e., of “free energy” [negentropy] provision to the biotic processes of this planet. These accumulations eventually transform to coal (land plants), petroleum (sea plants), and natural gas. Thus, photosynthesis itself causes a progressive lowering in the rate of photosynthesis — photosynthesis slows itself down, brakes itself and thereby breaks itself; puts the brakes on itself — by lowering its rate-determining concentration of atmospheric CO₂. If this process were to continue unabated, without any innovation in the foundation of life, in the natural means of production of biomass, or in the sources of life-usable energy [biological negentropy], then the totality of the biosphere must eventually pass out of existence, as the rate of photosynthesis, and with it the “productivity” of the biosphere, decelerated toward zero.

Only an ecological innovation which could turn that ‘photosynthetic entropy’ back into energy for life; which developed other new basic sources of life-energy for the ecosystem, partially or wholly supplanting photosynthesis, or which developed some new ecological pathway which could return that carbon to the atmosphere in oxidized (CO₂) form, could provide a new continuum for this otherwise terminal biosphere.

II - The Necessity of Humanity

Need I say more? We are that innovation! The human species was and is the ‘ecological invention’, the new ‘natural technology’, by which the biosphere saved itself! Those accumulations of photosynthetically useless carbon — initially the woody bodies of trees, and the corpses of other plants and animals, terrestrial and aquatic, as well as, later, coal, oil, and gas — entropy, waste, for photosynthesis — represent free energy for human praxis, that is, for that new form of ‘synthetic’ econo-ecological activity, biomass yielding and biomass sustaining, which is human industry and industrialized agriculture. This same human praxis is capable, at length, of forging new basic pathways of energy entry into the [humanly-expanded] noo-bio-sphere, such as solar-electric and nuclear fusion power.

Human industry, social practice, increasingly supplants unaided photosynthesis as the vitalizing foundation of the biosphere. The planetary ecosystem becomes a humanly supported and humanly shaped econo-ecology — humanized nature (Marx). Though unconsciously so, at first, the world-wide social economy becomes the throbbing heart of the global ecology. And human industry is the means by which a new channel was opened for return of the vast Carbonic accumulations to the atmosphere to rekindle those scattered, waning embers of global photosynthesis that survived the Great Ice Age. This new channel was the burning, first, of dead but not yet ‘fossil-fuel-ized’, and of living vegetation by primitive hunting tribes ^c4 then by early agriculturalists, and second, later, of fossilized vegetation, by industrializing societies.

Graphic 3: harnessing fire and human muscle for the age of steel

Humanity was, and, is still to be, the solution to the latest problem of Nature’s self-reproduction and self-continuation! — Humanity the solution to the ‘self-breakdown-crisis’ of the photosynthetic mode of ecological, biospheric [self-re-]production — of the temporal self-extension, temporal self-continuation, or temporal self-prolongation of that self-formation of Nature!

How would we go about verifying such an hypothesis? By looking for signs of dire trouble in the biosphere just prior to the emergence of homo sapiens. By looking for evidence of a severe ‘depression’ in the self-productivity of biomass, or rate of reproduction of the biosphere (i.e., the totality of biomass), leading up to the appearance of the social formation, and more particularly, just prior to the recent period during which hunting-tribe fire-setting, slash-and-burn agriculture, and finally fossil-fueled manufacturing could make a photosynthetically significant contribution to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations.

III - The Decadence of the Biosphere

What we are trying to do, is to uncover the hidden history of the biosphere — hidden, blocked from view, at least, for the pervasive ideology of Nature which characterizes modern science; an ideology of ‘equilibriumism’ which unspokenly assumes only stasis, balance, and pre-established harmony in Nature, and is blinded to dialectical patterns by that pre- and contra-empirical presumption. What we are trying to determine is: What has really been underway in the last 280 million years — what has been the summary content, the dominant theme, the major trend, of the history of Nature on this planet in that time?

There is mounting evidence — evidence discernible, at any rate, to the dialectical eye, expecting not equilibrium, stasis, permanence, but dynamism, self-contradiction, self-change, evolution — that the biosphere, the photosynthetically-centered stage of it, had already reached its peak in the Carboniferous period, long before the advent of man, and has been in decline ever since; that the human species as we know it, whose first tracks, those of scattered stragglers staggering out of the blizzard, we can pick out against the opaque white background of the great Pleistocene Ice (see Graphics 5, 8, 9, 10, 11), was born into a dying world.

The remaking of that world, the restoration of ecological prosperity to that planet, then depends, evidently, on what that species will do. If ecological prosperity is ever to be restored on Earth, if the biosphere is to halt its self-destruction, and attain to a state of vigorous health again, it evidently must be through the agency of that species in Nature; through its redesigning of the Natural World, through its solving the contradictions of that world (including its own).

Plants grow faster, healthier, fuller in an atmosphere many times as rich in CO₂ as the present one ^c5, suggesting a long adaptation to a climate much different from that which prevails today, for an atmosphere richer in CO₂ would be a warmer one. Of late ^c6, great bald patches have begun to appear in the ‘forestrial’ living fur coat of the planet — the deserts — which, like the Sahara, are continuing a geologically rapid growth. Before this balding set in, successive walls of ice had invaded the lower latitudes from both poles, lacerating the great rain forests and beating them back to a narrow equatorial band; melting back again but leaving great desolations of desert in their wake. For some reason — CO₂ deficiency and cooling global climate? — the great forests lacked the vitality to spread out once again from their equatorial respite and reconquer lost ground, so the ice was replaced instead by arid waste, grassland, or temperate forest, all much less prosperous ecosystems in rate-of-photosynthesis terms. In the long view, and in terms of the prime vital sign of this form of the biosphere, which is the rate of photosynthesis, controlling the rate of reproduction or self-accumulation of living mass, this is a picture of a world in decline, of a life-bearing planet committing suicide.

