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The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2Sabine Höhler

Online publication date: 19 March 2010

To cite this Article Höhler, Sabine(2010) 'The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2', History andTechnology, 26: 1, 39 — 58To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/07341510903313048URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341510903313048

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History and TechnologyVol. 26, No. 1, March 2010, 39–58

ISSN 0734-1512 print/ISSN 1477-2620 online© 2010 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/07341510903313048http://www.informaworld.com

The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2

Sabine Höhler*Taylor and Francis LtdGHAT_A_431478.sgm10.1080/07341510903313048History and Technology0734-1512 (print)/1477-2620 (online)Original Article2009Taylor & Francis254000000December 2009Research Fellow SabineHö[email protected]

This paper studies an attempt to replicate the Earth’s biosphere in the second half of thetwentieth century with the aim of preserving and refashioning the environment as a self-reproducing ecological system. Ecosystems dynamics framed the planet Earth as a closedsystem and directed scientific attention to questions of global environmentalmanagement. The image of the Earth as a spacecraft and operable in a similar waysupported ideas of placing the environment in a laboratory setting. Using the case ofBiosphere 2, launched in the Arizona desert in 1983, this paper studies the images ofnature and environment contained in this quest to create an ecosystem and human habitatas good as, or superior to nature on Earth (known in this context as Biosphere 1). Thesecond biosphere was designed as ‘a prototype for a space colony’ that would eventuallyenable its deteriorating predecessor, the Earthly biosphere, to reproduce and allowhuman settler societies to migrate to other planets. The paper draws on the culturalhistory of the ship in Western culture and on ships and spaceships as archetypes ofautarkic enclosures set apart from nature. It argues that Biosphere 2 as an example of atechnologically controlled endosphere advanced an understanding of the environment asa ‘life support system’ that emphasized not completeness but systems integrity, and wasbased on principles of functionality and replaceability. The paper will explore hownotions of biospheric life support shaped demands on the natural and social environmentsin Biosphere 2 and Biosphere 1.

Keywords: biosphere sciences; Biosphere 2; ecology; ecosystem; twentieth centuryenvironmental history; environmental crisis; environmental management; life supportsystem

Environmental enclosures: refashioning nature in space

The opening sequence of a science-fiction film released in 1972 begins with close-up viewsof an Edenic garden of plants – plentiful, precious, pure, and peaceful. It soon becomesclear, however, that the richness on display is as unique as the biblical paradise. As thecamera draws back, we see that this botanical abundance is quite limited, contained withina large glass dome. Pulling back still further, the camera reveals that the encapsulated envi-ronment is actually situated in deep space; the dome is part of the Valley Forge, a hugeAmerican Airlines space freighter.

Accompanied by majestic music, this sequence culminates in the revelation of the awe-inspiring extent and importance of this US mission. A solemn voice reads out a declarationwritten at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in which the last surviving forests onEarth are dedicated to a conservationist journey through outer space that, as the storybegins, has been in progress for eight years. Astronaut and botanist Freeman Lowell, one offour spacemen aboard, tends the precious cargo that will one day be returned safely to itsEarthly home. Freeman is a true disciple of the environmental movement of the 1960s and

*Sabine Höhler is Research Associate in the Graduate School Topology of Technology at Darmstadt Technical University. Email: [email protected]

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40 S. Höhler

early 1970s. He still remembers when vegetables had taste, smell, and color, when the airwas fresh and the skies were blue (a time evoked by the film’s soundtrack of Joan Baezperforming folk music). Through Freeman we learn that, despite the warnings of environ-mental activists, the Earth of the future has become a bleak and uniform place with a homo-geneous temperature of 75°F. The planet is so densely populated that it has grown into onemassive, completely defoliated city; trees and plants are no longer essential for (human) life,as nutrients are now laboratory-manufactured.

The startling contrast between the richness of life and the fragility of its artificial envi-ronment, as well as the consequences of changed attitudes toward nature, are the issues onwhich the 1972 movie Silent Running focuses.1 The film was produced amid heated debateson resource exploitation, environmental pollution, and overpopulation. It reflects the popu-lar images of impending ecological catastrophe and the questionable survival of humankindat the time. It is certainly no coincidence that the film is set entirely on a spaceship. At theheight of the Space Age, the spaceship became a major symbol of the fears and the hopesassociated with the Earth’s transformation into an endangered planet. It epitomized techno-scientific progress and rationality, but in providing a ‘view from above’ it also highlightedthe uniqueness of the Earth. The dynamic green and blue colors of planet Earth were attrib-uted to three billion years of converting sunlight into processes of life.

The 1960s were also the peak time of the Cold War. With fears of total obliteration, theEarth and its inhabitants were redefined metaphorically as a spaceship, Spaceship Earth. In1965 the US ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai E. Stevenson, appealed to the inter-national community by referring to the Earth as a little spaceship on which humankind trav-eled together as passengers, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil. In 1966,the English economist and political scientist Barbara Ward chose the term to make a pleafor a new balance of power between the continents, of wealth between North and South, andof understanding and tolerance in a world of economic interdependence and potential nuclearwinter.2 Other authors of this lyrical concept, like the economist Kenneth E. Boulding andthe architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller, set out to summon the engineeringelite to take control of an environment in need of extensive repair. They used the spaceshipto offer a blueprint of a self-contained and self-sustained Earthly environment yet to come,a circulatory natural-technological system, largely autonomous, to be run, maintained, andoptimized through technoscientific expertise and rational management.3

This paper explores the emerging fascination with self-sustaining environmentalsystems between 1960 and 1990, particularly those that took the closed world of the spacecapsule as analogy. The focus of this study is Biosphere 2, a project launched in the Arizonadesert in the 1980s. Biosphere 2 was an ecological experiment of unprecedented kind andscale. On a site of three acres, seven defined Earth ecosystems or biomes were establishedand sealed under a glass dome. The ‘living laboratory’ was based on a concealed techno-logical infrastructure and populated by nearly 4000 animal and plant species as well as eighthumans. Its originators stemmed from a small private group of eco-enthusiasts that hadformed in the early 1970s at the height of the environmental movement. Members consistedof entrepreneurs, artists, architects, scientists, philosophers, engineers, and computer tech-nicians spread across the world but united by the idea of developing the new discipline of‘ecotechnics’ that would interrelate the human ‘technosphere’ with the ‘biospheric totality’on the planet Earth. Inspired by systems sciences, including a fascination with informaticsand cybernetics, they strove to generate a ‘genial and creative atmosphere’ for producing a‘synergetic system,’ a system ‘where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts andunpredictable from them.’4 In the early 1980s they established close working ties withcontemporary visionaries of a holistic ecology to gather expert knowledge and construct a


History and Technology 41

biospheric container for understanding and, ultimately, operating ecosystem processes onEarth and beyond. They designed Biosphere 2 as a means to replicate and then leave itsdeteriorating predecessor, allowing pioneering settler societies to migrate to other planets.

