Marburger Forum    Beiträge zur geistigen Situation der Gegenwart  Jg. 2 (2001), Heft 4

by

Geraldo Mario Rohde

Geologist, Environmental Scientist
Fundação de Ciência e Tecnologia
Porto Alegre, BRAZIL

Keywords: Environmental Sciences; Epistemology; paradigm change; Environmental Geology; environmental theory of knowledge; disciplinary concepts.

Any attempt to make an approach of the complex reality that exists on the planet Earth nowadays will necessarily show the insufficiency of the scientific disciplines. The impossibility of a correct approach of the reality, by natural and social sciences, can be found both at the theoretical and empirical levels.

The theoretical argumentation must then start with the lack of the natural paradigm that begins with Aristotle's ideas about nature, which were followed and developed by Bacon, Galileo and Newton. In this paradigm, nature only operates by itself and remains untouched by man's actions. The complete framework of reality is ready and the sciences can only explain, describe or classify it.

Since Kant, however, the great degree of freedom of human beings is well known. He states, in the classic Critique of Judgement (1790), that:

"For man's reason informs him how to adapt things to his own arbitrary whims – whims for which he was not himself all predestined by nature" (Kant, 1988 [1793], p. 15).

Expanding this contingent possibility in a planetary scale, we have the action of Homo sapiens as a geological agent.

3. Humankind as a geological agent

The humankind as a geological agent was foreseen by Vernadsky (1998 [1926] and 1945) and is now well established by the concepts of Environmental Geology:

• Quinary and Technogene (Guerasimov, 1979; Chemekov, 1982; and Ter-Stepanian, 1988);

• Anthropostrome (Passerini, 1984);

• Anthropogeology (Jäckli, 1962, 1972, 1982 and 1985; Young, 1975 and Hubbert, 1977);

• Geochemical landscapes (Fortescue, 1980);

• Global Change (Graedel & Crutzen, 1989; Firor, 1990; Oberbeck, 1993; Allègre, 1992; Allègre & Schneider, 1994; Huch, 1994; Pernetta, 1995 and Rohde, 1996).

This human action in geological scale is recorded according to its diverse aspects: landscape, lithological, geodynamical, (seismical, hydrological, massive and erosional), geochemical and fossiliferal.

There are other kinds of actions that appear in a planetarian scale, like climate change, a potential mass extinction through the loss of biodiversity and the near-space solid wastes (debris from spatial activities).

In a next higher step, humankind appears as a new force that tries to drive the Universe with the landings on the Moon, probes on Mars, Jupiter and the comets, and SOHO mission to the Sun. The action over other planets is planned with the use of the "terraforming" concept (Fogg, 1995).

Taking the human freedom of acting into the ideas expressed in Schelling's work of about nature, it becomes very clear that reality ("Wirklichkeit", in German) is under one effectuation ("wirken", in German) that is the expression of cosmic and natural forces, and another one that is the human effectuation. More than this, on the light of the self-organization theory, human beings are, as animals, autopoietic systems (Maturana & Varela, 1993 and 1995), for their own maintenance and reproduction, and also have an allopoietic capacity to modify their context (Rohde, 1995 and 1996). This anthropic and anthropogenic (Skopek & Váchal, 1989) force that now drives the Earth system comes mostly from the use of fossil fuel, in a historic context of energy and materials production and leads to, at planetary level, what is now called "global change".

This human allopoietic capacity makes it possible to initiate, to produce, to influence, to provoke, to accelerate, to induce, to intensify and to amplify processes that already occur in natural spontaneous phenomena and some of these would not occur without the human action.

Far from a simple and strictly scientific revolution as, e. g., the position of the Earth in the heliocentric model (a revolution in Astronomy by Copernicus which was unconscious of itself) or the ascent of global tectonics in Geology, made in a very explicit way by Tuzo Wilson in Praha (1968) or the forthcoming revolution of bolid impacts (Alvarez, 1986; Marvin, 1990a and 1990b), the revolution of the environmental sciences is made at an epistemological level.

