In order to complete my post above, John is an amazing person and thinker who has been truly affected by the end of this project which was the outcome of 30 years of thinking and previous projects to study biomes across the world. He has seen received an extraordinary external pressure and it was impossible to deal with the project and this pressure. These people have killed his dream.
When I was speaking of a Bio2 failure, of course I did not mean a failure from John Allen but a failure to impose this project to a corporate and scientific establishment that was totally against it. Nobody else than John would have been better skilled to succeed but the external pressure was too high. John is a true person with strong beliefs and he couldn't have corrupted its initial ideas to please these people.
John has been ahead of this time (and even today external forces would fight such a project, at least in the US) and I really wish that the opinion on John and Biosphere 2 will change and that this project will deserve all the glory it always deserved and trigger a new interest in biospherics all over the planet.
I just finished the John Allen book. It is a great testimony of an extraordinary man, and as such it was really worth being written, for the rest of us. I agree though, that this book doesn't provide any light on what really happened at Biosphere 2. John Allen actually admits it himself in the last chapter of the book. He says that the book is more a tribute to all of these that have participated in making biospherics science possible and he clearly says that the book is in no way objective.
I have been doing a lot of research on Biosphere 2 failure, meeting with key people around the project, and I'll soon write this on my blog (in French unfortunately). Basically and to summarize, Biosphere 2 would never have existed without John Allen, but it seems that his personality and attitude toward outsiders was not the right one to make this a success. He is a dreamer with many skills but he was missing a few ones. Maybe he wanted his dream to stay a dream.
Now that biosphere 2 is there and biospherics is there, I'm sure others will continue the work. The testimony will (hopefully) serve to initiate new researchs. We have to thank John a lot for this.
Anyway, there is one book that you may not have heard off, that gives an extraordinary description of what happened there. It was written in 2005 by Jane Poynter, one the 8 biospherians. I found this book fascinating. It is a good place to start.
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In order to complete my post above, John is an amazing person and thinker who has been truly affected by the end of this project which was the outcome of 30 years of thinking and previous projects to study biomes across the world. He has seen received an extraordinary external pressure and it was impossible to deal with the project and this pressure. These people have killed his dream.
When I was speaking of a Bio2 failure, of course I did not mean a failure from John Allen but a failure to impose this project to a corporate and scientific establishment that was totally against it. Nobody else than John would have been better skilled to succeed but the external pressure was too high. John is a true person with strong beliefs and he couldn't have corrupted its initial ideas to please these people.
John has been ahead of this time (and even today external forces would fight such a project, at least in the US) and I really wish that the opinion on John and Biosphere 2 will change and that this project will deserve all the glory it always deserved and trigger a new interest in biospherics all over the planet.
Take care,
Jean-Pierre.
I just finished the John Allen book. It is a great testimony of an extraordinary man, and as such it was really worth being written, for the rest of us. I agree though, that this book doesn't provide any light on what really happened at Biosphere 2. John Allen actually admits it himself in the last chapter of the book. He says that the book is more a tribute to all of these that have participated in making biospherics science possible and he clearly says that the book is in no way objective.
I have been doing a lot of research on Biosphere 2 failure, meeting with key people around the project, and I'll soon write this on my blog (in French unfortunately). Basically and to summarize, Biosphere 2 would never have existed without John Allen, but it seems that his personality and attitude toward outsiders was not the right one to make this a success. He is a dreamer with many skills but he was missing a few ones. Maybe he wanted his dream to stay a dream.
Now that biosphere 2 is there and biospherics is there, I'm sure others will continue the work. The testimony will (hopefully) serve to initiate new researchs. We have to thank John a lot for this.
Anyway, there is one book that you may not have heard off, that gives an extraordinary description of what happened there. It was written in 2005 by Jane Poynter, one the 8 biospherians. I found this book fascinating. It is a good place to start.
http://www.amazon.com/Human-Experiment-Twe…
Take care,
Jean-Pierre.