“The Human Experiment: Two years and twenty minutes inside
Biosphere 2.”
-Book Review
Many people in 1991 were fascinated by the idea of Biosphere 2, a closed, hermetically
sealed, self-sustaining, man-made ecosystem with a desert, an ocean, a rainforest, a
savannah, a marsh, a habitat and an intensive farm, all in three acres. On September 26
eight people entered the structure for a two-year stint living "as if on Mars, farming all our
food, recycling our water, our waste and even the oxygen we breathed..."
But bad publicity dogged the project even before the team went in. The public grew
skeptical, as the Biospherians were dismissed as frauds, cult figures, publicity hounds and
charlatans. None of which, strictly speaking, was completely false, or completely true.
Jane Poynter, who celebrated her 30th birthday in Biosphere 2, and went on to found an
aerospace firm with fellow Biospherian, Taber MacCallum, attempts to set the record
straight with this emotional and wide ranging account.
Poynter was an upper-class English girl who joined the Institute of Ecotechnics at age 20 for
travel and adventure - and, no doubt, to escape her parents' conventional expectations. The
IE group, headed by charismatic and authoritarian John Allen, were Synergists who believed
in a "strict adherence " to three avocations - theater, philosophy and business - to keep
themselves in intellectual, emotional and economic balance. This was the group that went
on to conceive and build Biosphere 2.
Poynter was an early candidate for the team. Her training included stints on a Ferro-cement
research vessel built by IE staffers and an outback ranch in remote Australia populated
primarily by large meat-eating ants, plagues of flies, and termites who ate the tires off cars.
Lessons in resourcefulness, difficult physical conditions and close, isolated living may have
been useful as Poynter says, but nothing could really prepare any of them for the Biosphere
experience.
"After thirteen months in Biosphere 2, we were starving, suffocating and going quite mad."
Inadequate food had plagued them from the start. In part this goes back to the cult-like
group dynamic.
The Biospherian candidates worked on design and construction of Biosphere 2 (earth being
Biosphere 1), and were shifted to different tasks in order to have well-rounded experience.
In practice, shifts were sometimes made to punish a staffer for disloyalty, i.e., criticism.
Criticism was also dealt with in less subtle ways.
Poynter, as agriculture manager, was asked to draw up a report showing that Biosphere 2
could produce all of the food they would need. When she could only arrive at a total of 80
percent she, and two others who sided with her, were fired from the team. Poynter and
another woman were taken back three days later without explanation - the third was
shunted to some other aspect of the program.
This type of behavior was common and served to keep all of them cowed, off balance, and
unwilling to point out snags. When a certain root fungus was cited as a potential problem.
The fungus was indeed a persistent rice-crop killer.
Their second big problem was a steady, unexpected drop in oxygen. For months they did
intensive experiments, but the debilitating riddle remained unsolved until an outsider
provided a clue in a casual phone call. Serendipity and science working together would
seem to give the Synergists' creed of balance a lift.
But the "going mad" part never really got better. Much of Poynter's book focuses on the
interpersonal acrimony, which eventually divided them into two groups of four. Difficulties
were exacerbated by backbreaking work on inadequate diets in low oxygen, but even when
these problems were somewhat alleviated relations stayed poor.
Of course, the manipulation by outside management never got better and it was that that
separated them into loyalists and non-loyalists. Poynter was a non-loyalist. When she
walked out of Biosphere 2 her time as a Synergist was done too.
But her book seems balanced and open - something of a catharsis. She celebrates the
science, such as it was, and laments that more was not done later to study closedecosystem reactions. There was one more 6-month group sojourn inside, but the project
was too expensive to continue.
Though the two years were arduous she counts them a success - "we had proven that a
man-made biosphere can successfully sustain life, including human life, for an extended
period of time without inexplicably crashing, or devolving rapidly into green slime." True,
but they did need two infusions of oxygen, which would not have been possible in space,
and for all their psychological problems they always knew they could walk out at any time.
Naturally many questions remain, particularly about the environmental science. Though the
environment was carefully engineered and controlled they still had ceaseless problems with
insect pests (including ant intruders from outside) and plant diseases.
Poynter is at her best describing daily life; the "dysfunctional family" they became, the
feasts and famines, and the daily grind of work, though you get the feeling she's leaving a
lot out to avoid pressing on old wounds. An absorbing, varied and often suspenseful read.