The Environmental Age, the peak time of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s hasbeen studied primarily for the conservationist concerns it raised, the emerging environmen-tal movement, and the environmental regimes it stimulated.5 I maintain that the period alsodemonstrates a growing interest in ecological concepts that framed nature and environmentin terms of self-contained and self-sustained ecosystems, provoking new images of natureand environment as objects of scientific and technological expertise. Fundamental shifts inscientific conceptions of the human habitat facilitated ideas of creating environments asgood as or superior to the environment of the Earth. This development reflects a familiartheme of modernity: the power of humankind to create a technologically enhanced nature,either to exert control or to facilitate some notion of improvement. Biosphere 2 provides aparadigmatic example of how concerns for a threatened planet blended with the promise ofconstructing efficient technological environments – enclosed living spaces, as secluded,sanitary, and conditioned as space capsules, and more economic, resistant, and sustainablethan the living spaces that seemed literally at man’s disposal.6

The use of technology to reinvent nature has come to the forefront of technology stud-ies in recent years.7 Still, the shifting boundaries between the natural and the technologicalraise questions of commensurability, challenging in what respect, to what extent, and forwhom technoscientific habitats are as good as or even superior to the Earth’s environment.Recreated nature entails its own specific politics and forms of governance regulatinginclusion and exclusion, allocating access and distributing resources. Biosphere 2 alsomakes an exemplary case for studying how the project’s advocates defined principles ofecological, economical, and technical minimalism and efficiency, and how they selectedthe most useful and collaborative species to inhabit the new environment. This paper,though, mainly addresses the provocation inherent in Biosphere 2, the provocation toperceive the Earthly environment not as embedded into social relations, nor as embeddinghumans, but to perceive the environment essentially as an enclosed object to be controlledand managed from outside. Biosphere 2 put into effect a new image developed in spaceflight and in systems ecology, the image of the biosphere of the Earth as a ‘life supportsystem.’

To illustrate the origins of the environment as a self-sustaining system the paper willbegin by stepping briefly through the history of the Earth’s biosphere in the twentiethcentury. Originally defined as the sphere that encompassed all life on Earth in the late nine-teenth century, systems ecology framed the biosphere as a self-contained and self-sustainedglobal ecosystem in the early 1970s. The biospheric system became a blueprint for ecolog-ical and technological theories of engineering Earthly living space. I will then pursuethemes of enclosure, drawing on scholarship on the figure of the ship in Western culturalhistory and on ships and spaceships as archetypes of autarkic spaces set apart from natureunbound. I will introduce Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on endospheres to examine some ofthe motifs and consequences of isolating technologically controlled interior spaces. Thefollowing section explores how descriptions of the Earthly biosphere and the ecology ofspace capsules merged, as both descriptions based life on technical systems of life support.Subsequently I will outline the Biosphere 2 experiment of constructing a materially closedbiospheric environment in the 1980s and early 1990s and describe how the project managersanswered to and challenged the US space politics of colonizing outer space. I proceed bydiscussing the selective quality of the biospheric life support system of Biosphere 2. Thefinal section briefly summarizes perceptions of the biosphere as a life sustaining system in


42 S. Höhler

Earth systems science after 1990 and the questions this focus entails regarding the changesin local and global environmental governance.

From sphere of life to global ecosystem: the biosphere

In September 1970 the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson introduced a Scientific Americanspecial issue with an article titled ‘The Biosphere’ that was later praised as epoch-making.8

Hutchinson defined the biosphere as the thin film of the Earth’s surface and its surroundingatmosphere and oceanic depths in which life forms existed ‘naturally.’9 He was not the first,however, to restrict life to a ‘terrestrial envelope’ roughly 20 kilometers in extent.10 In 1875the Austrian geologist Eduard Sueß had reflected on the ‘zone’ on ‘this big celestial bodyformed by spheres’ to which organic life was constricted; ‘on the surface of continents,’Sueß asserted, ‘it is possible to single out a self-contained biosphere.’11 In 1909 Sueßconfirmed that ‘All of Life’ arranged itself into an ‘entirety’ that emphasized not ‘unity’ or‘common descent’ but ‘solidarity.’12 This notion that had been opened up by Lamarck andDarwin brought with it, Sueß argued, ‘the concept of a biosphere through which life wasassigned its place … and which at the same time encompassed life only on this planet withall its demands as to temperature, chemical composition etc.’13

While Sueß considered life ruled by the particularity and destiny of the planet Hutchin-son addressed the Biosphere – with capital B – in the terms of global geochemistry laid outby the Russian biogeologist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky who’s main work TheBiosphere was published in 1926 in Leningrad.14 That the Vernadskyan biosphere ulti-mately received more attention than Sueß’ sphere of life might be attributed to the fact thatVernadsky understood life not only as an effect of geological conditions but also as ageological force producing geological effects. His project of a ‘physics of living matter’15

within the parameters of a spherical planet provided a powerful base to study energy andmatter cycles within the environment. The so-called ‘Vernadskyan revolution,’ the formu-lation of a unified Biosphere Theory, led to translating Sueß’ ‘self-contained’ biosphere intoa ‘self-maintained’ biosphere.16

Hutchinson’s article illustrates the conceptual shift from a phenomenological under-standing of the envelope of life to a physical, bio-, and geochemical approach to living matterand to the environment as a self-regulating and evolving system designed like a planetarymachine. Hutchinson based the ‘the day-to-day running’ and ‘operation of the biosphere’on a mechanical and functional idea and terminology of managing an ‘overall reversiblecycle.’17 The notion of the biosphere as a metabolism, a circulatory system, whose boundaryconditions limited the ‘amount of life’ on Earth, made Hutchinson conclude in respect to itsexpected life span: ‘It would seem not unlikely that we are approaching a crisis.’18

The Scientific American special issue appeared as the environmental movement drewprominently on the imagery generated by spaceflight. It is not without irony that the iconicimage of the ‘Blue Planet’ on its lonely course through space, came into focus as the Apollomissions opened the possibility of humans moving from Earth to the stars. James Lovelockasserted that it was ‘this kind of evidence from space research that led me to postulate theGaia hypothesis,’ which views Earth as a single organic whole.19 The special issue on thebiosphere verbalized this systems view as well as the concerns it entailed: the exploitationof non-renewable resources, a growing world population, and the finite dimensions of theplanet, which were identified as the ultimate cause for the rising economic and ecologicalpressures.20

Ecosystems dynamics provided a theoretical architecture for perceiving the Earth’senvironment as a global ecosystem that had to be properly managed and operated according



to its diverse and complex functions.21 Geoffrey Bowker has characterized the systemssciences that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a new ‘interdiscipline,’an assembly of scientific disciplines creating and sharing new technological infrastructuresof computer-based data processing and growing networks to circulate information on aglobal scale. The interdiscipline, as Paul Edwards phrased it, epistemologically recreated‘“the world” as an ecological and physical unity.’22 Computer programs that modeled worlddynamics used as an assumption that the Earth was a ‘closed’ system. The idea of closurefacilitated the mathematical analysis of global natural processes. The scientific modelingand forecasting of nature as a closed system also went along with a politics of nature thatfollowed rational and technocratic planning ideals. The modelers’ view on the planetfavored the notion of the Earth as a small and isolated island and supported the idea ofrerunning and eventually recreating the Earth from scratch.

