The Living Planet

Platnick, N. I. (1999). Dimensions of biodiversity targeting megadiverse groups. In The Living Planet in Crisis. Biodiversity Science and Policy, eds. J. Cracraft and F. T. Grifo, pp. 33-52. New York Columbia University Press. 

The name of the living planet, Gaia, is not a synonym for the biosphere. The biosphere is defined as that part of the Earth where living things normally exist... 

Environmental News Service (2004) Human ecological debt now too great to repay. 21 Oct The Living Planet Report 2004 www.panda.org/livingplanet Last visited 29 April 2008... 

Collen, B., Loh, J., Holbrook, S., McRae, L., Amin, R. and Baillie, J. E. M. (2009a). Monitoring change in vertebrate abundance the living Planet Index. Conservation Biology, 23 317-327. 

Lamoreux, J. F., Jenkins, M., Kapos, V. and Randers, J. (2005). The Living Planet Index using species population time series to track trends in biodiversity. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B, 360 289-295. 

As this book went to press, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Committee (2005) issued an interim report on the state of the Earth s ecosystems and the services they provide. This report, based on a four-year study and the collective findings of 1,300 scientists from 95 countries, provides a synthesis of environmental data on an unprecedented scale (see the Living Planet Reports of the World Wide Fund for Nature discussed on p. 202-205) and arrives at four conclusions as summarized below ... 

We cover each of these types of examples in separate chapters of this book, but there is a clear connection as well. In all of these examples, the main factor that maintains thermodynamic disequilibrium is the living biosphere. Without the biosphere, some abiotic photochemical reactions would proceed, as would reactions associated with volcanism. But without the continuous production of oxygen in photosynthesis, various oxidation processes (e.g., with reduced organic matter at the Earth s surface, reduced sulfur or iron compounds in rocks and sediments) would consume free O2 and move the atmosphere towards thermodynamic equilibrium. The present-day chemical functioning of the planet is thus intimately tied to the biosphere. 

In addition to stable elements, radioactive elements are also produced in stars. The unstable but relatively long-lived isotopes °K, Th, and make up the internal heat source that drives volcanic activity and processes related to internal convection in the terrestrial planets. The short-lived transuranium elements such as Rn and Ra that are found on the Earth are all products of U and Th decay. 

The conversion of building block molecules into an energy-rich, reactive form is referred to as activation. This process can be carried out in the laboratory (in vitro) but also occurs in all the cells of all the living organisms on our planet (in vivo). 

The plant species biomass of Boreal and Sub-Boreal Forest ecosystems accumulates a significant part of living matter of the whole planet. This value is about 700 x 106 tons of dry weight. The biomass per unit area of different Forest ecosystems varies from 100 to 300 ton/ha and even 400 ton/ha in the Eastern European Oak Forest ecosystems. The annual net primary productivity, NPP, varies from 4.5 to 9.0 ton/ha (Table 1). 

I see this notion as an effort to explain the very real sense of informational interconnectedness that pervaded our experience, which occurred in one of the densest tropical forests on the planet. We did seem to be in touch with the living mind of the... 

According to the foregoing analysis, conformers such as gauche- and anri-butane or chair and twist-boat cyclohexane would be considered to be diastereomers of each other. However, under most conditions these conformers interconvert so rapidly that butane and cyclohexane are considered to be single species and not mixtures of stereoisomers. When we have to write chemistry books for people living on the outer planets of the solar system, we might have to modify these concepts. 

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