Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History of the Future

Very interesting book by Dorian Sagan that takes a different approach to the big questions in science and philosophy. Sagan is at times hilarious, especially in his critiques of religion and creationism. He is a big thinker with some unique insights on nature. I recommend this book as well as his book from years ago entitled "Biospheres" which is in some ways similar and had a profound effect on my own ways of perceiving nature. As with his late father Carl Sagan, you cannot go wrong with anything Dorian writes, nor with his mother Lynn Margulis who is a renowned biologist. Don't miss Dorian and Lynn's book "Microcosmos" if you want to know the foundations of life, climate and who really controls the show.

I bought this book in the University of California at Berkeley book store and read the last half of it while flying back to El Paso, Texas. It was well worth the price of admission! Dorian Sagan is an interesting and stimulating thinker. In "Notes from the Holocene: A Brief History History of the Future" he often argues, or at least introduces, both sides of an argument. In this he is quite superior to writers of straight polemics. He makes few pronouncements, but invites the reader to take part in the discussion as an equal. This does not mean that he lacks an opinion. It just means that he knows that his opinion could change, based on new evidence, and so has not invested his ego into absolute statements of "facts," when there is uncertainty. By the time you finish reading the book you are convinced however of the basic weirdness of the universe and of the planet earth in particular, and of the fragile state of human existence. This book is a treat for those who think about such issues as the existence of a creator, the effects of human-induced global warming, the possibility of a living planet, the Anthropic Principle, the tragedy of the commons and other stimulating questions. While Sagan does not solve most of these (this is not his purpose in any case), he certainly gives the reader something to ponder. I highly recommend this book for those who would plumb the depths of such perennial questions. You may not always like Sagan's take on these issues, but he will make you see many questions from a new and often surprising perspective.

Holocene is a sophisticated, energized, literary-scientific essay in geoecology that is also a very enjoyable read. The breadth, depth and seriousness of Dorion Sagan's scholarship is unexpectedly punctuated every couple of pages with his captivating dry wit. At times I imagined portions as a script for a standup comedy act - perhaps combined with a few magic routines - Dorion being among other things a professional magician. If this book were to be developed into a Holocene television series paralleling his father's Cosmos, it would be equally eloquent; yet enhanced with a touch of science fiction vaudeville. StarTrek's Data might costar. The inclusion of numerous references to science fiction (cf Robert Dick) reflects the essay's dual polemic - as much an exploration as an update of current thinking. Unlike classical mechanical science that tends to see the future as pre-determined by universal laws of necessary causal connection, the science fiction mind is that of the engineer, a participant in the universe, who wants to know, not what must be, but what could be. And it is through this portal that Dorion connects us to literature and philosophy. The breadth of the scientific examination is inspiring, covering the billion of years of Gaia's evolution partitioned into the viewpoints founded on what has been recognized since ancient times as the four thermodynamic phases - earth, water, air and fire. The central theme of Holocene is best understood as a probing response to the question - Where is geoecology leading us? It is both a statement and broadening of the inquiry. Although understated, there is a palpable sense that we are involved in an historic intellectual transition. Darwin looked at Nature and saw a Malthusian competition of all against all. Vernadsky looked at the same Nature and saw a diverse and highly organized community equally as cooperative as competitive. Many of us recall the experience when first introduced to the Darwinian theory of wondering 'if it is competitive, and obviously humans are the winners, then what are all these other life forms doing still hanging around'. Richard Dawkins modernized the competitive metaphor, in his book The Selfish Gene. The natural expectation of the Darwinian tradition is for there to be only one winning species. The overwhelming evidence against this has been handled by introducing what philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn referred to as 'auxiliary hypotheses' - plausible exception clauses. But modern ecology, epitomized in Vernadsky's 'biosphere', sees an organizational structure completely unexplained by The Darwinian Research Program. James Lovelock's ecological research program captured in his Gaia Hypothesis serves as the modern counterpoint and prospective successor to Dawkins and the dwindling Neo-Darwinian research program. The depth of the intellectual transition was pointed out by Sagan in his previous book, with Eric Schneider, Into The Cool. And it is h

If you enjoy philosophy, history of human consciousness, creative speculative thinking and the fine arts of nature as manifest over the past 4,000,000,000 years you will enjoy this book. Notes from the Holocene is both very smart and totally unpretentious. Equally important, for the reader's pleasure, it is at once profound and hilarious. Dorian Sagan's "Brief History of the Future" is way pre- and post- postmodern. At times I felt I was on a train to nowhere, lucky enough to be seated near Douglas Adams and Foucault having a heart-felt chat. With sleight-of-hand artistry, Sagan deftly deconstructs our trained-incapacities--we see our delusional projections (aka reality) for what they are. While making us feel we are part of the continuity of 4,000 million years of life on this planet, Sagan uncovers our arrogant self-importance and, at the same time, leaves room for wonder. Notes from the Holocene, much the way Shakespeare's Cleopatra does, moves us into re-cognizing the difference(s) between delusion and illusion--between disjunctive destruction (of much of the planet and ourselves) and visionary imagination. If you enjoy philosophy, science, evolution of planet Earth, and the ins and out of humans thinking about these things, you'll enjoy this book. If you don't, my hunch is you will enjoy the book anyway. Notes from the Holocene is simply a good read, at he desk with highlighter in hand or at the beach with a glass of wine.

If I were to write a history of the Holocene Period at some time in the distant future, I would likely focus on Dorion Sagan's book, Notes from the Holocene, as a critical turning point in humanity's relationship with its environment. It is not so much that Sagan presents any new ideas; rather it is in his organization of many recent and old ideas into a cohesive epistemological system at a critical time in history when such a cohesive system is needed to understand and address pressing planetary issues such a global warming, pollution, peak oil, and population growth. The epistemological shift advocated in Notes from the Holocene concerns our concept of life and its relation to our planet Earth. Is this third planet from the sun simply a rock upon which life maintains a foot hold in the universe, or has the thermodynamically complex self organizing, self maintaining, and self reproductive systems known as life so infiltrated this planet over the past 3.9 billion years that the planet itself exhibits these same characteristics; self organizing, through the ongoing recycling of material by tectonic processes; self maintaining through the distributive processes of weather and oceanic circulation systems; and self reproductive in its facilitation of a species that has evolved a predilection for exploring and colonizing other planets beyond this one? The proposition of a living planet, where the constituents consists of the multitudes of species that we've organized into five taxonomic kingdoms function in conjunction with physical processes endemic to this particular planet, such as crustal plates moving along convection currents that are the result of heat given off by internal radioactive decay, air movement resulting from planetary spin, and temperature fluxes due to changing positions relative to the sun, will inevitably elicits accusations of anthropomorphizing ; undertaking a subjective as opposed to an objective inquiry. Sagan confronts these accusations head on presenting this idea of a super organism, variously called Gaia, Biosphere, Noosphere, and Life, as a system in complete conformity with the second law of thermaldynamics. A living system, whether a bacterium, plant, person, or a planet, cannot be describe through the simple iteration of its basic components (modern Cartesian science), but must be understood through its behavior; the ongoing dynamic relationships between the components. Understanding things according to their parts requires that the individual components be isolated out of context and evaluated according to the linear effects they might have on other components. Through this process of reductionism, modernist science conflates the fundamental components of cognitions; the entity as it actually is, a dynamic system or subsystem of some greater system, and our conceptual abstraction of it, thus resulting in the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (Whitehead 1978; Rescher 2000). This fallacy is akin to conflating the