Graphic 4: global distribution of continental glaciers

We can readily envision the final scenario: The climate continues to deteriorate as the CO₂ level continues to fall. Glaciations grow more frequent and more severe. The ice retreats for a time after each onslaught, thrown back by the “saturation” nonlinearities, the negative feedbacks or inhibitory self-effects which a vast glacier system develops against itself once it grows beyond a certain extent. ^c7 But each time it gathers greater force, laying siege anew to the tropics and cutting deeper into the last fastness of the once great forest. Finally, the twin equator-ward pincers of the two polar caps meet, clanging shut like frigid, icicle-fanged jaws over the world of life they have just devoured. Having broken through the last defenses of the plant world, marine and continental alike, and, with that, of the life-world, of the biosphere, as a whole, all that would remain would be the mopping up of isolated pockets of biology — spores, seeds, micro-organisms — which could not long hold out beyond this, the biosphere’s mediated self-destruction of its own photosynthetic basis. In the end: a sterilized planet, alternately frozen or arid, but shaved clean, by an ice-edged razor, of that mantle of life which once adorned it with such luxuriance and promise!

That is the scenario, unless we stop it!

Now let us examine the evidence behind it. According to available information, the last 3 million years of Earth’s history, called the Quaternary period (refer to Graphics 5, 8, 9, 10, 11), has been a time of unusually “harsh” climate. ^c8 In fact, through most of Earth’s history as a biotic or life-bearing planet, tropical conditions prevailed over most of its surface:

“... one conclusion seems inescapable. This is that the present restriction of tropical climates to a relatively narrow belt (and in periods of glaciation to an even narrower belt) of the Earth’s surface is an unusual situation. The evidence of the Cretaceous and Tertiary indicates that for most of the time prior to the Pliocene the tropical zone was more widespread than now and that during certain intervals at least the boundary of the tropics was at some point between 50^o and 60^o N latitude in the northern hemisphere and occupied a similar position in the southern hemisphere... the conclusions of various workers, such as...«long list follows» indicate that a more widespread tropical or “warm” climate prevailed over much of the Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Tertiary «i.e., for most of the last 500+ million years since the dawn of photosynthetic life before the Cambrian Period — see Graphics 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, reproduced here from the text».” ^c9

“The luxuriant growth of broad-leaf hardwood forests in high Arctic latitudes persisted from the Cretaceous into the Eocene and probably the Oligocene, indicating a prolonged continuation of humid warm temperate, or at least temperate forest climate in the polar regions. Evidence for this may be found in both Arctic and Antarctic regions. During the early Cenozoic the northern mid-latitudes were covered by vegetation, the botanical equivalent of which is now confined to sub-tropical and even tropical climates.” ^c10

“From all we know, the Quaternary represents an exceptional period in the history of our globe. The repeated advance and retreat of glaciation is a phenomenon specifically restricted to this period: before that, for a time interval of about 200 million years, there was almost no permanent ice on the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] surface: even the poles were free and enjoyed a temperate or cold-temperate climate.... In any case it is now clear that the ice ages represent cases of a general deterioration of the climate of our globe.” ^c11

During this long warm period of the last 130 million years and more, two successive intercontinental forests clothed the globe, of which today we know only tattered remnants. The earlier of these two was tropical:

“At the beginning of the Tertiary, the continent was relatively low and relatively uncut by the many mountain ranges of today. There were only three main ranges: two in the Rocky mountains, and one in the Appalachian region. Everything west of the present Utah-Nevada line was relatively low country with relatively even and mild climates. Tropical forests extended as far north as the state of Washington, and Alaska was covered with temperate forests of redwood and other species. These warm and uniform conditions across the continent eventually came to a gradual close with volcanic activity and a cooling of the climate in Miocene times and ended in another great period of mountain-building during the very late Pliocene and Pleistocene within the last million years or so.” ^c12

In the wake of the great cooling, a temperate forest succeeded this inter-continental jungle, but a temperate forest whose grandeur surpassed by far that of any seen on this planet since, let alone that of the — comparatively speaking — mere pockets of forest we know today:

“Taking the place of the tropical forests in the North, the transcontinental temperate forest moved down from Alaska and northern Canada. This northern Miocene forest was the most magnificent temperate forest of all time. It not only was essentially transcontinental from the Southern Appalachians to Washington and Oregon but, with variations, extended clear around the Northern Hemisphere so that it was well developed also in Europe and Asia. Dr. Chaney has called it the Arcto-Tertiary forest. In middle Miocene times, it extended down the west coast as far as central California and south central Nevada, where it bordered on the Madro-Tertiary woodland.”

“The Arcto-Tertiary forest was so big geographically that it was bound to vary in composition from one place and time to another. No temperate forest in the world today is exactly like the Arcto-Tertiary forest. However, if one walks through the cove hardwood forests of the Great Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee and western Carolina, he [ed: one] will get some idea of what the Arcto-Tertiary forest was like. Another forest quite like parts of the Arcto-Tertiary forest is the coastal redwood forest of northern California...”. ^c13

The latter history of this forest’s life unfolds as a vast story of Nature at war with itself, of a planet-spanning battle between Green and White, a war of the forest versus the desert and the great Ice for predominance in the occupation of the surface of the Earth:

“Within the last million years or so, the climates of Western North America began to turn much colder and drier.... Not only did the climate become colder and drier but the rainfall pattern changed. Instead of rainfall being evenly distributed throughout the year with plenty of summer rainfall, there was a shift toward winter precipitation and very little rain during the summer. This pattern persists today.... These climatic changes had pronounced effects on the vegetation. The Arcto-Tertiary forest disappeared over much of its range.... Great grasslands, with herds of hoofed mammals such as the horse and camel, replaced the forest east of the Sierra and extended far into the interior of the continent....” ^c14

About this time, the troubles begin to show, and the first rumblings of the coming war are sounded:

“In late Pliocene and Peistocene times, some 1 or 2 million years ago, with the Sierra rising rapidly, the climates became even more arid. From the retreating subtropical Madro-Tertiary flora, from the Arcto-Tertiary flora, and from the high mountains, new kinds of plants evolved that fitted the extremely dry conditions. Up to this time, there had been no real desert climate or desert vegetation in North America The present deserts of the American Southwest owe their origin to increasing aridity in late Pliocene and Pleistocene times, and thus, compared to the forests, are a recent phenomena The species, and often the genera in them, are new....” ^c15

Then, monstrous creatures of ice begin to gather on the edges of the forests:

“Soon, however, things began to change rapidly. For some reason (there are many theories), the snow that fell in winter in the north and in the mountains did not all melt the following summer. Every year there was more carry-over of old snow to the new winter, when even more snow fell. The winter snowfall increased, and permanent snowbanks in the mountains got larger and became more abundant. These snowbanks gradually turned to ice and because of their weight began to move down and away from the zone of accumulation. These events were the beginning of the Ice Age of the Pleistocene Epoch.”