‘Qualitative and Quantitative Living Space Requirements’23 formed the core of the‘Biosphere Conference’ in the UNESCO Headquarters in September 1968 in Paris. Thisfirst international ‘conference of experts’ on questions of the Earth’s habitat gathered todevelop a ‘Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of theBiosphere.’ To solve ‘the problems of the biosphere in its totality’ the conference launchedthe long-term research program Man and the Biosphere (MAB) that started in 1970.24 Anew form of protected area emerged: the ‘biosphere reserve,’ organized in a world-widenetwork, reflected the internationalization of nature conservation strategies and global envi-ronmental governance.25 Biosphere reserves were set up as ecological laboratories to studyand explore the wealth of nature, not only for protection and preservation, but also forhuman benefit and future utilization. Reserve management focused explicitly on the recon-ciliation of biodiversity conservation with social, cultural, and economic development. Thisnew form of human environmental stewardship marked a transition from a nature-centeredview of conservation to a human-centered view on the environment. When the internationalUN conference in Stockholm in 1972, the first in a series of Earth summits, put the ‘HumanEnvironment’ on the agenda, the conference called for a combination of environmentalprotection and efficient resource management. A study entitled Only one Earth: The Careand Maintenance of a Small Planet, drawn up to prepare the conference agenda, supportedthe familiar environmental alarmism, but it also took a guidebook approach to the Earth inthe form of a technical reference manual.26 The human environment as a global commonswas assessed and researched scientifically, negotiated internationally, politically adminis-trated and allocated, monitored by technology, and rationally developed.

On the one hand the term human environment pictured humans as part of and affectedby their surroundings. On the other hand, the human environment projected an environmentthat would primarily serve human requirements. In a similar way, images that framed theEarth as a spaceship conceived of the environment as controlled, and eventually created byhuman resourcefulness. Richard Buckminster Fuller published his Operating Manual forSpaceship Earth in 1969 and stretched the spaceship metaphor provocatively, arguing, ‘Weare all astronauts.’27 ‘We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally designedmachine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total.’28

Because ‘no instruction book came with it,’29 humankind was confronted with the challengeof learning on its own how to operate ‘Spaceship Earth and its complex life-supporting andregenerating systems.’30

In 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding likewise chose the spaceship to prefigure what he calledthe ‘closed Earth of the future.’ In a programmatic lecture titled ‘The Economics of theComing Spaceship Earth’ he delivered on the occasion of a conference on ‘environmentalquality’ in Washington, DC, he referred to the common experience of the Earth’s historical


44 S. Höhler

‘transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.’ Boulding dated the ‘global natureof the planet’ back to the immediate time following World War II and to space flight. Earliercivilizations, he stated, had had the experience that there ‘was almost always somewherebeyond the known limits of human habitation,’ so that ‘there was always some place else togo when things got too difficult.’ ‘Gradually,’ he stated, ‘man has been accustoming himselfto the notion of the spherical Earth and a closed sphere of human activity.’ Boulding advo-cated to abandon the wasteful ‘cowboy economy,’ the open, throughput-oriented economyof the illimitable plains and prairies, by a frugal ‘spaceman economy.’ The spaceship to himbecame a figure of self-reliance, a vehicle to promote the project of maintaining the Earthlyenvironment as a cyclical ecological system capable of continuous reproduction of materialform and externally sustained by energy inputs only.31

The significance of endospheres in Western history

From the early modern voyages of discovery to the Apollo program ships and spaceshipssymbolized spatial expansion and the exploration of the unknown as well as transition,frailty, and autonomy. Ships have been at the heart of Western culture’s most powerfulnarratives. The French philosopher Michel Foucault considered the ship to be the ‘hetero-topia par excellence.’ Heterotopia was his term for an exceptional site that exists within theworld and, at the same time, lies far remote from or beyond it. Heterotopias, according toFoucault, are in relation with all other places and spaces, and yet in opposition to them. Theship he described as a ‘floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself,that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.’32

Roland Barthes, French philosopher and semiologist, portrayed the ship as a symbol ofseclusion and refuge from life’s raging storms.33 In a confined space the ship provides ahome for a traveler’s valued objects; the ship forms a singular universe floating amid theviolent tempests of time. Barthes particularly referred to the fictional narratives of JulesVerne, in which ships replicate and preserve the world on a small scale. Barthes describesVerne’s ships as vehicles of the encyclopedic project of the nineteenth century, designed toencompass and conserve en miniature all elements of a finite but rapidly proliferating world.

Appropriating and preserving the world by compiling, registering, and neatly arrangingthe elements within it is a strategy not limited to the modern era of scientific collecting,archiving, and interpreting facts. The procedure recalls the primal ship representing thefamily of mankind, the inventory of the world: the biblical ark. This vessel from the OldTestament (Genesis 1: 6–9), furnished with specimens of living creatures on Earth, differsin a significant way from Verne’s crammed but comfortable floating interiors: Noah’s arkis the paradigmatic heterotopia, a storm-tossed place of survival and salvation in the face ofcatastrophe. In the second volume of his work titled Sphären, spheres, the German philos-opher Peter Sloterdijk analyzes the ark as the perfect example of the ‘ontology of enclosedspace,’ a thinking and acting in essentialist terms of contained and exclusive spaces that heconsiders prevalent in Western culture.34 Ark, from the Latin arca, is the word for ‘case’ or‘compartment.’ The primal ship conveys a strong sense of authority, order, and rigorousdiscipline, but the ark also suggests the uncertain course, the drifting voyage, and theendless journey. Ultimately, it can be seen as an exemplary site of selection and selectiveprinciples for survival or obliteration. To Sloterdijk, the ark denotes an artificial interiorspace, a ‘swimming endosphere,’ that under certain conditions provides the only possibleenvironment for its inhabitants.35

While the historical actors of this period may not have consciously drawn on thesecultural motifs, the spaceship does fit into a tradition of thought, a trope for an insular habitat



for a small group of living beings facing a hostile outside world. At a time when the Earthseemed a paradise in jeopardy, the spaceship, like the ark, held out the hope of preservinglife in all its diversity. The spaceship represented two prevailing attitudes towards environ-mental degradation: ecological sufficiency and technological efficiency. Boulding’s refer-ence to the cowboy ideology makes a good example: the spaceship could serve both tocritique post-war technocracy and to affirm it. It took the ancient motif of the ship asthe ‘greatest reserve of the imagination’36 and united it with the modern image of humantechnological supremacy in space. Space flight also invoked the American cultural ideologyof the frontier. When the world frontier came to its end and the formerly distant ‘lost hori-zon’ of the seas and the unknown continents became familiar territory, it was outer spacethat seemed to hold new possibilities for exploration and expansion. Space became theremote place to develop new frontier societies, which, similar to colonies fixed to an empire,would be connected to the Old World, yet form distant places on the outer edge.37 A refer-ence to Spaceship Earth and its future spaceman economy also cited and affirmed the rela-tion of space flight, scientific and technological progress, and frontier exceptionalism andexpansionism.

