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Dreaming the Biosphere: The Theater of All Possibilities
Biosphere rises from southern Arizona's 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.
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.
310 pages, Hardcover
First published November 16, 2009
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August 21, 2019As heard of on Utopian podcast.
June 2, 2016
This book describes the history of Biosphere 2. This glass dome built in the Arizona desert was in part meant to be a replica of Earth's biosphere ("Biosphere 1"). Or so we've been told. It turns out there was a lot of woo-woo involved in the project's planning, building, and operation of this project.
Rebecca Reider describes the great resistance she encountered during interviews and investigations into the sordid history of the project. She managed to get her hands on a copy of "The Theater Of All Possibilities" which is a book of plays performed by some of the founders of the project. These people were dreamers, not scientifically trained, and were therefore suckers for all kinds of pseudoscience.
The founders were also deeply involved in a hippy commune called "Synergia Ranch". These people were believers in the so-called "Gaia Hypothesis". This is the theory that life makes the Earth more habitable to life. This is a pseudo-profound realization because it has some obvious truth to it when you consider the interconnections of the food web and carbon/oxygen cycles. But the founders of Biosphere 2 took this way too seriously.
Their charismatic fearless leader John Allen was a genius in his own way, but made terrible decisions based on a mythological interpretation of the Gaia Hypothesis and other woo-woo beliefs about. He second-guessed the scientific experts and, not surprisingly, lost every time. He created an environment of fear and loyalty with his fierce temper and a cult style of leadership.
This book does a good job exposing these things that many people want us to forget. We also learn how the structure has been used since it came under new (more scientific, less cult-like) leadership.
The book ends with some petty, ignorant criticism of "establishment" science and some bullshit about Joseph Campbell. I found this very out of place as the rest of the book is quite skeptical. I think the larger lesson for science that can be learned from the whole Biosphere 2 fiasco is that science is a process. Big buildings made of glass may be impressive, and may fool people into thinking real science is taking place. But there's no substitute for the formulation and testing of specific hypothesis. There was little benefit to fundamental science from this big huge garden of Eden in the middle of the Arizona desert.
As often and as easily as I'm disappointing with our modern era of woo-woo, it's impressive to see how far we've come since the 1970s. The author of this book thinks that we're missing something having outgrown the myths of the pre-scientific era. I say good riddance to the myths. John Allen is a perfect embodiment of why they're rotten to the core. Fairy tales, when taken as anything but fiction, are just excuses to ignore the real world we live in.
This abuse of myths is tempting for those seek power, sex, fame, and to build a grotesque monument to their own ego.
Rebecca Reider describes the great resistance she encountered during interviews and investigations into the sordid history of the project. She managed to get her hands on a copy of "The Theater Of All Possibilities" which is a book of plays performed by some of the founders of the project. These people were dreamers, not scientifically trained, and were therefore suckers for all kinds of pseudoscience.
The founders were also deeply involved in a hippy commune called "Synergia Ranch". These people were believers in the so-called "Gaia Hypothesis". This is the theory that life makes the Earth more habitable to life. This is a pseudo-profound realization because it has some obvious truth to it when you consider the interconnections of the food web and carbon/oxygen cycles. But the founders of Biosphere 2 took this way too seriously.
Their charismatic fearless leader John Allen was a genius in his own way, but made terrible decisions based on a mythological interpretation of the Gaia Hypothesis and other woo-woo beliefs about. He second-guessed the scientific experts and, not surprisingly, lost every time. He created an environment of fear and loyalty with his fierce temper and a cult style of leadership.
This book does a good job exposing these things that many people want us to forget. We also learn how the structure has been used since it came under new (more scientific, less cult-like) leadership.
The book ends with some petty, ignorant criticism of "establishment" science and some bullshit about Joseph Campbell. I found this very out of place as the rest of the book is quite skeptical. I think the larger lesson for science that can be learned from the whole Biosphere 2 fiasco is that science is a process. Big buildings made of glass may be impressive, and may fool people into thinking real science is taking place. But there's no substitute for the formulation and testing of specific hypothesis. There was little benefit to fundamental science from this big huge garden of Eden in the middle of the Arizona desert.
As often and as easily as I'm disappointing with our modern era of woo-woo, it's impressive to see how far we've come since the 1970s. The author of this book thinks that we're missing something having outgrown the myths of the pre-scientific era. I say good riddance to the myths. John Allen is a perfect embodiment of why they're rotten to the core. Fairy tales, when taken as anything but fiction, are just excuses to ignore the real world we live in.
This abuse of myths is tempting for those seek power, sex, fame, and to build a grotesque monument to their own ego.
