Book description
"Biosphere 2" rises from southern Arizonas high desert
like a bizarre hybrid spaceship and greenhouse. Packed with more than
3,800 carefully selected plant, animal, and insect species, this
mega-terrarium is one of the world's most biodiverse, lush, and
artificial wildernesses. Only recently transformed from an abandoned
ghost dome to a University of Arizona research center, the site was
the setting of a grand drama about humans and ecology at the end of
the twentieth century.
The seeds of Biosphere 2 sprouted in the 1970s at Synergia, a
desert ranch in New Mexico where John Allen and a handful of dreamers
united to create a self-reliant utopia centered on ecological work,
study, and their traveling experimental theater troupe, "The
Theater of All Possibilities." At a time of growing tensions in
the American environmental consciousness, the Synergians took on
varied projects around the world that sought to mend the rift between
humans and nature. In 1984, they bought a piece of desert to build
Biosphere 2. Eco-enthusiasts competed to become the eight
"biospherians" who would lock themselves inside the giant
greenhouse world for two years to live in harmony with their
wilderness, grow their own food, and recycle all their air, water, and wastes.
Thin and short on oxygen, the biospherians stoically completed
their survival mission, but the communal spirit surrounding Biosphere
2 eventually dissolved into conflict--ultimately the facility would be
seized by armed U. S. Marshals. Yet for all the story's strangeness,
perhaps strangest of all was how normal Biosphere 2 actually was. The
story of this grand eco-utopian adventure (and misadventure) becomes a
parable about the relationship between humans and nature in postmodern America.
Visit the authors' website at www.
dreamingthebiosphere. com
Rebecca Reider has worked and written on issues of human
and ecological community around the world. Her projects have spanned
from Biosphere 2 to indigenous communities in the Amazon, to New
Zealand, where she currently works with organic farmers.