Life support on Earth and in space

Fuller chose the spaceship to describe an innovative technological model of a natural envi-ronment yet to come. Boulding envisioned the spaceman economy of the closed Earth ofthe late twentieth century as the rational management of circular material flows in order tosecure ‘stock maintenance.’38 His programmatic vision of an efficient technologically main-tained ecosystem was shared across disciplinary boundaries and by much of the generalpublic. As the spaceship was fused with the system planet Earth became a habitat based onsystems and cybernetic principles. The global environment was conceptualized as function-ing by means of technology-driven control systems, similar to the control systems inte-grated into space capsules. Ecosystems sciences regarded the environment as an economyof efficiently cooperating parts, composed and operated like a machine. While the term andconcept of the ‘ecosystem’ had already been introduced in 1935, the British ecologistNicholas Polunin attempted a general definition of the Earthly biosphere in ecosystemsterms in 1984, defining the ‘Biosphere (with capitalization also of the initial letter of “The”(sic) when immediately preceding it)’ as follows: ‘The integrated living and life-supportingsystem comprising the peripheral envelope of Planet Earth together with its surroundingatmosphere so far down, and up, as any form of life exists naturally.’39

Bios – life – now acted as an autonomous system, purposeful and directed but neverthe-less wholly contingent in existence, so as to create an organization capable of self-identicalreproduction.40 With systems sciences and principles of thermodynamics entering ecology,the concept of life increasingly centered on structural order and functional complexity, onmetabolic processes and endless reproduction. The conception of life as the ‘optimizationof functional efficiency’41 became a prerequisite for spaceflight to define elements and mech-anisms of ‘life support,’ to modularize and combine these elements and to substitute themtechnologically, and vice versa: similar to life in a space capsule, the biospheric life supportsystem of the Earth emphasized not encyclopedic completeness but systemic integrity; itrequired and sustained the optimum combination of collaborating organisms. Sloterdijk haspointed to this kind of selectivity that characterizes all stories of the world as the journey ofan ark. In all ark narratives, he observed, the choice of the few is declared a holy necessityand salvation is found only by those who have acquired one of the few boarding passes tothe exclusive vehicle.42 The emerging spaceship ecology not only created new metaphors


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for understanding the fragility of the planet but also inspired a rigid classification and selec-tion of life and nature in order to determine what would be useful and what was redundant,what was to be conserved and what discarded.

Making an enclosure: Biosphere 2

‘Why not build a spaceship like the one we’ve been traveling on – along with all its inhab-itants?’43 The provocative question of Phil Hawes, the architect of Biosphere 2, character-ized the entire Earth as a temporary environment, opening up the prospect of abandoningthe planet altogether. ‘Men in a spaceship are not locked in one place, but become perpetualtravelers,’ William Kuhns had remarked in a chapter on Buckminster Fuller in 1971.44

Sloterdijk reminds us that ontologies of enclosed space, as they are represented in the arkmythology, imply the radical idea of completely removing the endosphere from nature andto re-present it as an artificial construct.45 In 1929 the British physicist John DesmondBernal had predicted that globes would one day replace the Earth. In detail he outlined howa spaceship or a permanent space station – a ‘globe’ or ‘colony’ – would have to beconstructed to take over the Earth’s vital functions. As if in anticipation of Biosphere 2, heprojected an artificial sphere that ‘would fulfill all functions by which our Earth manages tosupport life.’46 I argue that the project of Biosphere 2 represented just such an artificialconstruct of a nature materially isolated from the outside environment, a veritable ‘secondnature’ to be operable at any terrestrial or extraterrestrial location.47 In slight modificationof Fuller’s quote about all of humankind being astronauts, observers of Biosphere 2 claimedthat, ‘Actually, we are all biospherians.’48

The simulation of Biosphere 1 (as the living Earth was now addressed) rested on the ideathat the most powerful way to understand biospheres was to build and to operate them.Earthly nature was to be artificially recreated and separated from the outside environmentto study closed ecological systems and to develop a self-contained and ultimately self-sustaining living system materially closed and informationally and energetically open – notunlike the spaceship that Fuller and Boulding had had in mind when devising the Earth’sfuture. The reproduction of planet Earth on a small scale aimed at constructing a robustecological system that would be capable of longer-duration and supporting greater diversitythan common life support systems in space. Anticipating that in the long run, life on Earthwould have to expand to other planets, the experimenters hoped to develop ‘a prototype fora space colony’ and to settle future ‘Sustainable Communities’ on Mars.49

The inventors of Biosphere 2 considered going to space a ‘historic imperative.’50 Thelifespan of Biosphere 1, they warned, was at best equal to the life of the Sun. They thoughtit more probable yet that the life of the Earth would be shortened further by Sun changes,cosmic impacts, and by the failure of ecological homeostasis and an ensuing entropic reac-tion. As a likely reason for the death of the Earth, the project managers considered the abuseof atomic weapons and the subsequent environmental catastrophe of a nuclear winter. Inaddition, they pointed to the human-induced ‘burdens of population explosion, agriculturalstress on the environment, technological paralysis, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, and anumber of other potentially debilitating conditions of an overburdened planet.’51 Before toolong, they cautioned, the singular ‘window of opportunity’ to turn humankind into a space-faring civilization, a window characterized by an unparalleled concentration of wealth,resources, and energy, and adequate technologies at hand, would close again, and the firstbiosphere would be ‘doomed to die within a small fraction of the life of the cosmos.’52

According to the theory of living systems the project planners endorsed, biospheres wereliving entities that evolved in Darwinian fashion, to survive or go extinct: ‘Biosphere I must



disappear sooner or later unless it can participate in sending forth offspring biospheres topopulate other regions of the cosmos.’53

A joint venture called Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV), founded in 1984, owned andoperated Biosphere 2. SBV had two components: the Decisions Team, a private group ofresearchers, developers, and investors, contributed managerial as well as scientific and tech-nical expertise and the Decisions Investment Corporation supplied the capital. Funding alsocame from two minor private sponsors, the London-based company Synergetic Architectureand Biotechnic Designs and the Institute of Ecotechnics, an ecological think tank of whichthe leading figures in Biosphere 2, John Allen and Mark Nelson, were founding director andchairman.54 While Allen had trained as an engineer and business administrator and demon-strated working experience in local ecological and development projects, Nelson helddegrees in philosophy and environmental studies and a PhD in environmental engineering.Allen considered himself the inventor of Biosphere 2 and the head of the group of environ-mental entrepreneurs involved in the project, mostly individuals who were widely traveledand could prove ample project experience. Their backgrounds were in philosophy, biology,architecture, or environmental engineering, and they were interested in designing, construct-ing, and managing ecological architecture and communities.55

Although a private endeavor, the plan of building a contained living system simulatingthe Earth soon spread widely. From the mid 1980s onwards the group organized interna-tional workshops and symposia on closed ecological systems and biospherics, to draw onthe ideas and expertise of well-known eco-visionaries of the time. Among them were archi-tect Buckminster Fuller and also microbiologist and ecologist Lynn Margulis. Margulis wasa close collaborator of Gaia concept originator John Lovelock.56 The group also extendedits network of affiliations through involving numerous consultants from universities andinternational educational institutions to Biosphere 2, including representatives from theNational Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The media covered the effortextensively when preliminary closure experiments involving humans began in late 1988.Allen himself volunteered to be Vertebrate X, the first human to be locked into the testmodule for three days. Popular lifestyle magazines and daily newspapers praised the exper-iment as a pioneering endeavor. Also environmental journals hailed Biosphere 2 as a ‘glassspaceship’ ‘ready to go.’57

SBV acquired an area of three acres in the Sonoran Desert about 25 miles north ofTucson. The area housed an enclosure of steel and glass, a modular structure of ‘space-frames’ projected to last at least a century. To meet the problem of longevity the construc-tion demanded new techniques, know-how, and endurable materials that would not leak outtrace elements and be able to carry a structure of up to 30 meters in height and a glasssurface of more than 15,000 square meters. The glass and plastic panes used for the domehad to be transparent to permit sunlight to enter. They had to be airtight and watertightaccording to a 1% leakage standard to ensure that the biosphere was materially isolatedcompletely from the outside world. The fully ‘sealed’ enclosure, however, posed the prob-lem of balancing the fluctuations in air pressure within the dome. Two huge flexible expan-sion chambers or ‘lungs’ constructed outside of the rigid building solved this problem.Furthermore, the greenhouse climate developing under the huge sealed dome had to becontrolled. Quickly rising temperatures forced the Biosphere 2 designers to abandon theplan of a purely solar-powered facility. To operate the indoor ventilation, heating, and cool-ing system, a plant capable of generating more than 10 MW of electrical power was erectedoutside of the glass dome.58

