Biosphere 2

monument to pharaonic ecology was built in 1989 by members of a commune established twenty years before – the Synergia Ranch – where everyone was to some extent a thespian, cybernetician, gardener, sailor, and entrepreneur

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Biosphere 2 belonged to a long line of Cold War environmental research focused on escaping Earth’s surface

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CO2 ‘scrubbing’ technology, which underpins ‘carbon capture and sequestration’ systems today, was originally developed for the USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine

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Within the gleaming walls of Biosphere 2, one could find five ecosystems reproduced in miniature: tropical rainforest, coastal fog desert, mangrove wetland, savannah, and ocean (with a coral reef)

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Given such immense resources, its purpose seemed modest enough: to keep eight ‘biospherians’ alive for two years without allowing anything (not even air) in or out of the complex

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Before the end of the first mission, the biospherians had inadvertently managed to replicate many of the different facets of the environmental crisis in miniature – an appropriate outcome for an experiment conducted in a place named Oracle

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Some 19 of its 25 vertebrates went extinct, along with a majority of the 125 insect species

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The most important lesson salvaged from the wreckage of Biosphere 2 is the impossibility of controlling ecological systems even of a modest size

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