August 25, 2025
This was the book I wish I had access to when I was younger. Ever since I learned about biosphere two, (from the children’s illustrated encyclopedia in grade school) I had wanted to know more. The encyclopedia provided the standard synopsis. Some people tried to create a self contained ecosystem, it failed, something about earthworms. This was always unsatisfying. Why was this attempted? Why exactly did it fail? And more importantly why did no one try again? Are humans incapable of designing a whole ecosystem? Also it’s just a greenhouse, surely someone could do better? Well finally here are some possible answers. And I feel compelled to add this after talking to a conventional commercial greenhouse operator, apparently it’s quite difficult to keep a closed greenhouse going and you often end up in an ongoing chemical war with various pests. This hasn’t been my experience with unheated greenhouses though so my grasp on just how ambitious the biosphere project was is still up for debate.
To start, why the biosphere two? As best I can tell it appears to be in part an attempt at theater and imagining a different world for humans to live in, and from a drive to live in a specific harmony with the earth. I say a specific type of harmony because it seems to be the desire to combine natural systems with technology. If harmony alone was the goal, well plenty of people have done that throughout history, and the team could have just produced their living from an existing ecosystem (and many seem to have later done so) so to me it seems that the integration of technology was one of the key points. There also seems to have been an understanding among many members as well that technology was leading to the death of the earth and there was a need to create something different.
So much for the good motivations, what about the dark side? Well for one example the founders seemed to be stuck in a particular type of America frontier ideal, despite wanting to build against the culture, it still viewed places as a blank slate, ready to be remade in a New World. You can also find echos of the death of the space race that are still reverberating today, as the great powers retreated from their ambitions among the stars, talented scientists would go to work on biosphere two imagining that colonizing the stars was still possible and that we could simulate what it would look like.
Then there was the core group and the original management. And the question we have to ask is: cult or no cult? Let’s go over the checklist! I am pretty comfortable saying cult just on the founder making a ritual out of publicly shaming people’s faults in front of the group. They also did the whole taking to the high seas on a boat thing which is a pretty good indicator of a cult. There is the isolation from society at large too, which was done later under the cover of preventing negative press, which I can’t say was completely wrong, but is also a good cult marker. On the other hand most of the enterprises were organized as completely standard businesses and the focus seems to have been more on controlling the organization and running them well instead of controlling people forever. The focus on business will be one of the reasons for the project’s downfall, but was also probably necessary to procure resources, so at least some things never change.
For the technical aspects specifically, the only real failure by my reckoning was the weathering of the concrete. This absorbed oxygen which was not available via carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Everything else aside, it’s incredibly impressive that they did achieve in making some kind of self organizing ecosystem that kept people and many of the other species alive. On the other hand, the first team not having more farming experience and planning for food production more has to be seen as a failure if humans were meant to live in the system. Expecting to feed 8 people on 0.5 acres is crazy. Globally the industrial food system uses about that much land to feed 1 person. Now, with year round growing thanks to temperature control and light given the lack of cloud cover in the desert that can be reduced a lot, and human scaled intensive agriculture will out yield conventional on a per square foot basis, but still I think at least an acre should have been used. I’m impressed they just about made it work, but also starting in the fall when available solar energy is only going to decrease is just terrible timing as well. I guess specifically from my perspective it seems like they could have used a little more practice in being high tech peasants before they tried it for over a year.
In regards to the social aspects of failure, it’s really just a disappointment. The hope appears to have been that biosphere two would inspire people to consider their connection to the earth (biosphere one) and change our destruction of it. Well over 30 years later and that didn’t happen. But the social failure of the project itself, the literally hostile takeover, just seemed more disappointing than any other failures. (At least reading about the unexpected problems of making an ecosystem from scratch was interesting and I would have read more) The bankers seemed to have no vision whatsoever for the place, (yeah that tracks) and even handing it off to new more scientific management seems to have resulted in even less scientific results. It’s also a shame as the most interesting thing would have been to just leave it as a sealed ecosystem for a while and see how it evolved.
Fundamentally though whether biosphere two was actually a failure hinges around some possibly not answerable questions. Is nature actually a machine? Do we actually control our fate? And can you create human culture on purpose?
There’s more to find here too, but for parting thoughts, just remember that if you try and create anything that runs counter to extractive capitalism you will be invaded by the government and infested with bankers.
(This is almost no longer relevant but instead of the Iraq war we could have had 2,000-6,000 biospheres built so we probably should have done that instead and just had fun with it.)
To start, why the biosphere two? As best I can tell it appears to be in part an attempt at theater and imagining a different world for humans to live in, and from a drive to live in a specific harmony with the earth. I say a specific type of harmony because it seems to be the desire to combine natural systems with technology. If harmony alone was the goal, well plenty of people have done that throughout history, and the team could have just produced their living from an existing ecosystem (and many seem to have later done so) so to me it seems that the integration of technology was one of the key points. There also seems to have been an understanding among many members as well that technology was leading to the death of the earth and there was a need to create something different.
