Inside the Biosphere I: Two Years and Twenty Minutes
A Sermon by the Rev. Aaron
McEmrys
Delivered to the Unitarian
Society of Santa Barbara, March 1, 2009
On September 26, 1991, eight human beings began an amazing experiment. Wearing NASA-like blue jumpsuits, they marched proudly into Biosphere 2, the 3.15 acre self-sustaining ecosystem that they hoped to live in for three years, hermetically sealed off from the outside world.
Two years and twenty minutes later, those eight human beings emerged. They were still wearing their sharp blue jumpsuits, but now the suits hung off their emaciated frames like drapery, and they had reached, or perhaps gone beyond the limits of their physical, mental and emotional endurance.
They had walked into the Biosphere two years earlier as a family, but now emerged hopelessly divided into warring factions. The humans left behind them a shattered ecosystem, its biological diversity long since eradicated. They left behind them an oxygen-starved shell of glass and steel, now given wholly over to the one truly successful species in the experiment – the ants.
But best to begin at the beginning.
The Biosphere we know and love, the amazingly complex and wonderful world we inhabit, is Biosphere 1, and back in the 1980s a small group of people decided to embark on an important mission. “They wanted to find creative ways to bring technology and ecology together to create a more just and sustainable world.”[1]
One way they sought to achieve these goals was by creating truly synergistic communities. Jane Poynter describes life in one of these communities this way: “Life at Synergia Ranch became a creative maelstrom. The group questioned modern life unceasingly, along with humanity’s place in it. We eventually developed a strict adherent to three simultaneous lines of work: theater to explore inner life, philosophy to search for truth, meaning and personal development, and business enterprise – initially because we were broke. Meditation, plays, spiritual readings, scientific studies and speechmaking all found a slot on the week’s crammed schedule and everyone attended each function. Work ethic and discipline were extremely strong.”[2]
Ultimately they found a private investor willing to fund the greatest imaginable test of their synergistic philosophy: Biosphere 2. Biosphere 2 was to be an entirely self-enclosed, self-regulating and self-sustaining world, complete with a “Rainforest, with sixty foot trees, a mountain and a thundering waterfall. There was also a Savannah modeled on a South American grassland. The desert was a coastal fog desert full of cacti and other succulents, and the Marsh would squeeze sixty linear miles of Florida Everglades into one hundred feet of mangrove and freshwater marsh flowing until it reached the salty sea. The Ocean biome had a coconut palm beach with white coral sand from Bahama and a coral reef, while the Human habitat would suggest a city, with a machine shop, gym, hospital and offices, all surrounded by the Agriculture section, which combined the best of ancient tropical intensive farming with high tech modern methods.”[3]
The five “Wilderness” biomes were to provide most of the life-support functions, the most important of which was perhaps air management, making sure that the balance between oxygen and carbon dioxide would adequately support human life.
The Synergistas broke ground in 1987 and soon over four hundred people scrambled over the site like ants: builders, architects, botanists, engineers, ecologists, doctors, plumbers, mountain climbers, agronomists, plant pathologists, accountants and photographers all jostling to contribute to the creation of a new Eden.
And then, four years and two hundred fifty million dollars later, four men and four women were locked in, hermetically sealed into their new world – and the experiment began in earnest.
Inside Biosphere 2, the crew, as they called themselves, continued to do their best to live their lives along the synergistic lines they had worked so well for them in the “outside” world. They continued to take turns giving speeches, creating plays, making art and working hard, bonded together not only by personal affection, but by their shared commitment to their mission. They knew that conflict was likely in such close quarters, but felt well prepared to face and resolve anything that might come up.
And for a while all was well. The work was hard and unrelenting, but the crew was well disciplined and used to working as a team. Life was hard, but satisfying. Nothing remotely like Biosphere 2 had ever existed before, and so they conducted experiments and collected data for researchers from scores of different disciplines, but the vast majority of their time was increasingly devoted to making sure they got enough to eat.
