World in a Bottle
Once the punch line of a bad joke, Arizona’s Biosphere 2 could be more relevant than ever.
BY REED KARAIM
If you have an interest in either science
or pop culture, you probably recall Biosphere 2, which
briefly captured the world's fancy in 1991 when eight
"biospherians" boldly went where no man or woman
had gone before—into a giant terrarium for two years
to live with plants, animals, and a whole lot of bugs.
Their mission, driven by a strange philosophical meld
of Star Trek and The Whole Earth Catalog,
was going to show us everything from how to live in
tune with nature here on earth to how we might someday
exist on other planets.
It didn't work so well. The air inside the steel-and-glass
enclosure went bad, cockroaches thrived, and the biospherians
were constantly warding off hunger. Sometime after
rumors spread that pizza and candy bars were being
smuggled inside and that seven tons of oxygen had
to be pumped in to keep them all breathing, Biosphere
2 became a national joke, a staple of late-night monologues
and gleefully snarky reporters. By the time the eight
biospherians were released back into the wild, the
project had settled into a cultural niche as one of
those goofy examples of self-aggrandizing counterculture
idealism just made for a Saturday Night Live
skit.
It comes as a bit of a surprise, then, to realize
that Biosphere 2 is still out there in the Arizona
desert, a sprawling complex of geodesic domes, towering
pyramids, and majestically vaulted glass ceilings,
all topped by a bulbous white tower. It's being
operated now as a tourist attraction—think Epcot
Center, but less fun—and it's up for sale.
The facility itself is surely less desirable
than the surrounding property: thousands of acres
of undeveloped land amid Tucson's suburban sprawl.
Fairfield Homes, a development company based in Tucson,
had announced plans early last year to buy the property
and build Biosphere Estates, with homes starting at
around $300,000, but bowed out as the housing market
stalled. (The deal would not have required the developer
to preserve the Biosphere facility.) In the end, the
complex will need luck to survive the inexorable march
of the bulldozers.
Except for the concern of a few ecologists and science
geeks, the reaction to this threat has largely been,
"Oh well." But before we consign Biosphere
2 to whatever fate awaits it, we owe it one last look,
to see if it might have something left to teach us.
After all, it's not like we're doing so
well with Biosphere 1 these days—also known as
the planet Earth.
For more of this article, look for the
May/June 2007 issue on newsstands or e-mail
us to purchase a copy.
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