“Four times the continental glaciers moved down past the middle of the Rocky Mountains.... Heavy precipitation built up great lakes in what had been the deserts and grasslands of Utah and Nevada. The western glaciers carved the mountains into new forms; the Tetons, the Beartooth, the Lewis Range, and many others emerged sharp, polished and devoid of much vegetation. In the eastern half of the continent, the ice stood a mile deep over Michigan and New York, and the Arcto-Tertiary forest was wiped out except in its Southern Appalachian and Mexican refuges.”

“...The climatic changes of the late Tertiary eradicated or restricted the Arcto-Tertiary and Madro-Tertiary vegetations of the West and aided the evolution of the floras of the present deserts, chaparral, and pine forests. However, the eastern part of the forest probably escaped serious disruption until the Pleistocene ice. Nothing was more destructive than the physical mass of ice and the severe climate to the south of the ice front. The land of the northeastern quarter of the United States and all of eastern Canada was either scoured away or covered with glacial debris; the vegetation was destroyed. On a major scale, this destruction has occurred four times in the last million years. After each advance of the ice, warmer periods have followed, the ice has receded into the Arctic and the higher mountains, and the flora has migrated species by species both northward and upward.... All evidence appears to indicate that we are in another interglacial period.” ^c16

Indeed, it is our hypothesis that it has been the human contribution of CO_² return to Earth’s atmosphere that has forestalled the — now long overdue — ending of the current interglacial, an ending that would be heralded by renewed, gargantuan global drought and desertification, followed by the return of Ice Age conditions, at the timing appointed by the insolation-based and now-coinciding cooling effects of the three types of Earth orbital variations which constitute the Milankovitch mechanism of Ice Age pace-making. We believe, that is, that it has been the human CO₂ contribution that averted the progression of the ~400 year so-called “Little Ice Age”, from ~1450 through ~1850, into the next ‘Big Ice Age’, so far. However, our hypothesis also holds that this so far inadvertent, unconscious, undeliberate, and undesigned intervention of humanity’s global “Warming Effect” will prove insufficient, over time, to hold back the growing, glaciation-forcing momentum of the Milankovitch drivers, all three of which now mutually-reinforce to impend Earth’s climate in the direction of the termination of the present ~10,000+ year interglacial, and the return of another ~100,000+ years of The Great Ice. A conscious, deliberate, and designed human intervention will be necessary, to pace humanity’s counter-action — to avoid either under-warming or over-warming in the short-term — if humanity’s salvation of the biosphere is to continue much longer in a geologic sense, and if that salvatory contribution is to finally succeed in ending Ice Age eco-suicide for planet Earth ^p2. Failing such deliberative intervention by humanity, the blind-running destiny of our planet, biosphere and noosphere alike, is the global graveyard of a “Snowball Earth”. ^p3

Graphic 6: glacier

In the foregoing record, we have before us a vast pattern of devastation and decline of the biomass of the biosphere, proceeding with accelerating ferocity over a protracted duration of geologic time: at least the last 22 million years. What was the cause of this decline? A little further on, we will present evidence that all this devastation was, in fact, a self-devastation of the biosphere, a manifestation of what Marx might have called the “internally self-ravaged ground” of the evolving planetary ecosystem; that this colossal violence, geologic in scale, was the explosion of the self-contradiction inherent in a photosynthetically-grounded biosphere.

Prior to that, however, let us put in place a few observations regarding the foregoing material. We see within and leading up to this pattern of devastation a prolonged trajectory of decay, a movement of dense jungle giving way to temperate forest, thence to grassland, and finally to desert, barren tundra, and ice; a movement, thus, toward the denudation of the continental land surfaces -- toward the scraping clean of the film of biotic matter from the underlying lithosphere upon which it had grown up. It is important to notice the implications of this trend in terms of the pulse-beat of the photosynthetic biosphere, the rate of photosynthesis. Even today, under conditions of extreme CO₂ rarefaction, and a world climate unusually cool and dry, the tropical rainforests are much lusher, denser biomes, much more ecologically prosperous regions of the biosphere, more productive in biomass terms, than the temperate forests, not to mention grasslands and deserts (including under this concept tundras and ‘ice deserts’). Current estimates indicate that tropical forests exceed other forests by a factor ranging from about 2 to 3 times in Net Primary Productivity (NPP), and exceed the NPP of temperate grasslands by a factor of 4 or greater. ^c17 Thus, this movement of succession represents the decadence of the photosynthetic regime; a prolonged secular fall in the rate of reproduction of the biosphere — what might be called ‘contracted nature-al reproduction’ [or ‘self-contracting ecological self-reproduction’].

Graphic 7: earthquakes - global distribution/concentration and zonation

Much about “Nature” that we today accept without question as ineluctable facts of life “unchangeable as the weather”, as the saying goes, had its origin in the protracted catastrophe of global cooling narrated above. The descent into cold has profoundly reshaped the ‘climatic morphology’ of our planet, generating a new global differentiation in both spatial and temporal dimensions. Before this climatic cataclysm, neither latitudinal zonation nor seasonal variation were so pronounced as today. Instead, a unified global climate prevailed, with a single season year round and a single, tropical “zone”, virtually from pole to pole. The three-way geographical ‘mitosis’ into tropical, temperate, and polar bands ^c18; the two-way (in tropics and poles) or four-way (in the two temperate zones) temporal mitosis into dry and rainy seasons, or Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer seasons ^c19, are, respectively, both products of the geologically recent period of cooling — of drought, desertification and glaciation. We can at present only speculate about the possible effects of the fantastic loads impressed upon the Earth’s crust by up to mile-thick jackets of ice, and the resulting depressions and compressions, beginning in the two polar circles, in stimulating associated periods of vulcanism, earthquake, and orogeny (mountain-building) elsewhere on the surface of the planet. ^c20 (For example, perhaps the pressure of mounting ice-packs literally squeezes magma up out through the volcanic pores of the Earth).

Graphic 7b: volcanism’s “pancake stack” as seen at sunrise on Mt. St. Helens (in Washington, U.S.A.)