Indeed, the demands of growing, gathering and preparing enough food to keep eight people alive soon pushed aside almost every other consideration, as the Biospherians began to lose weight. Poynter remembers, “We were far from starving, but I was beginning to understand the terrible plight of people in the world who are truly hungry, fighting for their lives and their families lives. Aside from the misery of hunger itself, it is a dreadfully helpless feeling to not have enough physical energy to fix the problem that caused the hunger in the first place. Farming”, she writes, “Is bloody hard work. Long before the next meal arrived, I had usually burned up the calories from the last one. I dragged myself from chore to chore, taking twice as long to weed a sweet potato field as it should have taken, skipping other chores.”[4]
Hunger was a real problem and there seemed to be no way around it. Even the food they had became more and more limited as environmental conditions changed, and after a while their diet was so simple that their skin turned orange from eating so many sweet potatos, and the only locked room in the whole place was the banana room, which they all agreed was far too tempting to be left unguarded.
Creating everything necessary for human life was turning out to be much more difficult than anyone had imagined, but they struggled on, sure they could find just the right formula, just the right organizational plan, to see them through.
Meanwhile, their struggles became harder to bear as another kind of scarcity began to take its toll. They had extremely limited contact with the outside world. Tourists and others would come by and press their noses up against the hot walls of Arizona glass like visitors at a zoo, but the crew could not reach out and touch them. The only lifeline to people on the outside was by telephone, which could be used only intermittently. But use it they did, even occasionally holding musical jam sessions with musicians in California with the phone on the floor of the common room.
But the most serious form of scarcity of all was the persistent lack of oxygen. Despite their best efforts and the most sophisticated technology available, the oxygen/carbon dioxide balance proved extraordinarily difficult to manage, especially because for most of the two years they lived there, the Arizona skies were covered in a grey El Nino event that blocked almost 25% of the sun the plants inside needed to produce the air we breathe. Oxygen typically makes up about 21% of the air we breathe, but in Biosphere 2, it first dropped to 17% and then lower still, to 14.%, the equivalent of living at 17,000 feet!
Once the balance of life had been upset, their tight little community began to lose its balance as well. That’s when the blaming started. In fact what happened next could best be described as an epidemic of blaming, and no one was immune. Their leaders were blamed for being short-sighted, other crew members were blamed for being freeloaders, they blamed themselves for not being able to deal with the terrible challenges they faced, and in a remarkably short period of time, their little family had all but disintegrated into two intensely bitter factions, “Us and Them.”
Jane Poynter recalls that, “On Tuesday morning I was putting fodder in the animal bay when Gaie walked over to me. I watched as she collected a big wad of saliva in her mouth and spat in my face. She turned and walked away without a word. Later I was walking up the spiral stairs during break time when Laser stopped on the stairs next to me and spat a mixture of saliva and peanut goo in my face. ‘What have I done?’, I asked, wiping the dripping, slimy mess from my face. ‘That’s for you to find out,’, came the surly reply.”[5]
When those eight people finally emerged from their glass jar, they left nothing but ants and ruins behind them.
The lessons for us here are rich and deep.
Considering their story I was first struck by how predictable it all was. Sociologists and social psychologists have written tome upon weighty tome explaining what is likely to happen to human beings when scarcity begins to dominate their lives. The number one cause of divorce is financial scarcity, and scarcity of food, water and the other real or imagined neccesities of life lie at the root of the vast majority of violence, unrest and suffering in the world.
But we humans do not read psychology, listen to sociologists or pay much attention to the world around us very much. Instead we either remain voluntarily oblivious or worse, imagine that we are the exception to the rule of the human condition! We imagine that this time it will be different, this time we will not fall into the traps of the past, the traps and snags that all the rest of humanity so frequently falls prey to – because we are different. We are mature. We are wise. We are better than all those who have come before us and all those who surround us now. This is the insane arrogance of the gambler, who knows for a fact that every game is rigged so that the house will always win – and yet persists in believing that “I will win. I will beat the house because I’m no fool – I have a system!”
We humans have amazing gifts when it comes to technological innovation, but are remarkably dense when it comes to understanding ourselves. We are great students of cause and effect, and yet we cannot seem to recognize the links of cause and effect that make all the difference between war and peace; hope and despair; love and hate. Just like the Biospherians, we are prone to the delusion that the usual rules don’t apply to us. Stick us in an enclosed space without enough food, strip our meals and our lives of its richness and diversity, and then start removing oxygen – and we’ll be okay, we’ll be able to handle it, to keep our community together, even to emerge victorious – because we are different.