The first epistemological revolution was the book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" (Kuhn, 1970 [1962]) itself, giving a new direction to the theory of knowledge and the meaning of scientific change.

The second epistemological revolution is the substitution of the natural by the environmental paradigm, the radical emergency of the environmental sciences (Rohde, 1995 and 1996). It is no more possible to sustain the naturalistic approach of reality because nature now does not work alone on the planet Earth; changes are both natural and man-made, throughout social mediated actions. The revolution of the environmental sciences must be put at an epistemological level because it is, firstly, done in various disciplines and it needs the intervention of interdisciplinarity and transdiciplinarity. Secondly, it stresses that an attempt to compare scientific enigmas in a point to point check with nature, as proposed by Kuhn's book, is no more feasible due to the fact that the puzzle of reality has, now, a very strong anthropogenic component.

The revolution of the environmental sciences (Rohde, 1995 and 1996) establishes the environmental field at an epistemological level and the making up of the particular environmental sciences, both needing new tools, which are:

• the use of the philosophy of effectuation by Schelling (1988 [1799]);

• the application of the theory of self-organization (Varela; Maturana; Uribe, 1974; Andrew, 1979) to demonstrate the existence of a human allopoietic effectuation of planetarian-geological dimensions;

• the articulation of the philosophical-scientifical implications in a way of recurrency that includes contingency (Cirne-Lima, 1997), reprocessuality Huggett, 1993), ethics (Jonas,1984; Grün, 1996; Callicott, 1997), history (White Jr., 1967; Roberts, 1989) and hermeneutics (Wright, 1974);

• a new framework for empirical sampling of environmental data (the environmental sampling matrix; Rohde, 1995, p. 136 and Rohde, 1996, p. 74);

• the interdisciplinarity and transdiciplinarity approaches and strategies (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1991; Godard, 1992a and 1992b).

An environmental science is the one that takes into account the process between the natural and the human effectuation, which is the artificial complexation of the natural complexity, the interactive relations between the natural and the social (or cultural) systems. Therefore, the environmental sciences can be set as the study of the human allopoietic effectuation (Rohde, 1995 and 1996).

The present situation of the Earth system, which results in great part from the worldwide spreading of the values and products of western industrial civilization, puts humankind in a situation that can be identified as a philosophical trap of planetarian scale: we are, today, in a global performatic contradiction.

In classic History we affirm "progress" and "development", but the environmental sciences show physical damages like ozone depletion (Stolarski, 1988), greenhouse effect (Kirstein, 1994), acid rain (Mohnen, 1988), desertification, climate change (Schneider, 1989; Houghton & Woodwell, 1989), and solid waste – in land, water and near space surroundings; biosphere destruction by loss of biodiversity (Wilson, 1989), extinctions and deforestation; and social problems such as misery, poverty, hazard and war migrations and epidemic diseases.

All forms of life modify their context, but only the human race has now the power of global destruction and, on the other hand, the ethical imperative of never doing so.

Humankind introduces disorder and chaos in a dynamic system that was enduring, sustainable and self-organized for more than 3 billion years, leaning to environmental and social uncertainties that must, now, be faced by all the sciences.

The Science of the Earth System (NASA, 1988), the United States Global Change Research Plan (Peck, 1991), the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme-IGBP (1990), the German "mission to Earth" (Lange & Olbers, 1990; BMFT, 1992) and the International Dimensions of Global Change initiative (Jacobson & Price, 1991) are good examples of initiatives that try to determine these uncertainties based on system's theory, but still remain with some handicaps of the insufficiencies that arise from the natural paradigm (historical, scientific and epistemological) in its form of applied science.

The need of a correct theoretical setting for the environmental sciences is essential, because on this epistemological approach will depend (Rohde, 1995 and 1996):

• the correct interpretation of the global change in progress, the Earth biophysical limits, the strategies for survival, the global environmental policies, worldwide treaties, the implementation of mitigation measures and the monitoring systems to recognize the rights and mistakes;

• the social perception of global and local change, the dynamic societal learning about these changes and the important role of environmental education in this context;

• the feedback of these two aspects of reality.

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