Graphic 8: temporal acceleration (1)

At any rate, it seems clear that the cooling, and subsequent desertifications and ice invasions, as well as the prior “warm” eras, were not mere local events, but reflected a global process with presumably a global causation:

“At present there is little doubt that all the phenomena of the Quaternary glaciation happened simultaneously all over the surface of the globe.... The ice ages reflected a general decrease of the average temperature of the earth [ed: Earth]... the climate changes took place simultaneously all over the surface of the earth [ed: Earth] and were not produced by local conditions.” ^c21

Moreover, this epoch of the great global cooling and dying, in which we find ourselves still situated today, represents not a sudden change, but a longterm trend in the climatic evolution (or dis-evolution) of the planet, characterizing not just the Pleistocene Epoch or even the whole Quaternary Period, but at least the entire Cenozoic Era to date:

“The most significant feature of the Cenozoic migration of vegetation is the steady retreat of the temperate forest flora from the Arctic regions and the concomitant retraction of the early Tertiary tropical elements of mid-latitude floras into the present marginal tropics. The curve of floristic change may therefore be translated into a curve of climatic change. If this interpretation is accepted, it appears that the great trend of Cenozoic climate which culminated in Pleistocene glaciation began in the mid-Tertiary, probably more than 20 million years ago. Pleistocene glaciation itself, of which present climate is in many respects an extension, may then be regarded as a geologic and climatologic event the antecedents of which extend over a fair segment of recent geologic time and is not to be viewed as a sudden change in the history of the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] climate.” ^c22

We must also avoid, therefore, the empiricist error of assuming the “normality” of presently prevailing climatic and ecological conditions:

“...it is apparent that the present climate of earth [ed: Earth] is not a logical point of departure for interpreting past ecologic conditions of the present land surfaces.” ^c23

Post-Pleistocene humanity, it appears, was born, not into an idyllic, harmonious, balanced, cyclically self-maintaining “state of Nature”, but into the ruins of a mediately self-ravaged biosphere; into the desolation wrought by a state of internecine ecological warfare within Nature!

Graphic 9: temporal acceleration (2)

What was the source of these vast ecological and climatic movements? Strange as it may sound, we are going to argue that the vast forests themselves, together with their marine counterparts, caused their own demise; that their own ‘nature-al’ ‘doing’ was also their own undoing. The glacieral juggernaut which mowed down the ranks of trees; the flood-tide of white which overwhelmed the once-dominant intercontinental carpets of forest green, was a ‘self-reflexion’ of the forest itself, the other side of its ascendancy, the rebound of its pre-eminence, the mirror image of its burgeoning growth. The real domination of photosynthesis is the harbinger of the end of that photosynthesis-dominance.

Graphic 10: temporal acceleration (3)

We propose that the well-known hypothesis of the atmospheric “greenhouse effect” of carbon dioxide is the key to understanding this whole dynamic of the biosphere since the Carboniferous:

“... the carbon dioxide theory is not new; the basic idea was first precisely stated in 1861 by the noted British physicist John Tyndall. He attributed climatic temperature changes to variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. According to the theory, carbon dioxide controls temperature because the carbon dioxide molecules in air absorb infrared radiation. The carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere are virtually transparent to the visible radiation that delivers the sun’s energy to earth [ed: Earth]. But the earth [ed: Earth], in turn, re-radiates much of the energy in the invisible infrared region of the spectrum. This radiation is most intense at wavelengths very close to the principal absorption band (13 to 17 microns) of the carbon dioxide spectrum. When the carbon dioxide concentration is sufficiently high, even its weaker absorption bands become effective, and a greater amount of infrared radiation is absorbed «see Graphics 12a, 12b, 12c reproduced here from this article». Because the carbon dioxide blanket prevents its escape into space, the trapped radiation warms up the atmosphere.... Water vapor and ozone, as well as carbon dioxide, have this effect because they too absorb energy in the infrared region. But the climatic effects due to carbon dioxide are almost entirely independent of the amount of these other two gases. For the most part their absorption bands occur in different regions of the spectrum. In addition, nearly all water vapor remains close to the ground, while carbon dioxide diffuses more evenly through the atmosphere. Thus throughout most of the atmosphere carbon dioxide is the main factor determining changes in radiation flux. The 2.3 × 10¹² (2,300 billion) tons of carbon dioxide in the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] atmosphere constitute some 0.03 per cent of its total mass.” ^c24

Graphic 11: temporal acceleration (4)

Thus, the geologically rapid depletion of CO₂ -- atmospheric carbon — by the fabulous rates of photosynthesis of the global forest and its associated oceanic plant forms in the heyday of photosynthesis; the fixation of this carbon in atmospherically inaccessible forms, encased in the corpses of these plants and the animals supported by them, shielded from normal decay by the very rapidity of their accumulation, and therefore later transformed into hydrocarbonaceous forms, such as coal (on land) and petroleum (in the sea) ^c25, would have led to a gradual cooling of the global climate which, coupled with the slow ‘suffocation’ of photosynthesis owing to the progressive CO₂ rarefaction of the air, would have paved the way for desertification and the icing of the poles, followed by the extension equator-ward of the polar ice caps, the process known as an “Ice Age”.

Infrared Absorbers

Graphic 12: infrared absorption

“Infrared absorbers in the Earth’s atmosphere include carbon dioxide, water vapor, and ozone. Spectral charts of their absorption in the infrared region show that these gases warm the Earth by preventing its infrared radiation from escaping into space. Carbon dioxide influences climate because it has a broad absorption band at wavelengths (13-17 microns) near the wavelengths at which the Earth’s infrared radiation is most intense. Water vapor and ozone can also influence climate.”

Graphic 12b:

Atmospheric Parts per Million (280-335)

Graphic 13a: rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration

Graphic 13b: rising temperatures

“Rising temperatures recorded at various points on the Earth during the past 100 years parallel the increase in atmosphere carbon dioxide plotted in this chart. The yearly mean temperatures shown were averaged over previous 30 years to remove short-term fluctuations.”

The causation of the Ice Ages is one of the great unsolved problems of modern science, and an intensely active area of current scientific speculation and research, as a glance at the contents-page of virtually any recent number of any prominent scientific journal will attest. Most of this activity is focused on possible astronomical explanations for the Ice Age phenomenon, i.e., on a causation external to even the geological, let alone the biological, processes of the planet itself. Theories of such ‘internal’ causation are neglected or disparaged.