This, my friends is what the Catholics call the Sin of Pride, and I can fully understand why they call it a Deadly Sin.
Just imagine how different things could have been for the Biospherians, or for us, for that matter, if we had a menu, a kind of Cliff notes to human behavior. We could put it up on our refrigerator with magnets: “When this sort of thing happens, we know that humans are likely to respond thusly. Therefore, pay attention and try to respond this way instead of that way.” I know I could use a list like this. For example, I know that when I respond to my wife in this way, we’re probably going to end up in an argument, and if I respond to her in that way, then things will probably be just fine. But I am so forgetful, and I respond this way much more often than I (and definitely Eliza) would like.
The Biospherians remind us that we are capable of incredible things: invention, endurance, devotion and that we most definitely are capable of doing the impossible They also remind us that we are very likely to sabotoge even our best efforts and most noble aspirations through our own entirely predictable foolishness. But we don’t have to fall prey to those old patterns – we can learn from them and grow through them, not perfectly, of course – but we can move in the right direction. We just have to come to know ourselves as thoroughly as we know our cars, our computers and our rocket ships.
We have to start by knowing what we need, what we love.
I cannot offer a comprehensive list, of course, but here are some of the things the Biospherians needed, but often didn’t have enough of:
1. Enough – the crew needed enough: enough food, enough oxygen, enough rest, enough of the basic stuff of life so that there was room for more in their lives than the task of simply staying alive for another day.
2. Freedom – the crew discovered that they didn’t do well living in a petrie dish. They needed the freedom of time and space to understand their lives and find their balance. They needed to be able to make choices and to say no as well as yes.
3. Variation, diversity – the Biospherians suffered terribly as their world became ever more reduced. As the astonishing array of plants and animals and even insects faded into a drab and limited palate, our poor humans suffered terribly from living in a world without diversity. Just as being fed a steady diet of sweet potatoes and beans did not nourish their bodies, so to did just a handful of fellow-inmates fail to nourish their hearts and spirits.
4. Hope – At first the crew faced even the most severe of hardships with equanimity, because they were still hopeful, they believed that things would be all right, that they would somehow make it through. But as their hope faded, as they became more and more convinced that their mission was a failure, so did their energy, their will and their ability to perform even the most basic and important of chores.
5. Purpose – This is something that the crew held onto for a very long time, even after they had lost so much of everything else on this list. Some of them never lost their sense of purpose. They were devoted to a mission much bigger than themselves, a mission they believed could change the course of life itself for the better. This sense of purpose, of mission, held them together long after most people would have been pounding and screaming at the glass walls for release.
6. Love – This, I believe was what the Biospherians needed most in their time in Eden. Their whole mission was based in love for life, for creation, for the Earth and all its complex wonder. Their community was based on principles of interconnection and loving interdependence. And even as the social fabric began to fray and tear, still every member continued to love at least one other member of the crew. This limited kid of love did help lead to the Us vs. Them situation that ultimately made life in the Biosphere completely untenable as they fractured into warring camps, but without the fortifying and healing power of love, all eight of the former crew members would no doubt have been locked up in a madhouse somewhere for the rest of their days.
In the end the human lessons of the Biosphere are clear. For life to be successful we have to have the things we need, and not just some of us, but all who share the larger Biosphere of which we are a part, for above all else, the lesson of Biosphere 2 reminds us how intricately interconnected we are. We all deserve and require life’s most essential ingredients: material security, freedom, diversity, hope, purpose and love. We need these things every bit as much as we need the air we breathe, and successful living requires all of these, mixed with the ability to know ourselves better, to recognize the difference between healthy and destructive patterns – and to break free of the patterns that do not serve us.
We can do this. We humans may often behave as if we are incapable of learning and immune to growth – but we are not incapable nor are we immune. Possibility, potential, creativity: everything we need is within our grasp, we just have to be brave enough and loving enough to become the people it is within us to be.
© 2009 Aaron McEmrys, Santa Barbara, CA