Biosphere Blowhard

In the early 1990s, Southern Arizona enjoyed a rush of international
attention when eight “biospherians” sealed themselves inside the newly
built architectural and engineering wonder near Oracle called Biosphere
2, and promised not to come out for two years.

At the time, much was made of the ambitious experiment, though some
of it verged on mocking. Lilith on Cheers decided to engage in a
similar project, to great comic effect, as did Pauly Shore and a
Baldwin brother in 1996’s Bio-Dome, though their take on the
experiment wasn’t funny at all. Some in the media were skeptical,
including this newspaper, which published a cover story accusing the
project of lacking scientific rigor and relevance, and pointing out
that its leader and founder, John Allen, was something like a cult
leader.

In a new memoir, Allen makes only glancing reference to his many
critics, and portrays the construction of Biosphere 2 and the
unqualified success (in his view) of the first mission as the
culmination of a lifetime of studying the original biosphere (that is,
Earth) and its far corners. (The second mission, in which he claims to
have had no role, broke down soon after it started.) This book is
published by an outfit in New Mexico called Synergetic Press, which has
deep ties to the Institute of Ecotechnics, which would not exist had
Allen not created it. In other words, this book is not too far from
being self-published, and therefore it cannot be trusted as a fair
record of the Biosphere 2 project.

But that kind of thinking is what Allen would call “reductionist,”
and as he writes in this unfocused book, he’s been fighting
reductionists all his life. Allen is an Oklahoma-bred polymath who
seems to have shown up at all the right counter-culture moments of the
past 50 years—he was in Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s and later
went to Tangiers with all the other bookish hippies; he knew William
Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ornette Coleman, Buckminster Fuller and many
other American Romantic thinkers exiled from the mainstream. At the
same time, he attended the Colorado School of Mines and Harvard. He
considers himself as much of a writer, playwright, poet and actor as he
does a scientist and engineer, and it is this promethean self-view that
makes reading him rather annoying.

Many of us have swum with dolphins and found it an invigorating and
even spiritual exercise. But only a guy like Allen, after swimming with
dolphins, would immediately recognize his animal totem and create a
poetry-writing persona called Johnny Dolphin. (He quotes many of
Dolphin’s verses in this memoir; I’d rather read an actual dolphin’s
poetry.)

For all of his new-ageiness, Allen is a remarkable man with many
impressive achievements to his credit. He is also a man who is always
far ahead of his time, and he seems to be, based on the evidence in
this book, a genius at turning his often highly unorthodox ideas into
reality. The most unorthodox of all of these was Biosphere 2, which he
spent 10 years planning and building. He says quite clearly in this
book that he was trying to create a small-scale biosphere like those
that would, one day, be used to sustain human life on other
planets—believing, as did his friend Burroughs, that we are here
to go to space.

And Biosphere 2 is still, after nearly 20 years and several changes
in its mission, an amazing and even historically significant
achievement. Currently, the elegant, space-age, whole-Earth laboratory
is being used by the University of Arizona to study the fundamental
question of how water moves across a landscape. Such research will
hopefully teach us much about drought and climate change, UA
researchers told me.

As for the history of Biosphere 2’s construction and the human
experiments that went on there, there is very little new, privileged or
even revealing information in this memoir. Nor will you find much
critical thinking in Allen’s version of the story—there is only
self-aggrandizing and name-dropping, along with writing that seeks to
be poetic without being clear. This is disappointing, because you won’t
find much that is critical, or even balanced, about Biosphere 2’s human
experiments in any of the other books written by its participants, some
of which have been published by Synergetic Press. The supposed “inside
story of Biosphere 2,” written by two of the original biospherians, was
published in 1993 by The Biosphere Press, a division of Space
Biospheres Ventures—the very consortium, controlled by Allen,
that started the project.

The true, objective story of Biosphere 2, then, still remains to be
written.

This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2009.