Another of the great unsolved problems of the Earth sciences and of paleoecology is that of the extinction of the dinosaurs, the rather sudden and thorough killing off of the whole spectrum of plant and animal forms which constituted the Era of the Great Reptiles. Here too, we find a very active current literature in the journals, and here also ‘externalist’, astronomical explanations, which project the causation of this ecological catastrophe wholly outside the ecosystem itself, are in vogue.

However, declining temperatures climaxing the Cretaceous have long been recognized as a possible cause of, or contributor to, this “Great Dying”:

“Why did the great dinosaurs die? It had long been thought that the 150 million year reign of these reptiles on earth [ed: Earth] was brought to an end by cooling of the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] climate about 65 million years ago. This idea was supported by geology, but the evidence was incomplete. At Urey’s suggestion, Epstein and Heinz Lowenstam set out to survey the climate of the latter portion of the Age of Reptiles, formally designated as the Upper Cretaceous «using a new technique developed by Urey in 1950»... their results showed that temperatures rose during the first half of the period and declined during the second half «see Graphics 14a and 14b below, reproduced here from the text». Unfortunately they could not measure temperatures at the very end of the period, because they could not obtain suitable fossils. The study nonetheless supports the conclusion that a decline in temperature might well have played an important part in the extinction of the dinosaurs.” ^c26

The Dinosaurs, mostly lacking any equivalent of the homeostatic, cybernetic systems of internal temperature and general metabolic regulation characterizing the mammals which succeeded them, and dependent on climate-sensitive plant life for their subsistence, are thought to have been highly vulnerable to the stresses of falling temperatures and changing vegetation patterns.

Graphic 14a: fluctuating temperatures

Graphic 14b: fluctuating temperatures

“Temperatures fluctuated toward the end of the Age of Reptiles. A maximum was reached about 80 million years ago; the subsequent decline may have brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. Above the graph are two dinosaurs and a primitive mammal.”

Graphic 14c: falling temperatures

“Temperatures declined during the Age of mammals. Oxygen isotope temperatures (dots) show that Pacific bottom water originating around Anarctica dropped from 10^oC to 2^oC between 31 and 1 million years ago. At top are three distinct mammals.”

Very recent discoveries tend to corroborate this picture, and its connection to atmospheric CO₂ depletion via photosynthesis. In response to new evidence, the onset of glaciation has been pushed back behind the late Pliocene originally thought to have been its locus, and into the Miocene. ^c27 More recently still, data from a Glomar Challenger expedition a little over a year old indicate a previously unsuspected ‘second Carboniferous’ age in the early Cretaceous Period:

“... the Deep Sea Drilling Project’s celebrated drill ship has plumbed extensive deposits of stinking black shales containing so much carbon that, suggests Dr. William Ryan of Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Geological Observatory and his colleagues, it could have upset the balance of the Earth’s atmosphere. Ensuing climatic changes could then have eliminated the dinosaurs and other Late Cretaceous animals.... Under conditions of oxygen lack at the bottoms of poorly aerated basins, the anerobic [ed: anaerobic] decay of vegetable and animal matter leads to the formation of carbon (sometimes as coal) and hydrocarbons, rather than carbon dioxide which, of course, returns to the atmosphere. Evidently, such conditions obtained extensively along the line where the Atlantic ocean was eventually to emplace itself. What has staggered DSDP researchers is the extent of the carbonaceous shales. One estimate places their carbon content as substantially more than that of all of North America’s coal deposits taken together. It seems likely that their formation caused a sharp decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide; that in turn, would have permitted much more of the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] heat to radiate into space. The resulting climatic downturn could well have been the death knell.” ^c28

“Because the deposits were laid down in a relatively short time geologically speaking, it has been suggested that they represent a rapid withdrawal of carbon from the environment, sufficient enough to have affected composition of the atmosphere and altered the climate, which would have put heavy stress on many forms of life, particularly the highly specialized reptiles.... The black shales not only lie along the African side of the ocean but extend from the continental margin of North America eastward of the Bermuda Rise, according to the drilling results. In view of this, Ryan suggests that the “carboniferous period” of the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] history occurred 100 million years ago, rather than during the coal-forming 200 million years earlier.” ^c29

Thus, the same accumulation process that formed the oil and coal deposits upon which contemporary industrial societal self-reproduction is founded, and which brought about, evidently, the downfall of the earlier form of the biosphere, the global rainforest, via the associated tendency for the rate of photosynthesis to fall and for world cooling/drought, culminating in the Ice and Desert Ages, may be at least part of the force which brought down the giant plant and animal organisms of the Mesozoic Era, the crowning forms of pre-social multi-cellular evolution, as well.

But our hypothesis places the onset of the ‘decadence of the biosphere’ much earlier than the dinosauric extinctions, in the prior Ice Age of the Permian Period, some 280 million years BP (Before Present), just after the all-time peak of photosynthetic reproductivity, the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian “coal-forming” periods still officially designated the “Carboniferous”, spoken of at the end of the last quotation. Our best information still indicates this Carboniferous Period, as our opening quotation suggests (see I - The Tendency of the Rate of Photosynthesis to Fall) to have been the ‘biotic boom’ crowning the ascendant phase of the photosynthetic biosphere (at least in its land plant aspect); the zenith of photosynthetic prosperity, with the highest rate of biospheric reproduction, or expanded reproduction of biomass, so far achieved on Earth. And, the rate of accumulation of biomass may have been mostly negative ever since.

This Carboniferous Age would then also mark the turning point from the ascendant to the decadent phase of the “photosynthetic solution” to the ‘problem’ of the self-reproduction of biotic or biological Nature. Since then, except for the interruption of the newly discovered sub-peak in the Cretaceous just cited, we have evidence of one long depression, or at least stagnation, in the rate of photosynthesis, a depression whose consequences, we hypothesize, included ocean surface waters cooling, hence reduced ocean surface waters evaporation, hence reduced precipitation over the surfaces of the land, hence drought and desertification, massive waves of extinction, ‘balding’ of the biosphere, and glacial devastation. This depression was evidently, at least, the underlying tendency, perhaps overwhelmed at intervals by countervailing forces such as spates of volcanic eruption, during which great quantities of CO₂ are expelled into the atmosphere from deep in the Earth, thus compensating for the photosynthetic losses.

