Volodymyr Vernadskyi - Know Your Own

Can life change a whole planet? Volodymyr Vernadskyi was one of the first to see that it can, and he built the theory of the biosphere and the noosphere. A founder of geochemistry, in 1918 he became the first president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.

A Petersburger with Poltava summers

Volodymyr Vernadskyi was born in 1863 in Saint Petersburg into a family with Ukrainian Cossack roots; his father, the economist Ivan Vernadskyi, was from Kyiv. He studied at Saint Petersburg University, was a professor at Moscow University and an academician. Much tied him to Ukraine: from 1889 to 1918 he spent almost every summer in the Poltava region.

The Academy’s first president

In 1918, under the Ukrainian State of Hetman Pavlo Skoropadskyi, Vernadskyi headed the commission to establish the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became its first president. That same year he was among the founders of the National Library of Ukraine.

Life as a geological force

Vernadskyi was one of the founders of new sciences, geochemistry and biogeochemistry, and he developed radiogeology. He was one of the first to understand that life on Earth is a geological force. In his book The Biosphere (1926) he described the Earth’s envelope that life creates and changes. Later he developed the theory of the noosphere: a stage when human reason becomes the main force changing the planet.

Debates and assessments

Vernadskyi’s views on the Ukrainian question were moderate: he was a liberal, a supporter of “Russian” unity and of federalist prospects for Ukraine, and he criticized the Bolsheviks, the Whites and the Directorate of the Ukrainian People’s Republic (UNR) alike. Despite this, it was he who led the creation of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became its first president.

Why it matters today

Vernadskyi’s ideas influenced modern ecological thinking. The National Library of Ukraine, which he helped found, bears his name.