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Biosphere 2 has stood amid the paloverde, mesquite, and ocotillo southwest of Oracle, Arizona, for less than 20 years, yet it looks decidedly aged. Its skin is mostly glass and lacks window-washing tracks, so the hundreds of panes had to be cleaned by workers hanging on ropes like rock climbers. At one time seven people were employed to do this; today there are none. The desert wind deposits dust on the structure and the rain washes it downward, forming parallel streaks. The rain forest inside pushes against the glass. In 2003 there were about 150 employees on the site. Less than a third remain. Dry leaves collect against the air handlers by the main doorway; whiptail lizards skitter over the concrete paths, and javelinas trot around the grounds at night. A note on a whiteboard in the operating engineer’s office tallies the number of poisonous reptiles encountered on the site, which is greater than the number of maintenance people left to encounter them: “Rattlesnakes: 17.”

The café is closed, the mission control building deserted, and inside the row of clear plastic sheds where plants were readied for installation in the main structure, towering exotics—Panama hat palm, angel’s trumpet—stand bleached and lifeless where they perished when the water was turned off. A monochrome monitor displays the last numbers it ever knew, burned into its dead screen. On the shelf below is the 1986 manual for the environmental monitoring system to which it was connected. Nothing ages faster than the future.

Constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 was a 3.14-acre sealed greenhouse containing a miniature rain forest, a desert, a little ocean, a mangrove swamp, a savanna, and a small farm. Its name gave homage to “Biosphere 1”—Earth—and signaled the project’s audacious ambition: to copy our planet’s life systems in a prototype for a future colony on Mars. A May 1987 article in DISCOVER called it “the most exciting scientific project to be undertaken in the U.S. since President Kennedy launched us toward the moon.” In 1991 a crew of eight sealed themselves inside. Over the next two years they grew 80 percent of their food, something NASA has never attempted. They recycled their sewage and effluent, drinking the same water countless times, totally purified by their plants, soil, atmosphere, and machines. It wasn’t until 18 years later, in 2009, that NASA announced total water recycling on the International Space Station. At the end of their stay, the Biospherians emerged thinner, but by a number of measures healthier.


Despite these successes, the media and the science establishment seized upon the ways in which the project had failed. Chief among these was an inability of Biosphere 2’s atmosphere to sustain human life. As was true outside, the problem was signaled by rising carbon dioxide. By 1996 Biosphere 2 had passed into the hands of Columbia University, and later the University of Arizona took over. Both used it to run scenarios of global climate and atmospheric change. In its later life, “instead of trying to model utopia, Biosphere 2 would actually model dystopia—a future plagued by high carbon dioxide levels,” wrote Rebecca Reider, author of a definitive history of the project. But while most research on impending environmental disaster relied on computer models, Biosphere 2 represented a fascinating alternative mode in which large-scale analog experiments employed real organisms, soil, seawater, and air.

The man behind Biosphere 2 was John Allen, a Colorado School of Mines–trained metallurgist and Harvard MBA. In 1963, after two hallucinogenic experiences on peyote, Allen looked out of the Manhattan office building in which he was working and realized he could not open the window. He felt trapped like a bug inside glass—an ironic epiphany for a man who would work so hard to seal up a handful of his followers three decades hence. So he sailed from New York aboard a freighter and traveled the world, seeking wisdom. By 1967 he had become a self-styled esoteric teacher in Haight-Ashbury-era San Francisco, delivering weekly lectures to a group of mostly younger followers and cohabitants. In 1968 he and his students went to New York to set up a theater company, and from there to New Mexico, where they started a commune near Santa Fe. If most such counterculture experiments yielded to entropy and poverty, Allen’s Synergia Ranch is a notable exception. The Synergians were a very hardworking bunch.

In 1974 a lanky young Texan and Yale dropout named Ed Bass wandered up the driveway to Synergia Ranch. Like Allen, Bass had a strong interest in the environment. Unlike Allen, he was the billionaire heir to an oil fortune. Later that year Allen and his followers drove an old school bus to Berkeley, California, where they built an 82-foot sailboat. None of them had ever built even a rowboat. In 1975 they began sailing the Heraclitus around the world. They took her up the Amazon River, dove coral reefs in the tropics, and sailed her to Antarctica to do research on whales.

With John Allen’s big dreams and Ed Bass’s big money, the Synergians began taking on bigger things. They acquired a huge cattle ranch in Australia, started a sustainable forest in Puerto Rico, built a hotel and cultural center in Kathmandu, and took on other projects in Nepal, the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. Now calling themselves the Institute for Ecotechnics, they began hosting international meetings on ecology, sustainable development, and then space colonization. At a conference in Oracle in 1984, Allen announced his plan to build a prototype Mars colony on Earth before the decade was out. The destiny of human beings was to seed Earth’s life into space, and the first stop would be a working colony on Mars.

The principals of the institute broke ground for Biosphere 2 in January 1987. If some of them lacked academic qualifications for the jobs they held, they enlisted real experts to execute the design. Walter Adey, a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution, was in charge of the ocean. The rain forest was the domain of Sir Ghillean Prance, then director of the New York Botanical Garden. These and other experts installed 3,800 species of life inside, even as cranes lifted great sections of white superstructure into place overhead. The majesty and complexity of the project entranced the press, touching on myth and religious narrative, Rebecca Reider wrote. Time called it “Noah’s Ark: The Sequel.” This created expectations that would be hard to meet.

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