The web's first magazine devoted to stories about life in giant artificial structures created by forces beyond human comprehension

Failure and Success in Biosphere 2

by Matt Carey

The ecology issue still hasn't come together, but I can't put out another issue of stories about life in giant artificial environments without addressing the subject of Biosphere 2, the famous experiment where eight hippies sealed themselves into an airtight greenhouse for two years and tried courageously to feed themselves. I happen to know next to nothing about this subject, but that’s okay because I’m writing for the internet, so all I have to throw together are a bunch of links, some ill-informed opinions, and some unnecessary personal narrative. I’m all set for that; I read in a Weekly Reader sometime in the late eighties that this Biosphere thing was being built, and just now I went on Wikipedia to see how it all turned out.

Not well! And that just goes to prove my point, which is that these giant artificial environments are damned problematic. I suppose that when Biosphere 2 was built, it was thought of as some kind of prototype for a giant space platform people were going to be riding in between here and Mars (official Biosphere 2 accounts like to refer to the experiments as “missions” and “voyages,” though that may just have been for the participants’ benefit, to soften the blow at getting stuck in a box for a couple of years). But these days Biosphere 2 seems more likely to inspire the kind of ecological enclaves that rich folks are going to be demanding once the globe heats up. It stands as a warning to people who thing they can build themselves a new ecosystem when they ruin this one.

So here are some of the problems they can expect: the Biosphere never produced as much food as it was supposed to (although an official source claims the biospherians got 2000 calories a day); the place got contaminated with a local ant species that crowded out all the carefully-chosen imported species; the oxygen level fell from 20.9% to 14.5% so they had to cheat by taking some in from the outside; all the pollinating species died.

And then there were the human failings: apparently the biospherians were the remnant of some weird utopian theatre troupe to begin with, but they rapidly split up into two hostile tribes like on Survivor. Then, during the second “voyage,” felony charges were brought for an act of self-defeating sabotage worthy of that scene where the guy opened the gates for the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. From Wikipedia: “Abigail Alling and Mark Van Thillo, members of the first crew, deliberately vandalized the project, opening all doors and violating the closure.”

The kooky leader of the Biosphere project, John Allen, may be able to shed some light on all the different ways the biospherians would be dead if they had really been unable to rely on the outside world. His autobiography is forthcoming in August. I read the online sample hoping to write some kind of preview, but Chapter 1 didn’t really cover the giant-artificial-environment part of Allen’s life story. Based on the sample chapter, I do think I can say with confidence that when Allen gets around to giving his account of Biosphere 2, it will be packed with florid digressions. I'm looking forward to it anyway.

Thanks to all of this season’s contributors! This issue surely contains the most horrific and uncanny labyrinthine worlds ever described in these web pages.