Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.
—Job 38:18 (NRSV)
At the very start of the whirlwind speech, Job, who has been asking for an explanation for his terrible misfortunes occurring in spite of his piety, receives an abrupt comeuppance from God: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me” (Job 38:2–3). This is the introduction to a towering set of questions about planetary creation, function, and biodiversity. It is a revelation of the creation and the most elaborate of the creation accounts in the Bible.1 At some level, the whirlwind speech is about Job’s legal standing to ask God, “Why?” “Why,” if Job was a good man and more than complied with what he was supposed to do, had he fallen into such a pitiable condition? Why does a benevolent, all-powerful deity allow bad things to happen to good people such as Job? “Why me, God?”
Such “why” questions arise in any culture whose religion centers on a protective, omnipotent deity. Accordingly, direct interactions between humans and gods to ask “why” are themes in many religious traditions. In these interactions, an immediate issue is whether a mere mortal should be allowed even to speak to the divine. This determination often involves a test. Job was not asked slay a horrific dragon along with its kith and kin, nor to tussle with various demigods, nor to bring back sundry magical objects from some intensely malevolent lady. Instead Job was challenged to comprehend the Earth and its workings. For an environmental scientist, the idea that understanding the way the world works somehow constitutes a challenge as daunting as slaying Grendel or capturing the Erymanthian Boar has an obvious appeal.
The quest to comprehend the Earth sweeps in a remarkable breadth of human knowledge, including the natural sciences of physics, astronomy, earth science, chemistry, and biology. Given the growing density of human beings on Earth and their propensity to change things around themselves as the planetary keystone species, the charge to comprehend Earth also has a sense of urgency. It is a scientific “good question”—difficult, well posed, synthetic, and important.
Answering this particular good question has been a scientific quest for much of the history of science. Certainly a high point was reached in the remarkable insights gained by the early scientists and naturalists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The voyages of exploration and discovery, the insights of the polymath scientists of the age of Enlightenment, and the simultaneously detailed and expansive conjectures of ecologists, anthropologists, and archeologists have provided the foundations upon which we build. In 1676, Isaac Newton wrote to Robert Hooke, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,”2 humbly referring to Newton’s exceptional contribution to science and his debt to the scientists of the past. Scientific discoveries of the present build on and reanalyze previous findings. This is certainly the case for scientists striving for increased comprehension of Earth. Surely, we stand upon shoulders of giants: Alexander von Humboldt attempting to understand the interconnected nature of living and physical systems; Svante Arrhenius calculating the effect of changing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by expanding ideas from Joseph Fourier eighty years earlier; George Hadley and William Ferrel trying to understand the cause behind the patterns of sea winds that had allowed navigators from centuries earlier to traverse unknown waters of the oceans; along with many others great and small, famous and unappreciated.
A second Newtonian reflection made near the end of his life captures another essential aspect of the forward progress in global environmental sciences: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”3 Like Newton, the past giants of Earth-system science were driven by their own curiosity to understand better the connectivity of nature. They were smart, driven, and often willing to take great risks in hazardous situations.
Think of Andrés de Urdaneta deciding to use a volta do mar to navigate the Pacific route from the Philippines to Mexico, or Joseph Banks stepping on board the HMS Endeavour bound for the South Pacific and Australia with Captain Cook. Many of them were wealthy or backed by supportive patrons. They were essentially doing what they enjoyed, what they had to do, what was their life’s quest. They resembled Newton’s boy playing on a seashore collecting pebbles and shells, but they and Newton were simultaneously much more. They likely would have not have had an easy time writing an incremental grant proposal to some nation’s science funding agency. A promotion and tenure committee at a university would have counseled them to try to get out some early results in a good journal—the more the better.
We live in a time of great need to understand our planet. We have the challenge of comprehending Earth as we simultaneously change the Earth. Are we creating the intellectual environment for creative, synthetic, and revolutionary researchers that can push us across the old boundaries into new paradigms? It is a not a question of letting scientists do what scientists do. It is a question for us all. Sadly, the politicization and the businessification of science may be taking the intellectual and creative environment in the opposite direction.
The tools at our disposal for the challenges in Earth-system science would be the envy of the environmental researchers who have come before us. We have satellite systems capable of remarkable measurements, along with a repository of innovative new systems on the shelf. Products of several of these are shown as illustrations in this text. However, the satellite constellation of the U.S. space agency, NASA, is falling into a state of disrepair. Some of this lost capability is being replaced by the orbiting instruments developed by other nations or by international and even commercial consortia. But overall, there is a loss of capability at this critical time. The conversion from satellite data provided free to researchers of any nation by NASA to a more nationally oriented, pay-as-you-go system may have a negative effect on creative, small-budget exploratory research.
Other capabilities include sophisticated chemical-analytical methods that can trace differences in the stable isotopes of elements and even isolate individual chemical compounds in microscopic samples for isotope analysis. These and the sophisticated analyses of DNA and other biochemical compounds using modern molecular biology provide new data to challenge old theories and produce new ones. These methodologies seem to have penetrated the public consciousness through their sometimes magical use in the fully instrumented forensic laboratories of TV police shows. Results of these chemical and physical instruments have also shown up in several of the chapters here, ranging from applications involving the details of the creation of the solar system to documenting fermented mare’s milk in pottery of the Botai culture in southern Ukraine and Kazakhstan six thousand years ago.
The Earth is a place that life has made much different from what it otherwise might be. In the past, different organisms have changed the planet. Archeons altered the Earth’s ocean and atmospheric chemistry. Photosynthetic species manufactured an oxygen-rich atmosphere far from its natural chemical equilibrium. These same photosynthetic species may have pulled enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to reduce the greenhouse effect and produce a frozen “snowball” Earth. The effects of modern technological human culture, even with its population expected to reach nine billion by the year 2050, pales in comparison to these agents for change on Earth.
Given available resources, the human per capita use of energy and materials also has edged up over time. Because of the increased population and increased use of the resources of Earth, we have begun to modify the internal feedbacks of the planet. Not as much as the changes from the archeons or from the photosynthesizers, as the collision of asteroids, or as the eruptions of an unusually active volcanic era, but we are changing the Earth nonetheless. To think otherwise is to ignore a considerable body of fairly easily understood information.
That the Earth previously has changed radically in the past is cold comfort. Life on Earth in some form has held on through billions of years. The question really is whether our species or our complex society will continue to find a comfortable home on Earth, our home for which we clearly have no other habitable alternative. Comprehending Earth was the subject of the whirlwind speech and its questions. In considering these questions, this book has attempted to provide some insight on the functioning of this interactive planetary system; this tiny blue and white marble in the vastness of space; this, our galactic home. We truly need to comprehend the Earth—its physical systems, its biota, its internal feedbacks, and our place in this marvel. The lives of the generations to come depend upon it.