So much for the good motivations, what about the dark side? Well for one example the founders seemed to be stuck in a particular type of America frontier ideal, despite wanting to build against the culture, it still viewed places as a blank slate, ready to be remade in a New World. You can also find echos of the death of the space race that are still reverberating today, as the great powers retreated from their ambitions among the stars, talented scientists would go to work on biosphere two imagining that colonizing the stars was still possible and that we could simulate what it would look like.
Then there was the core group and the original management. And the question we have to ask is: cult or no cult? Let’s go over the checklist! I am pretty comfortable saying cult just on the founder making a ritual out of publicly shaming people’s faults in front of the group. They also did the whole taking to the high seas on a boat thing which is a pretty good indicator of a cult. There is the isolation from society at large too, which was done later under the cover of preventing negative press, which I can’t say was completely wrong, but is also a good cult marker. On the other hand most of the enterprises were organized as completely standard businesses and the focus seems to have been more on controlling the organization and running them well instead of controlling people forever. The focus on business will be one of the reasons for the project’s downfall, but was also probably necessary to procure resources, so at least some things never change.
For the technical aspects specifically, the only real failure by my reckoning was the weathering of the concrete. This absorbed oxygen which was not available via carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. Everything else aside, it’s incredibly impressive that they did achieve in making some kind of self organizing ecosystem that kept people and many of the other species alive. On the other hand, the first team not having more farming experience and planning for food production more has to be seen as a failure if humans were meant to live in the system. Expecting to feed 8 people on 0.5 acres is crazy. Globally the industrial food system uses about that much land to feed 1 person. Now, with year round growing thanks to temperature control and light given the lack of cloud cover in the desert that can be reduced a lot, and human scaled intensive agriculture will out yield conventional on a per square foot basis, but still I think at least an acre should have been used. I’m impressed they just about made it work, but also starting in the fall when available solar energy is only going to decrease is just terrible timing as well. I guess specifically from my perspective it seems like they could have used a little more practice in being high tech peasants before they tried it for over a year.
In regards to the social aspects of failure, it’s really just a disappointment. The hope appears to have been that biosphere two would inspire people to consider their connection to the earth (biosphere one) and change our destruction of it. Well over 30 years later and that didn’t happen. But the social failure of the project itself, the literally hostile takeover, just seemed more disappointing than any other failures. (At least reading about the unexpected problems of making an ecosystem from scratch was interesting and I would have read more) The bankers seemed to have no vision whatsoever for the place, (yeah that tracks) and even handing it off to new more scientific management seems to have resulted in even less scientific results. It’s also a shame as the most interesting thing would have been to just leave it as a sealed ecosystem for a while and see how it evolved.
Fundamentally though whether biosphere two was actually a failure hinges around some possibly not answerable questions. Is nature actually a machine? Do we actually control our fate? And can you create human culture on purpose?
There’s more to find here too, but for parting thoughts, just remember that if you try and create anything that runs counter to extractive capitalism you will be invaded by the government and infested with bankers.
(This is almost no longer relevant but instead of the Iraq war we could have had 2,000-6,000 biospheres built so we probably should have done that instead and just had fun with it.)
June 14, 2010
Boring. Jane Poynter's book told the story better. I didn't learn much from reading this one that I didn't already know from reading hers. Made myself finish it, though I crawled through the end of it.
March 23, 2025
I loved this!
I visited Biosphere 2 a few weeks back, thoroughly enjoyed it, and picked up this book afterward, to help me better understand what I'd seen. I was surprised by how much it deepened my appreciation, and left me reflective about many subjects, including:
+ the role of romance in a life well lived;
+ the appellation "cult" (what exactly does it mean?);
+ the similarities between the Synergians and successful startup companies -- Biosphere 2 was a group of gifted, romantic, driven (and well-funded) amateurs running a team of experts;
+ the use of the term "good science" and institutional branding as a device of power, but one that can get in the way of actually achieving anything (the Columbia University President pondering why so few of Columbia's people really cared was very interesting);
+ the ways the media shape narratives, sometimes in defiance of reality;
+ the idea of systems science, and "the sciences of the artificial" (per Herb Simon);
+ the role of myth and culture in shaping lives and entire groups of people.
The public image is (still) that Biosphere 2 failed. And yet when I was there it seemed quite telling that the guides couldn't say much about the "good science" that had been done since the original mission was cancelled. But they knew a tremendous amount about the original mission. It seems to me rather than being a failure, it was more of an incomplete success - pointing at a class of things worth doing, but as yet rarely done.
