Before the doors closed, Biosphere 2 was “The Project that Will Save the World.” After they opened, it was a “pseudo-science stunt.” Both phrases are from the press, and the distance between them is the story of how the project was judged. The judgement had three sources, and they are worth separating, because they were not making the same complaint.

The reporter

The first was Marc Cooper of the Village Voice, who in the months before closure published a series of pieces on who the biospherians were. He found that the project had grown out of a commune, Synergia Ranch, founded in New Mexico in 1969 by John Allen and a group calling itself the Theater of All Possibilities; that Allen’s authority over the group was near-total; that most of the crew had little formal scientific training; and that the group’s private philosophy, in Cooper’s reading, held that the Earth was doomed and that humanity’s future lay in building biospheres elsewhere, with themselves as the chosen crew.

Then he found the scrubber: a machine, as he put it, of the kind a submarine carries, installed to pull carbon dioxide out of the air. To Cooper its presence “made the entire experiment worthless, whatever value it had,” because the public had been sold a sealed world in which nature did the work.

The project’s answers were not strong. Allen denied “singular and authoritarian control.” Taber MacCallum said that by the usual definition of a cult “many companies and organizations fit it.” On the scrubber, the engineers said, truthfully, that it had been in the design from the start, built in anticipation of the winter imbalance between respiration and photosynthesis; it is in Dempster’s engineering papers with its chemistry written out. But it was not in the story the company had told, and that was Cooper’s point. A 1994 profile in the Arizona Daily Star would describe Allen as “both a visionary and an abusive mind-control guru,” and he has spent the years since rebutting the second half.

The columnist

The second critic was a friend. Donella Meadows, the systems scientist and lead author of The Limits to Growth, wanted the project to succeed and wrote about it twice in its first years. Her complaint was not about cults or scrubbers. It was about truth-telling. The company, she wrote in October 1993, “shows a consistent preference for image over truth”; it admitted its problems “too late, reluctantly”; it had “built up an absurd expectation that there should be no problems” and then been destroyed by the ordinary ones. Its scientists had told it not to seal people in right away, and it had not listened. “Space Biospheres Ventures tries to look scientific,” she wrote, “but it has a history of not listening to its scientists.”

And then the sentence that the company’s defenders and detractors could both have signed: “in science experiments that don’t work are nothing to hide. They’re the source of learning.” She thought the project’s lessons were real and applied to the planet as well: slow down, quit trying to control the uncontrollable, listen to what the biosphere is telling you, and tell the truth.

The committee

The third was the company’s own Scientific Advisory Committee, eleven outside scientists appointed in the first year to restore the project’s credibility after the duffel bag, and chaired by Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian. Its members came from NASA, the Smithsonian, the National Cancer Institute and Kew Gardens, and included Eugene Odum, one of the founders of ecosystem ecology. On February 5, 1993, three weeks after the oxygen injection, six of the eleven voted to dissolve it. Lovejoy said he was “frustrated by the lack of progress” and declined to say more. Ed Bass said the cause was personality conflicts with the management team. Odum, who said most of the panel thought the programme had been very successful, gave the verdict that has outlasted the others: “What we’ve seen is not a scientific failure; it’s a failure of human relationships.”

Three years later two of the ecologists asked to think about the building’s future, Joel Cohen and David Tilman, wrote up the lessons so far in Science. Their judgement was measured and, read closely, not unkind: “No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free.” That was true before Biosphere 2 and true after it. The difference was that now someone had tried at scale and written down what happened.

The defence

The crew have answered for thirty years, and their answer has two parts. The first is about method. Mark Nelson has argued that the controversy came from a narrow idea of how science must be done: a hypothesis, a control, one variable at a time. Biosphere 2 was built the way Apollo was built, by what the engineers called all-up systems testing, putting the whole thing together and seeing what broke, because that is the only way to learn how a system of that complexity behaves. By that standard the oxygen crisis was not a failure; it was the result.

The second part is about the record. Nelson points out that the crew came out healthier by every measure the physician could take, that the ecosystems were alive and growing, that the seal was tighter than anything built before or since, that the carbon audit was a genuine discovery, and that a million people came to look. His own summary is that “the reality of what the endeavor was all about got lost in the shuffle.” Carl Zimmer, the science writer who went back over it in 2019, added the caveat any experimentalist would: with so many variables changing at once and no second biosphere for comparison, much of what happened cannot be attributed to a cause, and that limit is permanent.

What the quarrel was about

Set the three complaints side by side and they are not about the same thing. Cooper’s was about who the people were. Meadows’s was about whether the company told the truth. The committee’s was about whether anyone was being allowed to do science. Only the second was ever answered, and it was answered by the company’s collapse rather than by reform. The strongest point the critics ever had was not the commune or the submarine machine; it was that an operation which calls itself an experiment and then hides its exceptions has forfeited the one thing an experiment is for. The strongest point the defenders ever had was the data. And the data, as the next piece tells, were lost.

Sources

• Retro Report, “Biosphere 2: a faulty Mars survival test gets a second act,” with Marc Cooper, Jane Poynter and Taber MacCallum. Cooper’s reporting and quotations, and MacCallum’s reply. retroreport.org
• Christopher Klein, History.com, on the Synergia Ranch origins, Allen’s denial, and the Arizona Daily Star profile of 1994. history.com
• Donella Meadows, “Biosphere as theater,” October 28, 1993. donellameadows.org
• “Biosphere advisory panel disbands in frustration,” Associated Press, Deseret News, February 16, 1993. deseret.com
• Joel E. Cohen and David Tilman, “Biosphere 2 and biodiversity: the lessons so far,” Science 274, 1150–1151, November 15, 1996.
• Mark Nelson, “Some ecological and human lessons of Biosphere 2,” European Journal of Ecology 4 (1), 50–55, 2018; and “Biosphere 2: What Really Happened?”, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, May–June 2018, for the press phrases and the million visitors. doi:10.2478/eje-2018-0006, dartmouthalumnimagazine.com
• Mark Nelson and William F. Dempster, “Living in space,” 1996, for the all-up testing argument.
• Carl Zimmer, “The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments,” New York Times, March 29, 2019. carlzimmer.com
• William F. Dempster, “Biosphere 2 engineering design,” Ecological Engineering 13 (1999), for the scrubber’s place in the design.