The enclosure of Biosphere 2 housed an ecological ‘mesocosm.’ The large modelecosystem allowed unprecedented experimental ecological work at the mesoscale of


48 S. Höhler

‘biomes.’ Biomes were ‘large-scale complexes of life communities, soils and climates incharacteristic geographic positions.’59 They represented distinct ecosystems that were heldto contribute the essential natural parts and processes to the major material and energycycles of the biosphere. Seven such individual biomes were laid out underneath the glassroof. The five ‘wilderness biomes’ encompassed a tropical rain forest, an ocean including aliving coral reef, a savannah, a mangrove-marsh biome, and a desert. Next to the wildernessan ‘intensive agriculture’ biome and a ‘micropolis,’ a small ‘city’ for eight human biosphe-rians were created. The wilderness and agriculture biomes were to cooperate in the effort tosustain the human habitat at the top of the food chain.60 Biosphere 2 marked a new scale ofecological experiment to study the Earth’s ecosystems functions and interactions and toresearch the impact of humans and their technologies on the overall biospheric system.

The closed living laboratory also presented a new type of ecological experiment thatincluded humans. Eight biospherians, four women and four men, were sealed into theenclosure. The balance of the sexes was in line with the overall schemes of ecologicalsymmetry and equilibrium in Biosphere 2. Social relations did not enter the biosphericalequations. The human beings introduced to Biosphere 2 had to meet specific physical crite-ria in order to function as useful and skillful agents in the biospheric metabolism in a simi-lar way as the soils, plants, and animals selected. All of them were trained to perform amultitude of tasks, from diving to gardening to butchering to cooking. The biospherians hadto be ‘self-sufficient in everything from running tests in the labs to doing their own repairs.’They had to be ‘their own plumbers, electricians, and tailors, too. … They’ve been trainedto be good observers and researchers, as well as competent farmers and computer users.’61

Resembling the scientist-astronauts entering US space stations, the eight biospherians wereeducated scientists and engineers with backgrounds in physics, medicine, biology, ecology,and electrical engineering. On 26 September 1991, they entered their enclosure in the famil-iar way astronauts enter their spacecraft: in orange jumpsuits and intensely covered by themedia. A two-year closure period began, Mission One.62

The glass ark

‘The prospect of travel to other worlds began to make us realize that the biosphere of Earthwas unique in our solar system and we would go nowhere off this planet for long without asimilar life support system.’63 Employing the familiar view of whole Earth as perceivedfrom space, Allen’s statement claims that a major aim of the project was to comprehend andto maintain what had become ‘life support’ on Earth. His assertions also demonstrate thatthe second biosphere was intended to simulate and reproduce planet Earth’s ‘life supportsystem’ in such extent and complexity that the travel to other worlds would also permit theircolonization. Biosphere 2 was to ‘create living art forms appropriate to the Space Agewhich celebrate the epic of evolution and which will produce heroes of a new kind – heroeswho are champions of life and explorers of space.’64

The project team strongly supported NASA’s plans to build a permanently mannedEarth-orbit space station as a first step on humankind’s way to Mars. They welcomed USPresident Ronald Reagan’s endorsement in 1984 of the Earth-orbital station ‘Freedom’ tobe launched by 1992. ‘Space Biospheres Ventures drove to get Biosphere 2 built and intooperation by that date, anticipating the possibility of putting the first small space life systeminto orbit by 1995.’65 Yet SBV criticized the NASA space vehicles for their lifelessness andartificiality: ‘SBV’s vision of a created biosphere was 180 degrees from what they werethinking about at NASA. The space agency’s idea of a space station was of high-tech “cans”containing lots of plastic, metal, computers, and walls painted in psychologically approved



colors. There was little room for the odors, textures, sights, and sounds of a complex livingassemblage of plants, animals, and bacteria.’66

NASA had addressed the challenge of autarky and miniaturization for future spacetravel as early as the 1960s: ‘Life might be sustained in space as it is on Earth if enough ofthe “Earth” becomes transportable. The task of miniaturization is to make more things fitinto less space.’67 From the late 1970s onwards, the agency conducted design studies on‘Controlled or Closed Ecological Life Support Systems’ or CELSS. The system configura-tions would supply not a mere minimum of life support functions but a true environmentthat could produce food, water, and air on site. Complete recycling and recovery of oxygenand water would close the ecological material and energy cycles. Some projects ponderedabout plants and algae to be taken on board to decompose and regenerate waste. The imageof the ‘Interstellar Ark’68 signified this new dimension of space travel. According to thetruly visionary space travelers it would not suffice to equip a spaceship on an interstellarvoyage with the most basic supplies for the transportation of a handful of discoverers.Rather, the space ark would have to serve as ‘a mobile cradle of civilization – a self-contained small world, prepared for birth and death and for the cohabitation of many gener-ations of humans that never saw their planet of origin.’69

Biosphere 2 was termed a ‘Glass Ark’70 to denote the plan for a future space voyage ofmore than one generation of duration, self-contained and self-sustained. ‘SBV was on theverge of launching its own spaceship, so to speak, with eight people in it. It needed at leasta rough draft of an operating manual.’71 The operators of Biosphere 2 set up their manualwith the help of two new disciplines they called ‘biospherics’ and ‘ecotechnics.’ Biospher-ics they developed from Vernadsky’s biosphere theory combined with Lovelock’s Gaiatheory. They then further elaborated their concept of the biosphere into an evolving homeo-static feedback system, a complex superorganism that would follow its own evolutionaryinterests and provide its own source of energy by means of microbial processes. Theconcept of a holistic Earth as a living regenerative organism did not oppose the cyberneticview of Earth as a global automated machine and control system. It was this analogy of theholistic and the cybernetic approach to life that the biospherians put to work. Biosphericsunderstood life not as an individual property but as an ecological property and the biosphereas a homeostatic or cybernetic system of living and nonliving components. Ecotechnics or‘biotechnics’ denoted the corresponding technology based on and compatible with such lifesystems. Ecotechnics aimed at the construction of a ‘technosphere’ that would ‘stand in’ forthe geological functions of the planet and for its weather and climate systems.72

Ecotechnics conceptualized ecological relations as physical and biochemical causalrelations and transformed them into cybernetic servomechanisms. An elaborate infrastruc-ture of electrical, mechanical, chemical, thermal, and hydraulic transmissions formed thefundament of a new hybrid version of nature. As the infrastructure was hidden in the foun-dations of the glass-covered area it remained nearly invisible to visitors above ground.Biosphere 2 conveyed an image of containing pure Earthly nature under its glass dome. Thenature of Biosphere 2, however, was stretched like a thin organic skin on the surface of hugemachinery. An intricate network of more than 2000 sensors, the ‘nerve system’ of the plant,continuously monitored the designated parameters to effect stability and safety of the life-support system. A circuit of cables, ventilators, pumps, and turbines was responsible forcirculating, flushing, cleaning, and cooling the air and the water, for moving wind andwaves, and for regulating the climate – air pressure, temperature, humidity, precipitation.73

