Crossword No.2 Answers
Across: 1. See 5 down 6. Shriek 9. Epicurus 10. See 13 down 11. The Biosphere 12. Amur 14. Orgeat 16. Scend 17. Stodge 18. Eden
20. Obstetrician 23. Buzz 24. Sleepers 25. Accent 26 Gusset.
Down: 2. Avoid 3. Unuttered 4. Eroded 5,1. The Dialectics Of Nature 6. Slipshod 7. Rough 8. Elutriate 13,10. Metabolic rift
15. Green Bans 16. Sentient 19. Liebig 21. There 22 Ozone.
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Did You Know?
The following snippets relate to some of the clues and answers to the cryptic crossword.
9. Epicurus – the ancient Greek materialist philosopher whose work and whose ideas, as primarily expressed in Lucretius’ poem De renum natura (On the Nature of Things), were the starting point for Marx’ own materialism. Marx wrote of or about Epicurus and Epicurean materialist philosophy in his seven Notebooks on Epicurian Philosophy and his subsequent doctoral thesis (1839-1841), and in The Holy Family (1845) and The German Ideology (1846), both written together with Engels.
11. Vernadsky, V.I. – one of the two greatest Russian ecologists of the 1920’s and 1930’s (the other was the plant geneticist, N.I. Vavilov), Vernadsy achieved international renown for his analysis of the biosphere and as the founder of geochemistry. He published The Biosphere in 1926. As Lynn Margulis et al have written in the Forward to the English translation of his book, he was “the first person in history [to] come to grips with the real implications of the fact that the Earth is a self-contained sphere.”
5,1. The Dialectics of Nature – published from Engels’ unfinished manuscript.
13,10. Metabolic rift – Marx’ theory of the “rift” in the “metabolic interaction between man and the earth,” that is, the “social metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life” (quotes from Capital).
19. Liebig – Marx’ systematic investigation into the work of the German agricultural chemist Justus von Liebig, which grew out of his critique of Malthusianism, was what led Marx to his central concept of the “metabolic rift” in the human relation to nature – his mature analysis of the alienation of nature. The work of Liebig, with emphasis on the circulation of soil nutrients and its relation to animal metabolism, as well as Charles Darwin’s bio-historical work, led to the emergence of modern ecology in the mid-nineteenth century.
(Information taken from the book Marx’ Ecology: materialism and nature, by John Bellamy Foster, Monthly Review Press, 2000.)