The Biosphere 2 experiment: hippie madness in the Arizona desert
On September 26th, 1991, eight volunteers donned matching red jumpsuits and entered an ecological research facility called Biosphere 2, an air-tight glasshouse designed to perfectly recreate the earth’s atmosphere. For two years, they inhaled the same thin air, consumed the same low-calorie diet and suffered the same intense claustrophobia. It might sound like some mad reality show – because, in many ways, it was. But the Biosphere 2 experiment wasn’t intended as a form of entertainment, even if a hippie theatre company set it up.
Biosphere 2 was dreamt up in San Francisco in the late-1960s. The man doing the dreaming was John P Allen, a 40-something Harvard graduate, activist, beat poet and traveller who had spent much of his career studying indigenous cultures. He was also the brains behind the Theatre of All Possibilities, a touring theatre company founded in 1967. Their objective? Change the world through performance, not politics. You’d think such lofty ambitions would require a meticulous plan of action, but Allen was always more of a doer than a planner, and he expected his troupe to follow suit.
In 1969, the Theatre of All Possibilities moved to Synergia Ranch in the Arizona desert and founded a countercultural community there. Allen fed into the burgeoning survivalist movement and advocated Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Spaceship Earth’ concept, which held that biospheres could provide earth inhabitants with refuge from nuclear war and environmental collapse. In the early days, the ranch was a meeting place for resident and guest artisans interested in producing biotechnical products.
It also hosted a variety of furniture workshops and textile studios, with Llamas and sheep providing s plentiful supply of wool. Using the ranch as their HQ, Allen and Co. set about researching the world’s ecosystems and spent the next several years sailing around the world in their own boat – seemingly unshaken by the knowledge that it had been built by a 19-year-old with absolutely no experience in boat building.
Synergia Ranch was the product of both optimism and fear, fear that the world was on the cusp of collapse and faith that the future was a brighter, cleaner place. The ranch’s grandest structure, the geodesic dome, was a space-age structure plucked straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey and became a powerful symbol of alternative living in an age when society’s structures seemed destined to fall.
Its curved glass walls were designed to fuse the individual with the wider cosmos. The suburban home was seen as restricting consciousness; the dome allowed it to expand and grow. It was dreamt up not only as an alternative to urban living but as a way for humans to exist in closer collaboration with the earth. In this sense, the biosphere was essentially an environmentalist venture. How strange, then, that a Texan oil baron funded its construction.
In September 1991, Roy Walford, Jane Poynter, Taber MacCallum, Mark Nelson, Sally Silverstone, Abigail Alling, Mark Van Thillo, and Linda Leigh stepped into the dome to begin the Biosphere 2’s first closed mission. Anyone looking on would have thought the team were about to be rocketed into space; they certainly looked the part.
As they stepped inside the facility – complete with laboratories, hummingbirds, pygmy goats, jungle fowl, a coral reef, a desert and a forest – the media looked on with the same glazed fascination of children peering into a lizard enclosure. The cameras were still fixed on their movements when things started to go wrong.
The crops inside the dome were supposed to provide the Biosphere 2 team with 83% of their total diet, which included papayas, bananas, peanuts, beets, beans, rice and wheat. However, in that first year, the eight-person crew reported continual hunger, having vastly underestimated how labour-intensive life inside the dome would be. To add insult to injury, oxygen levels decreased far faster than anyone had expected.
Earth’s atmosphere is 21% oxygen; levels inside the biosphere fell to 14.2%. Almost all of the pollinating insects died, and cockroaches flourished in their place. All of this made the toil and drudgery of a subsistence lifestyle even more pronounced, and it wasn’t long before camp morale began to deteriorate.
Tellingly, one of the people who came to gawp at the Biosphere 2 crew was primatologist and anthropologist Dr Jane Goodall, who appeared to regard the team as having accepted a life of forced captivity. As is often the case with groups living in a confined space for long periods, the crew split into two factions. One camp wanted to bring in more oxygen and food, and the other group wanted to retain the purity of the original mission objective.
Ultimately, the decision was made for them, with Allen providing more food and a couple of extra oxygen pop-ups, which greatly eased the bitterness between former friends. Although the team became far less fond of one another as the mission progressed, all eight members reported signs of profound intimacy with their environment.
Being forced to pay attention to the health of the life system around them instilled a sense of interconnectedness and dependency. As Mark Nelson would later tell The Guardian: “It was like my body suddenly got the message: every time you breathe, these plants are waiting for your CO2. They are your third lung. I thought, ‘My God, this is keeping me alive! I am absolutely metabolically connected to the life here’”.
