Review by Catherine Cheek
Biosphere 2 was a closed ecosystem built near Tucson, Arizona in the early nineties. Eight people sealed themselves inside what was essentially a giant terrarium. They used plants, bacteria and machinery to feed themselves, recycle their waste, and keep the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen stable. Biosphere 2 captured our imagination, promoted in part as a trial run for a colony on another planet, and in part as an experiment to learn more about Biosphere 1, that is, the earth. The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2, by Jane Poynter, describes what it was like to be involved with this project before, during, and after.
Jane Poynter was born to a proper English family and had a conventional public school upbringing, but all of that changed when she met John Allen in 1982. He introduced her to a group of idealistic adventurers who would eventually form the corp of the Biosphere 2 project. John was looking for people who had good synergy, fearless people who could do a number of tasks well, and endure hardship for the sake if ideals. To prove herself, Poynter sailed around the world in a concrete junk, worked on a cattle station in the outback, and travelled internationally with a theater troupe. After proving herself willing to overcome any obstacle and withstand any hardship, Jane made the final cut on the team, and became captain of Agriculture in Biosphere 2, overseeing the crops of sweet potatoes, peanuts, and other foodstuffs which sustained them during their two year term of isolation.
What I liked most about this book were the insider anecdotes. For example, the crew had such a huge problem with roaches that they had to catch them by using cups smeared with KY jelly as traps. Mites ate their potatoes, ants chewed through the silicone, and they had to make two species extinct (poisonous stowaway bark scorpions, and their domestic pigs, who ate too much human grade food.) Algal blooms threatened the coral reef in their ocean, mildew on the glass blocked out the sun, and food shortages made them all weaker, even as the beta carotene from their main staple—sweet potatoes—turned their skin orange. They also had to account for several metric tons of oxygen that mysteriously vanished, leaving them weak and lethargic.
Worse than the physical hardships were the human problems. Poynter complained about the huge media storm that followed every decision, even one as simple as allowing her to leave to get hand surgery when a thresher amputated her finger. Big projects attract big personalities, and conflicts between the choleric John Allen and the others on the project eventually tore them apart. By the end of their two year term, the once close-knit group had severed into two factions Us and Them (as Poynter called them) who refused to speak with each other.
Although they managed to get the carbon and oxygen fluctuations under control, and the internal ecosystem eventually settled into equilibrium, they never resolved how to keep people in isolation for two years without having psychological distress. Five years after their mission, they still had the record for the longest time spent in voluntary isolation, which Poynter attributes to the fact that they were pre-selected individuals, screened to only include outgoing adventurous types with an extremely low predilection for depression.
The method by which the crew was selected, although effective, proved controversial. Allen appointed and fired people as heads of departments capriciously. Poynter, who was in charge of agriculture and at one point was also in charge of entomology, had no scientific background at all. She had the equivalent of a high school diploma, along with a year or so at secretarial school. Only two of the crew had advanced degrees, despite the fact that they were all involved in highly technical positions. This caused the press to decry the project as unscientific. Poynter argued that they were not scientists, they were skilled technicians and managers. Their group, the synergists, judged people by how well they did their jobs, not by how qualified they were. Ironically, while the project made significant scientific discoveries, it eventually crumbled due to incompetent management and had to be forcibly taken over by an outside organization.
While Poynter prided herself on being able to “learn by doing” and succeed at any task she set her mind to, I wish she had made an exception and hired a professional ghost writer to help her with this book. While the prose is fine at the sentence and paragraph level, it broke down on a macro scale. She began many chapters by describing a scene, only to segue into something unrelated. Poynter described people who later proved unimportant to the Biosphere 2 story, while neglecting to describe her fellow crew members. It was only by the end of the book that I could remember whether John and Margaret were actually within the Biosphere dome, and with the exception of her husband Taber, I didn’t have a sense of the personalities, roles, or even physical characteristics of the rest of the crew.
Poynter started out writing what appeared to be an autobiography, spending an entire chapter on her rather staid and uninteresting upbringing. But all that changed when she walked into the “October Gallery” and got introduced to the Institute of Ecotechnics. Poynter did not explain what an art gallery had to do with a theater troupe, or what either of those had to do with the IE. At this point in the book Poynter bombarded the reader with pages and pages of names, most of whom had little relevance to the story. She mentioned “Caravan of Dreams” and “Galactic Conference” and “Quanbun Downs” and names of people and their projects, but she didn’t go into many details, leaving the reader confused as to what a bohemian theater group had to do with a quarter-billion-dollar scientific project. So many of her references were for things left unexplained in the book that it felt as though she were relaying inside jokes and stories, or as though I were hearing half a telephone conversation.
About a hundred pages into the book, Poynter revealed with horror how devastated they had been when the media called them a cult. I laughed out loud. After all, this group of hippies had been working for practically nothing, under the dictatorial direction of a charismatic leader, enduring hardships for the sake of their ideals. They’d eaten together, lived together, meditated twice a week together, and even had renounced their own names in favor of nicknames the group gave them.
Poynter spent several pages indignantly denouncing the suggestion that they were a cult, and described how hurtful and wrong this was. This felt to me as ridiculous as someone spending a hundred pages describing obsessive calorie-counting, fasting, and purging, then getting huffy when accused of having an eating disorder. The spade was a spade.
Although I believe that the Biosphere 2 project was a very valuable contribution to science, especially to the study of the ecology, Poynter admits the flaws in their controls. Not only did they have to twice pump in oxygen (to compensate for that which was stolen by the un-sealed concrete) but they began exchanging sealed vials of air and water with the outside world for testing. During these exchanges, outside project members smuggled in alcohol and other treats. Poynter defended these as a huge boost to morale, but having the crew supplement their meager rations with M&Ms or Jack Daniels made the line between controlled experiment and expensive performance art project even fuzzier.
The book needed more focus. It couldn’t quite decide if it was Poynter’s autobiography, an overview of the Biosphere 2 project, or a memoir of being with John Allen and the synergists. I liked reading about the technical aspects of Biosphere 2, but wanted more detail as to the planning and the politics. If you’re entranced by the Biosphere 2 project and want to read something about it, this isn’t a bad introduction. It is by no means comprehensive, and if you want to learn all there is to know about the Biosphere 2 project, you’ll want to follow up with the books written by the other members who will no doubt contradict everything Poynter wrote.
Speak Your Mind