Biospheres: Metamorphosis of Planet Earth - Hardcover

Sagan, Dorion

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0070544263 ISBN 13: 9780070544260

Publisher: McGraw-Hill, 1990

Synopsis

Describes the earth as a living biological identity and discusses the extent to which biospheres will be produced on earth rather than in space

About this title

About the Author:

Dorion Sagan is an award-winning author and co-author of twenty-four books translated into eleven languages. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, The Skeptical Inquirer, Wired, Cabinet, Natural History, The Sciences, and other magazines. His coauthored What is Life? (Main Selection, Global Business Network Book Club), was called “A masterpiece of science writing” in Orion magazine, and included on a list of “Mind-Altering Masterpieces” by Utne Reader. His book Into the Cool, coauthored with ecologist Eric D. Schneider, was tagged “fascinating” by Nobel Prize winning chemist and poet Roald Hoffmann, and Melvin Konner, in The New York Times wrote about Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution that "this admiring reader of Lewis Thomas, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould has seldom, if ever, seen such a luminous prose style in a work of this kind." Although known primarily as a science writer and essayist, he has also contributed to philosophical works such as Zone 6 (MIT Press) and A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans (University of Minnesota Press). A Fellow of the Lindisfarne Association, he has been a Humana Scholar at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, and received an Educational Press Association of America Excellence in Educational Journalism Award for “The Riddle of Sex,” which appeared in The Science Teacher. His Death and Sex, a two-in-one hardcover published by Chelsea Green, won the 2010 New York Book Show in the competitive general trade nonfiction category. His current interests include philosophy and science fiction.

From Publishers Weekly:

Biospheres are self-contained ecological environments, ranging from laboratory-bred bacteria colonies to the Soviet Bios project involving prototypes of interplanetary spaceships. Coauthor with Lynn Margulis of Micro cosmos , Sagan takes a close look at Biosphere II, a sealed metal-and-glass terrarium for animals, plants and humans now under construction near Tucson, Ariz. Criticized by some as technocratic Disneylands or elitist retreats, biospheres are defended here as bulwarks against an increasingly polluted world, as experimental laboratories and even as confirmation of British chemist James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which views planet Earth as a single, live, self-regulating organism. Sagan's convoluted futurist tract is most useful for its sifting of evidence for the Gaia hypothesis from diverse areas--the behavior of termites, atmospheric science, genetics, etc.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0070544263
• ISBN 13: 9780070544260
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 198