“The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson.



If one stretches one’s imagination a bit too far, one would realize that the whole bio-sphere, the so called earth, inhabited by living organisms including man, is only a thin film of bio-plasma, resembling an oil slick in the sea. Curiously, at its thickest part this film is just twenty miles wide, while the radius of this whole is around 4000 miles in length. In short, the thickness is just 0.5% of the radius, even at the highest part of the atmosphere and the lowest part of the bottom of the ocean. Within this space the whole gamut of creation, maintenance and destruction occurs, at a phenomenal pace.



This is run exclusively by the only source of energy, the kingpin of the solar system, the sun. There are billions of other planets and galaxies but we are not able to communicate with them for the simple reason that they are billions of light years away from us. May be, there are more intelligent creatures in one of those planets, wanting to speak to us, but that looks rather remote for now. Let us be satisfied with learning about our planet and try to keep it going for our progeny.



Every single second of the existence of this biosphere there goes on hectic activity in all fronts. The basic units of all that exists are the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and some trace minerals. Basically, all energy for all the happenings in this bio- sphere comes from the sun’s rays through the greatest of all laboratories, the green leaf, where carbon dioxide combines with water to produce the green pigment, chlorophyll-the basis of all foods.



Man, proud man, with all his scientific achievements, is not able to replicate this one simple chemical reaction in his laboratory, however sophisticated the latter might be. All the energy sources that we tap, the fossil fuels, are also derived originally from the sun’s rays. Chlorophyll forms the basis of all food; consequently man is basically a vegetarian to begin with. Our infrastructure, the body, is built to digest vegetables only and not meat!



We have no idea how the building blocks the, DNA, is built from the elements mentioned above, although we claim that we can clone a man. How does the cell get formed, in the first place, is still a mystery and might remain so for ever. Reductionist science teaches us the methods to study an organ through the study of its component parts but given the component parts we would not be able to reconstruct the same organ from its bits and pieces. The bits may not make the whole! There is something more than what meets the eye here.



However, we have some idea as to what happens after death in the natural set up. Prof. Jerry A. Payne studied a wild pig, which died in its natural habitat in the forest in Tennessee. The body lasted for eight days and every day he studied with the help of other scientists the multiplicity of organisms that visited the body, excluding himself and his colleagues. When at the end of eight days there were only the teeth, bones, and the dry skin of the pig left behind by millions of other organisms that fed on the dead pig. Nothing really goes waste in this closed network of the biosphere where there is always an interaction between the living the non-living things that go to make the living things in the first place.



Denis Flanagan, the co-founder and editor of the Scientific American sums up this process in his inimitable style thus: “Payne got the carcass of the pig that died of natural causes…over the eight days Payne regularly sampled the carcass for the organisms that had come to them (not including himself). He identified a total of 522 species, representing 3 phyla, 9 classes, 31 orders, 151 families and 359 genera. Of the 522 species, 422 were insects.”



The impact of some of our mindless actions for temporary gain is seen in our use of chemical fertilizers for the so-called green revolution. It has now come to a pass that none of the dead animals in the villages get destroyed as easily as the pig in the Tennessee forests. Chemicals must have themselves destroyed most of the species that come to visit the carcass. Even the earthworm, the farmers’ friend, is no more there to burrow into the land. The earth can not now breathe to remain as fertile as it wants.





Ecological imbalance in the species could eventually make man perish from this planet. There are islets of hope still. I recently met a farmer in Hyderabad who gets more returns from his land, which no one in the world could match. His family for generations has not used artificial fertilizers at all. He gets four times the normal yield in his paddy (rice) fields! Similar is the story of his fruit trees.



The antibiotic use in human infections since the early 40’s has now reached a stage where most, if not all, the germs seen in some hospital intensive therapy units have become resistant to all the available five hundred antibiotic molecules! A good example of the ecological imbalance in the symbiosis between man and germ, both being good friends in the normal ecological balance, is evident now because of the misuse of antibiotics. Some hospitals in the UK and USA had to close down their operating theatres for want of better methods to sterilize the instruments.



The Times London carried an article on the Antibiotic Time Bomb, which might explode any time. The story of tuberculosis, which once ravaged mankind, has reared its ugly head again. It is threatening to be the most dangerous epidemic in the west in the next century, bringing back to memory the horror of the great epidemics of the White Death, in contrast to the Black Death of plague. It was called white because most patients dying of TB were both young adolescents and had bled so much during their last few weeks that they all looked pale and white after death!





Our ancestors must have known all this. We have been making all our durable things like bags, belts, wallets etc from dead animal skin, as the latter lasts long and resist quick degradation like the soft tissues. In fact, it is the skin of man that keeps all the internal organs safe from invading germs; but ironically skin hosts millions of them on its surface always to keep them going, true symbiosis. W.H.Auden wrote a poem on the theme:

For creatures your size, I offer

a free choice of habitat,

so settle yourself in the zone

that suits you best, in the pools

of my pores or the tropical

forests of arm-pit and crotch,

in the deserts of my fore-arms,

Or the cool woods of my scalp.



While we boast that we could easily clone a man, we are still not able to get the whole man. Clone is only a twig and the man we clone would only be a look alike but not the whole man, as the latter has another big dimension to him, that of his consciousness that shapes his personality and all his actions. That apart we are far from evening knowing how to put the atoms together to make a molecule and the to put the molecules together to make organs etc. Our reductionist science only teaches us how to break things down but not how to build things up.



One would have, by now, realized that the thin film bio-plasma churns out every life on this planet and then at the end of the day recycles the dead organisms into its bosom for recycling. This should teach us the greatest lesson of our lives. The more we abuse our bio-sphere with non-degradable artificial matter like plastic, more we would drive ourselves towards upsetting this normal cycle of birth and death and could one day end up destroying the very base of our existence. Man, with his proclivity for comfort and his passionate greed, would eventually destroy every natural resource in this biosphere.



Ozone depletion, warming up of the global atmosphere, clogging the atmosphere with all kinds of gases emitted from burning fossil fuels, deforestation depleting the top soil, artificial fertilizers and antiseptics killing all kinds of germs needed to keep the earth breathing for plant survival, plastic waste choking the soil and also the larger animals who eat them, would certainly upset the ecological balance in the bio-sphere.



Although man does not know how to create life, he has enough indication that he could upset the process of both creation and eventual decay by altering the ecological balance. I am reminded of what Emerson once said: “If there is an end for man on this planet, it would through civilization." The monetary economy of getting more and more and hating one another man has been systematically driving himself more towards the animal instincts rather than refining him to be human and humane.



Mankind, I am afraid, will have to pay a very heavy prize, otherwise. The study of our biosphere must be a very important part of school education. It is in that age group that students could be converted to the correct line of thinking. Many scholars call themselves ecologists, but I wonder if they realize the gravity of the situation! Many of them take it to ridiculous levels of irrationality that attracts non-compliance. We can not ask man to go back to the forest to live in tune with nature. We have to find a way out of these two extremes. It would be possible to have the same economy keeping in mind the need to preserve our environment.



“We have grasped the mystery of the atom, and rejected the Sermon on the Mount.”

Omar Bradley.