Biospherics held that principally, species could be replaced as long as they would fulfillidentical biogeochemical functions. This functional concept of life and life support madereplacement, the substitution of single parts, into a principle that worked along the lines of


50 S. Höhler

the necessary and the practicable. The equipment emphasized not completeness or affluencebut ‘diversity,’ modeled using biological agents that were chosen following criteria of effi-ciency and replaceability.74 ‘Residents had to earn their keep, performing some useful func-tion in the ecosystem,’ Allen explained.75 The 3800 species taken on board were determinedin a strict selection process: ‘Unlike the ark, Biosphere 2 welcomed animals to a web of life,as participants in the oikos logos. From the Greek origins oikos (house) and logos (govern-ing rules), ecology literally means the “rules of the house.”’76 The number of human beingswas restricted to a working population of eight: ‘Eight was the original number for the crewof Space Station Freedom. The number eight had also been suggested as ideal for aninternational manned mission to Mars. And eight had long been the size of the basic unit ofmilitary life; a squad consists of eight soldiers.’77

The politics of nature reserves

Any nature reserve comes attached with exclusive ‘rules of the house’ – claims of accessrights that settle who in a case of ecological emergency will utilize and command the naturalresources stored. The question of who will have control over a nature reserve comes up evenmore so in closed artificial environments like Biosphere 2 that are operated according tostrict economic principles. Formerly global commons like water, air, and soil are subjectedin new ways to questions of distribution. Access to these goods is governed according to anew set of rules. Biospheres and Biosphere 2 in particular make excellent examples of thepolitics involved in natural as well as in artificial technological structures.78

Timothy Luke has called Biosphere 2 ‘denature’ to denote a construction that allowedneither emptiness nor affluence, neither bleakness nor proliferation; a nature that followeda closely monitored program of ecological balance. Luke argues that Biosphere 2 repre-sented a simulation of nature for which an ‘original’ did not exist.79 Drawing on BrunoLatour’s observation of modern societies seeking to separate nature and society clearly,80

one could reason that ecology and ecosystems sciences constitute nature as the exceptionfrom culture, to be contained as pure wilderness or sacred space, or controlled as a techno-logical simulation. Biosphere 2 carried to extremes the image of nature in a ‘state of excep-tion,’ to employ a concept developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben toexplain a different context of emergency rule.81 Biosphere 2 established a form of environ-mental governance that claimed and exerted control over a nature refashioned according toecotechnological potentials and ideals. Acting on the assumption of a situation of ecologi-cal emergency, the biospherians created a concept of nature which made the natural anobject of detention, exploitation, enhancement, and optimization. Biospheres are material-izations of what Luke identified as ‘green governmentality’ or ‘environmentality’ – formsof ecological sovereignty taking hold in the name of managing nature and life for thegreater ecological good.82

The sovereign principle applied to the natural environment but it also extended to thoseeight humans that were enrolled as objects of ecological management. In a recent biograph-ical account about her habitation under the dome Jane Poynter refers to Biosphere 2 asthe ‘glass cage’ that kept her and her fellow biospherians as ‘inmates.’ After two yearsand twenty minutes, they finally ‘escaped.’83 The French philosopher Jean Baudrillardaddressed Biosphere 2 as a ‘glass coffin,’ thereby expressing his criticism of a project thatworked on conserving and musealizing nature during its lifetime. The term glass coffinreflects his observation that Biosphere 2 aspired to immortality by adhering to a minimalistprinciple of ‘survival’ through steady regenerative succession – ‘just like in paradise.’Baudrillard suggested that the experiment centered on ‘dissolving, shrinking the metaphor



of the living into the metastasis of surviving,’ the reduced continuation of life that avoidsdeath.84

Indeed, neither acid rain nor overpopulation nor pollution posed a problem within theartificial environment of Biosphere 2.85 Instead, harvest failures and food shortages, adecline in pollinating insects, losses of vertebrates and other species and the explosiveproliferation of ants complicated life under glass.86 ‘Noah’s ark is a metaphor, not a sched-ule,’ conceded Peter Warshall, Biosphere 2’s savannah ecosystem designer; ‘restoration orconstruction of a community cannot be instant, but requires patience and attention.’87 AndWilliam Mitsch, editor-in-chief of Ecological Engineering, acknowledged that ‘CO2concentrations soared and O2 concentrations dipped during those first years,’ in a preface toa special issue on Biosphere 2 in 1999.88 Though ‘heavily subsidized,’ Mitch commented,the closed material cycle could not be made to work, not even at all costs.89 Like so manymyths, the story of the Second Biosphere met its fate in hubris. The endosphere turned outto be an exosphere. The only environment to live in turned out to be outside.

Conclusion: life support and biospherics past 1990

In this paper I turned to Sloterdijk’s philosophical reflections on what he calls the ontol-ogy of enclosed space, the long tradition in Western culture of casting the world in termsof contained spaces or clearly bounded endospheres, as a way to understand the develop-ment in the late twentieth century of sciences and technologies for replicating the Earthlybiosphere. I argued that ideas of managing the environment of the Earth as a globalecosystem coevolved with framing Earthly nature into terms of a self-contained and self-sustained biosphere. In the age of environment the view from space of planet Earthbecame a metaphor of fragility and transience, but it also endorsed notions of planetarycontrol and enhancement. Biosphere 2 extrapolated and implemented the notion of theenvironment as a life support system that could be operated in direct analogy to a space-ship environment.

Public and professional perceptions of the project differ widely. I have shown that amplecritical scholarly literature exists on the effort, and the media virtually tore it to shreds. Themanagers of Biosphere 2 go as far as acknowledging a loss of certain species and an oxygenimbalance that called for an injection one and a half years into the experiment, but theyremain convinced that the project was successful and have actively rejected criticisms fromthe public and professionals. When Mission One ended in 1993, Abigail Alling and MarkNelson maintained that ‘At the end of its two-year maiden voyage, Biosphere 2 is like awell-tested ship, ready to carry on research in biospherics for decades to come.’90 Whatinterests me is not whether the project worked or failed, but its presumption that a smallgroup of experts were able to define what nature consisted of and how it worked. Althoughthe builders of Biosphere 2 claim to have taken a descriptive approach to the Earthlybiosphere, the normative dimensions of the project have been enormous. Biosphere 2 madea normative statement as to what purpose nature should serve at the turn to the twenty-firstcentury, and for whom. In this regard the experimenters reversed the relation between themodel and its ‘original,’ turning model into model nature. Perhaps the experiment’s majorprovocation consisted in the proposition to perceive the environment not as embedded,permeating human affairs and humans, but as an enclosed and external object of humanmanagement. Thus, it is not without irony that Biosphere 1 ultimately had to fill in as areserve for Biosphere 2. The act of enclosing and detaining nature in an exceptional spacemade the ‘natural state’ reappear – a state of nature the biospherians believed to haveharnessed and mastered.