As we shall see in the section following, the photosynthetic mode of reproduction was itself the ‘solution’ to a still earlier crisis of the biosphere, the ‘Heterotrophic’ or ‘Fermentation’ crisis. But, in the Carboniferous, the photosynthetic solution too came up against its immanent limits, and the Great Carbo-Permean Ice Age, following directly on the heels of the Carboniferous, signaled this awesome turn of events:

“Following the Silurian, high rates of photosynthesis are induced without corresponding quantities of organic materials immediately available ashore for decay and replenishment of CO₂. This suggests that oxygen may have “overswung” the present level to a somewhat higher value as the lush life of the Carboniferous developed. Then, with reduction of CO₂, the earth [ed: Earth] would cool, due to loss of the “greenhouse” effect of CO₂, leading to the ice ages of the Permian period. As the earth [ed: Earth] cooled, photosynthesis would sharply fall, leading to a major loss of oxygen.” ^c30

“During the Carboniferous period, when most of the coal and oil deposits were formed, about 10¹⁴ tons of carbon dioxide were withdrawn from the atmosphere-ocean system. This staggering loss must have dropped the earth’s [ed: Earth’s] temperature to chilly levels indeed; it is not surprising that the gigantic glaciers that moved across the earth [ed: Earth] after this period were perhaps the most extensive in history.” ^c31

In summary, we picture the history of the biosphere as one long decrescendo since the Carboniferous, with a ‘turning-point crisis’ in the Early Permian followed by a ‘terminal crisis’ beginning at the end of the Cretaceous, with the demise of the dinosaurs, and continuing into the glacieral conditions of the Tertiary and Quaternary, potentially fatal conditions for the biosphere which still, ambiguously, persist, and whose outcome is not yet decided. That outcome must be decided by the outcome of the current crisis in social evolution: the terminal crisis of world capitalism. The historical continuum branches ahead of us with essentially two possible trajectories: [econo-politically democratic, i.e., non-state-]Socialism or Fascist Neo-Barbarism.

The process of a successful transition to a world socialist society, involving the rapid burning up of fossil fuel reserves attendant upon the socially-urgent accelerated socialist industrialization of the “Third World”, plus the econo-ecological renovation of the “First” and “Second” Worlds, undertaken on the secure basis of an international crash program to develop and deploy fusion reactors and other post-hydrocarbonaceous energy technologies, coupled with subsequent coastal fusion-desalination plant irrigated agriculturalization and reforestation of Saharan and other desert regions of the planet, would rapidly lower the albedo (reflectivity) of the Earth, while simultaneously raising the atmospheric concentration of CO₂. This would rapidly ‘heat-up’ the global climate, and the primary productivity of the biosphere as well, at last putting a definitive end to the Ice Age and the long period of ecological decline. Cessation of presently intensifying forms of capitalist ‘looting of Nature’, such as the deforestation of the Amazon under the Fascist regime in Brazil, which threatens accelerated climatic degradation via increasing the albedo of the Earth in the Amazonian basin, and harmful modification of weather patterns, ^c32 would also contribute to global climatic improvement. Such measures would also, and not incidentally, augment both the volume of production and the productivity of world agriculture; the former, first of all, by bringing present desert/wasteland under cultivation, the latter by increasing the rate of photosynthesis for present and newly opened areas of cropland alike, via the CO₂ enrichment of the air. Thus, these measures would provide for the urgently needed nutritional upgrading of the standards of living of most of the human race, the present degradation of which represents a central gap in present productive forces, a gap whose closure constitutes a central goal of the first phase of any world socialist society.

Graphic 15: Earth’s atmosphere

Failing Socialist Revolution, the neo-barbarous collapse of civilization following close upon a short period of intensified natural looting, austerity, and Fascist self-cannibalization of humanity — even somehow assuming the avoidance of thermo-nuclear war — would signal the dénouement of social evolution and, with it, of all life on Earth; the shriveling up of humanity and of the rest of the biosphere in the descent into the icy darkness of the last ice age.

The hypothesis of global cooling due to CO₂ depletion as an explanation for the Ice Ages was attacked by Opik in the 1952 article quoted several times above, in the following terms:

“Variations in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a favourite topic in former speculations on climatic changes, need not be considered at all: absorption by water vapour practically covers all the absorption bands of carbon dioxide, and, in the presence of but minute quantities of water vapour, the additional absorption by carbon dioxide is nil. Variation in the amount of carbon dioxide will not alter the absorbing properties of our atmosphere, and will have no effect whatever on climate. If, nevertheless, the “greenhouse effect”, of carbon dioxide is sometimes mentioned, especially in popular books, this is due to lack of information regarding this particular problem of experimental physics. Practically all other theories of the ice ages and palaeoclimatic [ed: paleoclimatic] changes, which are based on purely terrestrial causes, are of a similar value and, thus, unfounded.” ^c33

This statement seems to directly contradict the statement quoted from Plass herein [see quote related to citation 24] according to which “the climatic effects due to carbon dioxide are almost entirely independent” of the amount of water vapor and “throughout most of the atmosphere carbon dioxide is the main factor determining changes in the radiation flux”! Opik’s statement also contradicts the absorption spectrum data presented by Plass [see Graphics 12a, 12b, 12c above], which shows very little overlap between water’s and CO₂’s absorption bands, especially in what Plass indicates to be the all-important 13 to 17 micron region of the Earth’s most intense infrared emission. Plass’s article was published in 1959, seven years after Opik’s, so that perhaps the “information regarding this particular problem of experimental physics” had been revised in the interim. However, more recent sources continue to show wavering on this question. For example, Carl Sagan changed his view regarding the respective roles of CO₂ and H₂O in the ‘runaway’ greenhouse effect believed responsible for the super-heated climate of Venus:

“Since CO₂ cannot ensure the necessary opacity over the broad range from 2 to 40 µ «microns», it was assumed in the initial variant of the greenhouse model «Kellog & Sagan, 1962» that the Venusian atmosphere contains a fairly large amount of H₂O (10 - 100 gm cm^-1).... In a later study, Sagan no longer insisted on large amounts of H₂O and, furthermore, pointed to the well-known fact that CO₂ absorption increases at the relatively high pressures assumed for the surface.” ^c34

A still more recent study, the book Atmospheres by Goody and Walker, vintage 1972, states that “water vapor is the principal absorbing gas in the Earth’s atmosphere” ^c35 but it is not clear whether this is due, in their view, to the present scarcity of CO₂ in the Earth’s atmosphere, relative to water vapor, or to the deficient absorption capabilities of CO₂.