I visited Biosphere 2 a few weeks back, thoroughly enjoyed it, and picked up this book afterward, to help me better understand what I'd seen. I was surprised by how much it deepened my appreciation, and left me reflective about many subjects, including:
+ the role of romance in a life well lived;
+ the appellation "cult" (what exactly does it mean?);
+ the similarities between the Synergians and successful startup companies -- Biosphere 2 was a group of gifted, romantic, driven (and well-funded) amateurs running a team of experts;
+ the use of the term "good science" and institutional branding as a device of power, but one that can get in the way of actually achieving anything (the Columbia University President pondering why so few of Columbia's people really cared was very interesting);
+ the ways the media shape narratives, sometimes in defiance of reality;
+ the idea of systems science, and "the sciences of the artificial" (per Herb Simon);
+ the role of myth and culture in shaping lives and entire groups of people.
The public image is (still) that Biosphere 2 failed. And yet when I was there it seemed quite telling that the guides couldn't say much about the "good science" that had been done since the original mission was cancelled. But they knew a tremendous amount about the original mission. It seems to me rather than being a failure, it was more of an incomplete success - pointing at a class of things worth doing, but as yet rarely done.
May 18, 2022
3.5 stars - Biosphere 2 is such an interesting and curious scientific project that had such an interesting stranglehold on the scientific community, only to be damned by the same community in a matter of years. This exploration on it is detailed to a fault - toward the middle I grew frustrated as I was increasingly enamored with the plot of the 8 Biospherians that were sealed in for 2 years, and that portion of the experiment felt almost glossed over. If there was more context around that part and less around the swapping of money to build and upkeep this experiment, I would have definitely rated it higher. Kind of difficult to get through, but a worthy read all around.
July 13, 2021
Riveting story of utopian dreams going awry
Fascinating story about avant-garde free spirited hippie ecologist cum entrepreneurs building a prototype for enclosed self sustaining mini- worlds. It didn’t work out as planned: it cost a fortune, needed huge electrical supply, and nearly starved the inhabitants. Then there were the management upsets and corporate take over. A tumultuous story of idealism coming face to face with humanity, and practical reality.
Fascinating story about avant-garde free spirited hippie ecologist cum entrepreneurs building a prototype for enclosed self sustaining mini- worlds. It didn’t work out as planned: it cost a fortune, needed huge electrical supply, and nearly starved the inhabitants. Then there were the management upsets and corporate take over. A tumultuous story of idealism coming face to face with humanity, and practical reality.
June 4, 2021
Pretty interesting, weird and all over the place, a good metaphor for the role science currently plays in our society, and it was interesting how the priorities of Biosphere 2 reflected the priorities of the U.S. as a whole throughout the late 20th and early 21st century. Definitely some ideas I resonate with in there and some stuff that was way out of the box. I'd check it out.
March 31, 2024
This is a fascinating deep dive into the messy struggles of a grandiose and sometimes scientific endeavor—one that says a lot about media and the politics of science in general. I might have highlighted about a third of the book…
It wasn’t the easiest to get through; it kind of felt like reading a 283-page Atlantic article. But it was worth it in the end!
It wasn’t the easiest to get through; it kind of felt like reading a 283-page Atlantic article. But it was worth it in the end!
May 1, 2012
Biosphere II loomed large in my young adulthood wonderings. For some reason, I was fascinated by the idea of living in a completely closed space for two years with seven other people. When the mission ended, I read that all of the participants had pledged to not share what went on while inside the Biosphere and I was disappointed I would never find out.
But "nevers" have a way of wandering off as time passes and I've since discovered that there are books about the Biosphere II mission written by the insiders. This, however, is written by an outsider and tells the tale of the creation of the Biosphere, which is as fascinating a story as the Biosphere II story itself. Recommended.
But "nevers" have a way of wandering off as time passes and I've since discovered that there are books about the Biosphere II mission written by the insiders. This, however, is written by an outsider and tells the tale of the creation of the Biosphere, which is as fascinating a story as the Biosphere II story itself. Recommended.
February 14, 2013
If you have visited the biosphere you will find this book fascinating. What can a small group of inspired and energetic ecology enthusiasts do if they are given unlimited funds for a science/culture/drama myth project? Why build a fantastically engineered, beautiful, garden of Eden, utopia which is horribly impractical and self-contradictory. Reider captures all of these elements in her well written book.
February 11, 2010
Biosphere 2 was an isolated island of biodiversity and rapidly explained what happens when natural places are cut off from others. The experiment was essential, if only to point out the obvious: we must preserve and link wild places if we are to survive ourselves. I would like to see the energy of the synergians translated into global projects of preservation and, where appropriate, restoration.
August 19, 2011
A story interesting enough that I have gone on to the partisan literature, beginning with Jane Poynter’s ‘The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2.’
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/82...
December 30, 2011
Probably not the most exciting book for average reader, but it is a good synopsis of the history of a unique place.
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