52 S. Höhler

‘The real point that resonates with me about Biosphere 2,’ editor Mitsch contemplated,‘is the sheer magnitude of what it costs in money, material, and energy to create enclosedhealthy ecosystems, not a trivial point if we are some day interested in habitation inspace.’91 The biome structure of Biosphere 2 offered a broad field of research and insightsinto the works of nature and it turned out a wealth of peer-reviewed results.92 Nevertheless,in 1999 scholars of ecology, among them the pioneering ecosystems scientist HowardOdum, would admit that the ‘experiment thus far has shown the difficulty in recreating theviability of our planet, Biosphere 1. Scale and an over-packed inventory of the familiarplants and animals that we know, may not be enough or may require a longer time to moreresemble planet Earth.’93

Yet Biosphere 2 embodied widely shared cultural motifs of the period. In 1982, whenthe Biosphere 2 project was gaining momentum, a Spaceship Earth was inaugurated inFlorida’s Walt Disney World. The spherical structure followed Buckminster Fuller’s geode-sic dome design, and its 18-floor interior was furnished with a geosphere of the Earth, builtto transport visitors across the farthest reaches of time and space. The view from the outsidewas that of a shiny silver spaceship of more than 50 meters in height and resting on a tripodas if ready for take-off. Until today, Spaceship Earth forms a central part of the theme parkEPCOT, the acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.94 Aspirationsof humans leaving the Earth in artificial biospheres did not subside. In the summer of 2006the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking posted an entry in a Yahoo! Internet forumthat illustrates this position. Hawking asked ‘How can the human race survive the nexthundred years? In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how canthe human race sustain another 100 years?’95 Addressing the future of mankind facingviruses, terror, and war, along with resource exploitation and global climate change,Hawking then answered his own question by suggesting that the survival of humankindcould in the long run be secured only by humans swarming out into space and colonizingother planets. He proposed that by manipulating their genetic material humans could be bio-engineered to make them capable of tolerating environmental conditions on other planets.A new species adapted to life elsewhere in the galaxy – homo spaciens96 – could be created.

Second natures, even those that have proven dysfunctional, tend to set new standards totheir firsts. Both Hawking’s analysis and his visions of human survival rely on principles oflife support that were elaborated in space sciences, systems ecology, and biosphere technol-ogy. Devised to sustain life where life had previously been considered impossible, theseprinciples came to define the very meaning of the Earthly biosphere. In the ecosciences oftoday, a life support system is defined broadly as ‘any natural or human-engineered(constructed or made) system that furthers the life of the biosphere in a sustainable fashion.’97

Notes1. Silent Running, USA, Universal 1972, directed by Douglas Trumbull, starring Bruce Dern in the

role of Freeman Lowell.2. Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth, xvii–xviii; Ward, Spaceship Earth.3. Boulding, ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’; Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual

for Spaceship Earth; Höhler and Luks, Beam us up, Boulding!; Anker, ‘Buckminster Fuller asCaptain of Spaceship Earth.’

4. Allen, Parrish, and Nelson, ‘The Institute of Ecotechnics,’ 205, 209, 207.5. The 1960s are considered the ‘time of awakening’ of the environmental movement, while the year

1970 is regarded as the beginning of the ‘Environmental Era’ in the Western world. Jamisonspeaks of the ‘age of ecological innocence’ coming to an abrupt end with the oil price shock in1973–1974; Jamison, Making of Green Knowledge, 87.



6. On the close relations of ecology and space flight to improve the architecture and design of inte-rior spaces see Anker, ‘Ecological Colonization of Space’; Anker, ‘Closed World of EcologicalArchitecture.’ On Biosphere 2 see Haberl, Weisz, and Winiwarter, ‘Kontrolle und Kolonisierungin der zweiten Biosphäre.’

7. Among the growing body of literature on technology recreating nature see Cronon, UncommonGround; Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; Hughes, Human-Built World; Merchant,Reinventing Eden; Price, Flight Maps.

8. Hutchinson, ‘Biosphere.’9. Ibid., 3.

10. Ibid.11. Sueß, Entstehung der Alpen, 159.12. Sueß, Antlitz der Erde, vol. 3, 739.13. Ibid. On the term ‘biosphere’ see also Grinevald, ‘Sketch for a History.’14. Vernadsky, Biosphere. The editors of the volume attribute the trifling reception and spreading of

Vernadsky’s work until the 1980s to the Iron Curtain, the trans-European barrier of the Cold War.The pre-war time of the 1930s and 1940s prevented the immediate translation into English. AFrench translation, prepared in 1929, became the master copy for the first abridged English trans-lation in 1986 done in the course of the Biosphere 2 project. Ibid., 15–17. Vernadsky visited Sueßin 1910. See Levit, Biogeochemistry, Biosphere, Noosphere.

15. Vernadsky, Biosphere, 15.16. Ibid., 91. Compare Samson and Pitt, The Biosphere and the Noosphere Reader, 23, for the differ-

ent translations of Sueß’ original phrase with ‘self-contained’ or ‘self-maintained.’17. Hutchinson, ‘Biosphere,’ 5, 8.18. Ibid., 7, 11.19. Lovelock, ‘Gaia Hypothesis,’ 16.20. The Biosphere, vii–viii.21. See Sachs, ‘Natur als System’; Hagen, An Entangled Bank; Elichirigoity, Planet Management.22. Bowker, ‘How to be Universal,’ 108; Edwards, ‘The World in a Machine,’ 242.23. Use and Conservation of the Biosphere, 251–7.24. Ibid., 191–235; concerning the research recommendations see 209ff. Recommendation 1 reads:

‘International Research Programme on Man and the Biosphere,’ 209–211; see also Dasmann,Planet in Peril?, chap. 7 ‘An International Programme,’ 127–32, quote 127.

25. Biosphere reserves reflected the simultaneous emergence of national environmental movementsall over the world as well as a rising global environmental movement that was mirrored in institutionslike the WWF and the UNEP that took up work in 1972, and also in the International Union forConservation of Nature (IUCN) that was founded in 1948 as the world’s first global environmentalorganization. Hays, ‘From Conservation to Environment’; Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology.

26. Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth.27. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 46.28. Ibid., 52.29. Ibid.30. Ibid., 54.31. Boulding, ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,’ 3, 4, 9.32. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ 27.33. Barthes, ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat.’34. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 251 ff. (translations are mine).35. Ibid.36. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ 27.37. Frederick Jackson Turner had proposed his ‘frontier thesis’ in the year 1893, asserting that the

center of American history was actually to be found at its edges. Turner, The Frontier inAmerican History. On the closing world frontier see Osborn, Limits of the Earth, 78. On therelation of the American space program and the experience of frontier exceptionalism andexpansionism see for instance Logsdon, Decision to Go to the Moon, Introduction: ‘A GreatNew American Enterprise,’ 1–7.

38. Boulding, ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,’ 9.39. Polunin, ‘Our Use of “Biosphere,”’ 198, emphasis in the original. Compare Siebert, ‘Nature as a

Life Support System.’40. Monod, Chance and Necessity.41. Eigen, Stufen zum Leben, 65 (translation is mine).


54 S. Höhler

42. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 260–1.43. Architect Phil Hawes as quoted by Allen, Biosphere 2, 16.44. Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets, chap. 10 ‘Leapfrogging the Twentieth Century: R.

Buckminster Fuller,’ 220–46, quote 222. In a comment written in 1980 Boulding referred tothe colonization of space as a vision closely connected to the metaphor of the spaceship;Boulding, ‘Spaceship Earth Revisited.’

45. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 254.46. Bernal, The World, The Flesh and The Devil, 23.47. For a critique of the ‘engineering approach to the age of biology’ and ‘creating a second nature

in our image’ see Rifkin, Algeny, 252; for an affirmative view see Sagan, Biospheres, 195. Onculture becoming ‘a veritable “second nature”’ at the moment ‘the modernization process iscomplete and nature is gone for good’, see Jameson, Postmodernism, ix.