Opik’s objection, however, even if partially true, ignores a salient fact about water vapor itself as a climatic heating agent: its strong correlation to the rate of photosynthesis, controlled by CO₂ levels, by way of the rate of evapotranspiration. “Transpiration” is the process by which plants pull a continuous column of water up through their root-hairs and circulate that water throughout their bodies, by evaporating water through “stomata” and like structures in the under-surfaces of their leaves. In this process, a kind of “reverse rain”, land plants act as powerful pumps which daily exhale tons of water into the atmosphere. So strongly correlated is the rate of this process to the rate of photosynthesis, that maps of the “Primary Productivity” of the globe (a function bounded by the ‘aggregate’ photosynthesis of the biosphere) have recently been constructed by direct calculation from global evapo-transpiration data. ^c36 Thus, a high rate of photosynthesis, made possible by a high atmospheric concentration of CO₂, should contribute to a warmer global climate, via stimulation of the rate of evapo-transpiration and the H₂O “greenhouse effect”, even if only on a more locally-restricted basis, given Plass’s contention [see quote related to citation 24] of the lesser atmospheric diffusability of H₂O vapor as against CO₂. Likewise, any drop in the level of atmospheric CO₂ should shortly amplify its direct cooling effect, by depressing the rate of transpiration, indirectly cooling the climate further through a drop in atmospheric water vapor levels.

Graphic 16: Earth’s atmosphere with regard to its vertical temperature gradient

With regard to the reversal of the trend of diminution in the atmospheric CO₂ content which seems to be an inadvertent (so far) consequence of the principal life-support activities of our species, we should mention a facet so far omitted. Not only do the combustion processes integral to the earlier, hunting, and to the later industrial technologies of homo sapiens accelerate the return of terrestrial carbon to a gaseous, atmospheric form, but so also do the agricultural activities which came into predominance in-between:

“During the past century a new geological force has begun to exert its effect upon the carbon dioxide equilibrium of the earth [ed: Earth]. By burning fossil fuels man dumps approximately six billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. His agricultural activities release two billion tons more. Grain fields and pastures store much smaller quantities of carbon dioxide than the forests they replace, and the cultivation of the soil permits the vast quantities of carbon dioxide produced by bacteria to escape into the air.” ^c37

In conclusion: we have arrived at an hypothesis of a general crisis in the biosphere, driven by the biosphere’s cumulative net withdrawal of a climate-warming carbon dioxide gas from Earth’s global atmosphere, expressed also, therefore, as a long fall-off in that biosphere’s life-giving rate of photosynthesis since the great boom of the Carboniferous, accompanied, with some lag, by a gradual refrigeration of the planetary climate, punctuated by violent episodes of glacial devastation, preceded by ocean surface water cooling, drought, and desertification, with restriction of the biotically fecund humid rainforests — veritable ‘vegetable bombs’ by virtue of the rapidity of their photosynthetic and evapotranspirative processes — to an ever-narrowing equatorial girdle. This long, gradual fall was broken by another episode of rapid photosynthesis and net CO₂ withdrawal in the Cretaceous, which, however, only intensified the crisis, leading to a “Time of Great Dying” in which the Great Reptiles and many other then-dominant plant and animal species perished; to stepped-up climatic cooling, to ocean surface waters’ cooling, thus to reduction in ocean surface waters’ rates of evaporation, therefore to reduction in rates of precipitation over land, i.e., to drought, leading to desertification, thence on to a new Ice Age, not yet definitively ended. This “Time of Great Dying”, and the subsequent glaciations, put an end to the predominance of those lineages of organisms which represented the flowering of multicellular pre-social evolution, ushering in the reign of the more gregarious mammalian line. Thenceforth, only evolution surmounting the merely multicellular plane of organization, and building structure on the next, the social, level of “aggregation” could provide potential for a new viable basis for the long-term continuity/“continuability” of the biosphere. That potential was to come to fruition, as potential, through an offshoot of the society-forming mammalian line, in the form of humankind. That potential has yet to be realized, now, in the closing decades of the twentieth century.

Graphic 17: current world deserts

IV - The Crisis of One-Previous

But the multicellular-organism dominated, photosynthetically-based biosphere which came to its crisis in the geologically latest epoch of the history of Earth-life, as we have seen, was, we suspect, itself the ‘solution’ to a much more ancient crisis, a crisis of the pre-multicellular, pre-photosynthetic biosphere whose life, it is believed, was confined to the warm primeval ocean, and to exclusively unicellular forms.

According to the currently hegemonic ‘Heterotroph Hypothesis’ ^c38, this, the original form of the biosphere, was based not on respiration as today for both higher plants and ‘higher animals’, a mode of metabolism requiring the ‘breathing’ of oxygen, nor on photosynthesis, a form of synthesis of organic “food” molecules requiring the ‘breathing’ of CO₂, but rather on fermentation, an anaerobic and much less energy-efficient metabolic ‘technology’. Large organic molecules which represent “food” — biological free energy or negentropy sources — for respiratory metabolism, such as acetic acid (vinegars) and alcohols, represent excreta — waste [bio-entropy], or poison — for fermenting organisms. These molecules could become metabolizeable only after free gaseous oxygen (O₂) was released into the atmosphere by photosynthesizing plants.

The synthesis of organic molecules required to feed the fermentation of the slowly swelling bloom of unicellular organisms populating the early ocean was accomplished, not of course by photosynthesizing plants, which had yet to evolve, but instead by the primitive, oxygenless atmosphere itself. We could call this process ‘atmo-photo-synthesis’ or ‘atmo-thermo-synthesis’, or just ‘atmo-synthesis’ for short. Through processes driven by molecular energy input derived ultimately from the sun’s light, and perhaps also from the self-heating of the early Earth owing to nuclear decay of the heavier, radioactively unstable, atoms contained in its mass, the gaseous methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water (vapor) thought to have been the main constituents of the early atmosphere combined into larger proto-proteinoid and ‘carbohydrateous’ molecules which precipitated out into the ocean because of their weight -- wherein the warm brothy solution accumulated in this way promoted further molecule-building and molecule-expanding reactions.

