--Biosphere 1--
And God saw every thing that he had made,
and, behold, it was very good.
Genesis 1:31
--Biosphere 2--
"In the 1990s, a troupe of hippies spent two years sealed inside a dome called Biosphere 2.......the outside world – Biosphere 1, if you prefer....Looking back, it’s amazing that Biosphere 2 even happened at all.
They ended up starving
and gasping for breath .
and gasping for breath .
As a new documentary Spaceship Earth tells their story, we meet the ‘biospherians’.
Biosphere 2’s origins lie in late-1960s San Francisco, and a man named John P Allen. Already in his 40s by then, Allen was something of a renaissance man: a Harvard graduate, a metallurgist, a union organiser, a beat poet, and a traveller studying indigenous cultures. He founded an idealistic performance group called the Theatre of All Possibilities. As the name suggests, they wanted to change the world but weren’t sure where to start. Art? Business? Ecology? Technology? In classic counterculture fashion, they decided: “Let’s do all of it!”
They turned their desert ranch into a self-sufficient homestead, planting trees and raising buildings, including a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome.
In 1975, they even decided to build a ship. Their chief designer was a 19-year-old student with no experience of boatbuilding, but it proved perfectly seaworthy. They sailed around the world for several years, researching the Earth’s ecosystems.
Having learned how these worked, they were ready to build their own. If humankind was going to settle other planets, they reasoned, it would need to learn how to replicate Earth.
The Biosphere 2 launch was staged like a space mission. The media descended on the $150m Arizona facility, all gleaming white panels and ziggurats of glass, filled with forests, deserts, laboratories, recycling systems, pigs, chickens, hummingbirds, bush babies, and even a coral reef. There were speeches and fireworks as the jumpsuited volunteers sealed themselves in for the two-year journey into the unknown.
After a stable start, problems began to emerge. Food, for one. “We really could have used more calories,” says Linda Leigh, another biospherian.
Leigh had been involved with stocking Biosphere 2 with wild plants, but many of the food crops were too slow or too labor-intensive to be worthwhile. The wild coffee bushes took a fortnight to produce enough for one cup.
Rather than luxuriating in a Garden of Eden, the biospherians became more like subsistence farmers. There was a lot of beetroot and sweet potato. “It was a challenge to make exciting meals,” says Leigh. Everyone lost a lot of weight.
On top of that, oxygen levels decreased faster than anticipated, with
Understandably, morale deteriorated. Living under biosphere conditions was a challenge at the best of times. If the coronavirus lockdown feels restrictive, imagine spending two years with the same seven people and no internet. Nelson likens it to “a marathon group therapy session”. Added to which, true to their theatrical origins, the biospherians were on permanent display. Coachloads of tourists and schoolchildren arrived daily to tap on the glass and take pictures of the emaciated crew. Leigh remembers anthropologist Jane Goodall coming to visit. “She observed us like we were captive primates.”
Biosphere 2’s difficulties had not gone unnoticed, though Allen and the team had tried to conceal them. Eventually extra food was smuggled in and two oxygen pop-ups followed."
Guardian