48. Gentry and Liptak, The Glass Ark, 82.49. Allen, Biosphere 2, 1, 59.50. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 1, 59.51. Allen, Biosphere 2, 147.52. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 40.53. Ibid., 52.54. Building Biosphere 2 was estimated to cost US$30 million. The Texan oil millionaire Edward

Perry Bass owned about 90% of Decisions Investment. See Allen, Biosphere 2, 2, 18.55. For more information on the key people of Biosphere 2 see the Biosphere 2 website at http://

www.biospheres.com (last accessed on 20 February 2010); the site also offers a view into extractsfrom Allen’s most recent book: Me and the Biospheres.

56. Allen, Biosphere 2, 7–8.57. Kelly, ‘Biosphere 2 at One,’ 105; Kelly, ‘Biosphere II.’ The Biosphere 2 managers supported this

favorable impact by using their own outlet, Synergetic Press in Arizona. For contemporary news-paper coverage of Biosphere 2 see Luke, ‘Environmental Emulations.’ The scandalizing andtaunting treatment of the project only began with the first long-term closure experiment in 1991,picking up and commenting on internal controversies among the organizers and the crew.

58. On spaceframe design, the specially designed transparent panes, sealing, pressure equilibration,and cooling see Allen, Biosphere 2, chap. 5, ‘Technics,’ 59–68.

59. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 21; Alling and Nelson, Life Under Glass.60. Allen, Biosphere 2, 95–6 on ‘Microcity,’ ‘Micropolis,’ and ‘Habitat.’ On ‘intensive agriculture,’

see chap. 6, ‘The Farm,’ 73–87.61. Ibid., 69–70.62. Allen and Nelson, ‘Biospherics and Biosphere 2, Mission One.’ Mission 2 started in March 1994

and was terminated after 6 months.63. Allen, Biosphere 2, 2.64. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 55.65. Allen, Biosphere 2, 3.66. Ibid., 33, emphasis in the original.67. Whitney Matthews from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 1961. See Matthews,

‘Miniaturization for Space Travel.’68. Die Kolonisierung des Weltraums, 111 (translation is mine).69. Ibid.70. Gentry and Liptak, Glass Ark.71. Allen, Biosphere 2, 115.72. Ibid., chap. 3, ‘Biospherics,’ 33; chap. 5, ‘Technics,’ 60, paragraph on ‘Ecotechnics,’ 71.73. Ibid., chap. 9, ‘Cybernetics,’ 115; Zabel et al., ‘Construction and Engineering.’74. Allen, Biosphere 2, 48.75. Ibid., 35.76. Ibid.77. Ibid., 127.78. Latour, Politics of Nature.79. Luke, ‘Environmental Emulations,’ 101, 109. See also Luke, ‘Biospheres and Technospheres.’ In

a similar vein: Hayles, ‘Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations.’80. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13 ff.81. Giorgio Agamben brought forth the view that sovereign power over life closely associates with

the idea of the sacred or ‘bare life.’ Agamben, State of Exception; Agamben, Homo Sacer. For arecent argument ‘against ecological sovereignty’ on the global scale of environmental politics see



Smith, ‘Against Ecological Sovereignty.’ Smith maintains that the declaration of a state of globalecological emergency following a modernized Gaian reasoning would end in suppressing politi-cal liberties ‘in the name of survival’ rather than encourage ecological politics. Quite on thecontrary, Smith argues, the recognition of ecological crisis would go along with impositions ofemergency measures and options for technological and military fixes (110).

82. Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality.’83. Poynter, The Human Experiment. Hers is a telling account of foibles and conflicts among the

group. See particularly chap. 12, ‘Cabin Fever,’ 167 ff.; chap. 18, ‘Dysfunctional Family,’ 261 ff.84. Baudrillard, ‘Überleben und Unsterblichkeit,’ 338; Baudrillard, ‘Maleficient Ecology.’85. Gentry and Liptak, Glass Ark, back cover: ‘Pollution, acid rain, global warming – these are prob-

lems caused by people that must be solved by people.’ The authors claim that Biosphere 2 wasmarshaled to solve these problems.

86. See Haberl, Weisz, and Winiwarter, ‘Kontrolle und Kolonisierung in der zweiten Biosphäre,’247 f. on the additional work that the species losses caused the crew. Among the problems theauthors also list temperature regulation, maintenance of the water cycle, and atmospheric compo-sition. They refer to the German edition of Kelly, Out of Control, and to a one-page note ofcorrespondence by Eugene Odum in Nature, in which Odum comments on the ‘extremely highcost of providing nature’s free life support services with the use of non-renewable fossil fuels’ aswell as on the monetary costs of the project in general. Odum, ‘Cost of Living in Domed Cities.’The monthly electricity bills the crewmembers would have to face if they had to pay for utilitiesat the US residential rates would be more than US$150,000. ‘At anywhere near this cost, veryfew of the billions of people on Earth could afford to live in domed cities,’ Odum concludes.Biosphere 2 was placed under the management of Columbia University. See Marino and Odum,‘Biosphere 2.’

87. Warshall, ‘Lessons from Biosphere 2,’ 27.88. Mitsch, ‘Preface: Biosphere 2,’ 1. See also Kelly, Out of Control, chap. 9, ‘Pop Goes the

Biosphere,’ 150–65.89. Mitsch, ‘Preface: Biosphere 2,’ 1. The actual costs of Biosphere are as contended as everything

else about the project. Poynter, The Human Experiment, 5, speaks of US$250 million; the NewScientist mentions US$150 million; see Lewin, ‘Living in a Bubble’; Veggeberg, ‘Escape fromBiosphere 2.’

90. Alling and Nelson, Life Under Glass, 233. Until the present day Nelson and Allen are convincedthat the experiment was a success (personal communication in 2007).

91. Mitsch, ‘Preface: Biosphere 2,’ 1.92. Allen, Nelson, and Alling, ‘The Legacy of Biosphere 2.’ Biospherians Poynter and Taber

MacCallum filed US Patent 5865141 for ‘Stable and reproducible sealed complex ecosystems’ in1996, claiming an ‘apparatus and method for establishing a sealed ecological system that is self-sustaining, remains in dynamic equilibrium over successive generations of organisms.’

93. Marino and Odum, ‘Biosphere 2,’ 13.94. ‘Spaceship Earth: Attraction at Epcot Theme Park.’ Establishing an experimental spaceship

community like EPCOT harmonized well with the goals of NASA’s space program in the 1980sduring the Reagan administration, that projected a permanent US Mars station to be in place bythe year 2030, nuclear-powered and complete with greenhouses, living modules, and workingspaces. During the 1990s, Robert Zubrin, a former astronautical engineer, authored severalscience fiction novels and a range of popular books on ‘terraforming’ Mars for human settlementand on testing this Earth-shaping practice in remote regions on Earth. In his 1996 book The Casefor Mars, Zubrin included a chapter titled ‘The Significance of the Martian Frontier’ in an obviousrecollection of Frederick Jackson Turner’s American Frontier thesis.

95. Hawking, ‘How can the human race survive the next hundred years?’96. Sahm et al., Homo spaciens; Sandvoss, Vom homo sapiens zum homo spaciens.97. ‘Definition of Life Support Systems in the Context of the EOLSS.’

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