Out of the non-living cell-like colloidal structures known to be formed spontaneously by sufficiently rich concentrations of these macro-molecules — structures called “coacervates” and “microspheres” — the early unicellular organisms are thought to have developed. Once vitalized, these structures would systematically turn on the same molecular building blocks out of which they had constructed themselves, and feed, gobbling them up to stoke the slow, biological combustion of their fermentation metabolism, which break apart such organic molecules — to the uses of these primitive cells — thereby releasing to cellular appropriation the solar-derived and heat-derived chemical binding energy that had held those molecules together. It is especially the molecular reactions of “autocatalytic” and “reflexive catalytic” type, in conjunction with other “circular” chemical operations, that are thought responsible for the eventual vitalization of the spontaneous, originally merely mechanically cell-like colloidal formations. ^c39 Such chemical reactions, of a “highly nonlinear”, “nonequilibrium” sort, give rise to “coherent” and “self-oscillatory” steady-states; to “dissipative”, locally negentropic, “spatio-temporally ordered” structures and behaviors of a kind believed essential to the phenomenologies which we recognize as “life”; as “living”. ^c40

Present-day plants are called “autotrophs”, which means, roughly, “self-feeders”. The term “heterotroph”, on the contrary, refers to organisms drawing their nourishment from sources “other-than-self”. The latter term is applied, therefore, to present-day animals, and to the hypothesized primitive cells, dependent for their food on ‘atmosynthesis’. Hence the name “Heterotroph Hypothesis” given to this model of the origin of the biosphere.

As the process of the primitive biosphere continued, the waste products of fermentation — ‘heterotrophic entropy’ — must have accumulated in the primeval sea as a growing reservoir of “toxic pollution” relative to the merely fermentative ‘metabolic technology’ of primitive unicellular life, threatening to poison the mounting swarms of heterotrophs populating that sea in much the way today’s fermenting bacteria and yeast, remote descendants of the primeval heterotrophs — die in their own alcoholic excretions in the process of winemaking. Furthermore, the demand for organic molecules constituted by this mounting population probably eventually outstripped the supply capabilities of a non-increasing, or perhaps declining, rate of atmosynthesis, leading to a relative depletion of food sources, a worsening scarcity of metabolizeable organic matter. Oparin, co-originator of the Heterotroph Hypothesis, describes the resulting crisis of the ‘Heterotrophic Biosphere’ in the following passage:

“The primitive metabolism of energy was entirely anerobic [ed: anaerobic] «oxygenless» and depended on the interaction of organic substances with molecules of water. But the supply of organic substance which could undergo fermentation must have been, therefore, decreasing in the primitive hydrosphere, being replaced by fermentation products such as carbon dioxide, alcohol, lactic and butyric acid, etc. Sooner or later this process must have come to a natural end with the complete exhaustion of organic nutrient material and the death of all living things. That this did not actually happen is due to the fact that some micro-organisms had acquired the ability to utilize light energy by virtue of their pigmentation.” ^c41

At least one lineage of the primitive organisms, under this mounting constraint, began to internalize the process of atmospheric synthesis of organic molecules. Evolution in the direction of internal synthesis is thought to have proceeded gradually, as a step by step ‘recapitulation in reverse’. In other words, whereas atmosynthesis began with simple molecules — H₂, NH₄, CH₄ and H₂O — and built complex ones, the evolution of internal synthesis would begin with the synthesis of rather complex molecules, and move back toward synthesis of the simpler ones as it proceeded. Ability to synthesize the scarcest of the common big food molecules (call it A) by internal transformation of several less scarce but less readily ‘etable’ molecules (call these B, C, and D) would develop first. But the resulting rise in consumption of, B, C, & D would eventually render them in turn scarce, putting a survival-premium on development of the ability to synthesize them from other, perhaps even less ‘etable’ molecules, and so on. Development of pigments, such as today’s chlorophyll, allowing the use of photons — i.e., the same solar energy source which drove the atmospheric synthesis process — would complete the internalization of ‘atmosynthesis’. The ‘autotroph’ represents an internalization or ‘folding-in’ of the whole previous environment of atmosynthesis in the same way that the primitive heterotrophs represented a concentrated ‘tucking-in’ -- ‘in’ to little colloidal pouches, known as “cells” — of the chemical ferment of the primitive ocean environment, a ferment originally spread throughout its great volume. The primitive ocean as a whole was thus the first great ‘cell’, just as the whole primeval atmosphere was the de facto first great ‘plant’, or chloroplast.

The more perfected forms of ‘photo(n)-synthesis’ involve the release of free gaseous oxygen, O₂, as exhaust. Photosynthetically-produced free oxygen, bubbling up out of the ooze of the primitive sea and, much later, venting out of the stomatic ‘pores’ of land plants, transformed the chemical nature of the atmosphere, from a “reducing” (electron-giving) to the opposite, “oxidizing” (electron-grabbing) state, putting a stop to atmosynthesis. Oxygen stopped atmosynthesis by disrupting the chemical reactions on which atmosynthesis depends, and also by forming an ozone (O₃-) layer in the upper atmosphere, shutting out much of the ultraviolet photon flux that had, in part, driven atmosynthesis. But this screening of the harsh ultraviolet rays also facilitated the invasion of the exposed land surfaces by biological organisms. More important, free oxygen allowed the metabolism of fermentation to be upgraded into the much more bio-energy-profitable, “aerobic” or oxygen-consuming metabolism of respiration. Once respiration came into play, the formidable oceanic accumulations of ‘heterotrophic pollution’ — ‘waste’ or ‘entropy’ for fermentative life — alcohols, lactic and butyric acids, etc. — could be mined as food; could become biological “free energy”, or ‘material negentropy’ for respirative life:

“In the absence of free oxygen all these substances are entirely unavailable for the animals of that epoch, but with the advent of oxygen the possibility of their utilization as sources of energy has been realized.” ^c42

Thus photosynthesis ‘solved’ the fundamental contradiction of the heterotrophic biosphere; its self-discontinuing continuity. That is, photosynthesis was the ‘form of continuum’ of that otherwise terminal -- self-terminating; self-dis-continuing — biosphere; the form in which a continuity of that biosphere, beyond the heterotrophic limit, was possible. Though we cannot speak with certainty, in direct homology with the form of the photosynthetic limit, of a ‘tendency of the rate of atmosynthesis to fall’, we can speak of, a ‘fermentation crisis’, and of a ‘tendency of the rate of fermentation to fall’. Photosynthesis became the basis