"The whole experience was marked by a feel of paranoia," says
[ITALICS]World Monitor[italics] producer Ed Fitzgerald. "The critics we
talked to
demanded meetings in open places, public parks. We had to ask
ourselves several times if we just felt we were being followed or if
we were." His reporter, Gloria Goodale, adds: "We were told once by
letter and once in person [by Carl Hodges] that they had some kind of
record of our confidential interviews and conversations with critics
of the Biosphere. It was scary." As in the case of the CBC,
[ITALICS]World[italics]
[ITALICS]Monitor[italics] also received a flurry of legal threats prior to
broadcast.
[BOLD]"It's Really a Sort of Iffy-Iffy Thing"[bold]
The business and "scientific" offices of the Biosphere facility
are dramatically less impressive than the glass dome itself. All
Southwestern stucco and wood trim, they have the tacky feel of a
southern California automobile club office. And, predictably, the
people of the Biosphere are also markedly less spectacular than what
you might expect to find at the site of what is supposedly a world-
class scientific experiment.
I will admit that I toured the facility after reading the Texas
newspaper expos s, and therefore was predisposed to find an eccentric
group of goofballs. But after two visits to the Biosphere, I find it
almost impossible to imagine how other journalists wouldn't have
suspected something awfully awry after the most superficial brush with
the Biospherians.
An atmosphere of secrecy, almost of paranoia, begins right over
the telephone. Routine press inquiries go weeks, months without
answer. Phone receptionists are trained to put no calls through to any
of the Biosphere managers-- even calls to the PR department are
shunted off to message takers and not returned for days, if ever.
Once a visit to the dome has been secured, you might as well be
in Baghdad. All interviews are conducted in the presence of a PR
"minder," who, with watch and walkie-talkie in hand, makes sure no
chat becomes too intimate, or probes too closely about who these
people are in their off hours. In fact, all questions about the
personal lives of the Biospherians are taboo. It is no accident that
of the dozens of published accounts on the project-- all sympathetic--
not one describes the family, friends, or homes of the Biosphere crew
or management. The few who are authorized to speak to the press are
almost all core group members. With no attempt at exaggeration or
interpretation, let it be said they are almost uniformly humorless. As
cold as the fish in their artificial ocean. Not a crack of human
frailty or emotion is revealed. The answers that are given are rote
and flat in tone, worlds away from the hyperpoetry of their
promotional brochures.
On my second visit to the facility I'm told I will have a spccial
treat-- an interview with none other than Mark "Green" Nelson. Now
director of space applieations for the Arizona project, Nelson is,
next to John Allen, the group's top ideologue. Tightly wound but
coolly controlled, Nelson appears to be in the habit of conducting
one-way interviews. In his early forties, wearing jeans, a plaid
shirt, and a brown corduroy jacket, Nelson speaks in a rapid near-
monologue, spiced with technical terms, that melds into a volley of
scientific name-dropping: "top level visits from NASA. . . our NASA
colleagues. . . joint projects with Yale School of Forestry. . .
collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. . .
ERL consultants. . . our consultants from Smithsonian," and so on.
I ask about the scientific underpinnings of his own group-- how
he responds to the CBC charge that his own Institute of Ecotechnics is
nothing more than a London letter drop.
"I have no contradiction with the facts [of the CBC piece], only
the interpretation," he answers. "So you go to some professor
somewhere and he says I've never heard of the Institute of
Ecotechnics. That's what's wrong. You go looking for something
expecting it to be one way when its really another." Nelson says.
"It's designed to be more of a think tank. . . it helps conceive
projects. . . bringing together leading artists, scientists,
researchers, breaking down the cubicles. It's a brainstorming
institute. No paid employees, a minimal existence. We started in New
Mexico and moved to London. We are an action-orientcd bunch."
"It's been reported that you, Johnny Allen, Margret Augustine,
and the core group here indeed goes back to a certain ranch in New
Mexico," I continue. "And that you are a small group, not really
scientists. My question is: who is this small group of people and what
is their relationship to Biosphere 2? You and Johnny Allen and Margret
Augustine do go back to the ranch, don't you?"
"There is no group of people, is the problem," Nelson begins a
lengthy answer that seems to contain not a single complete sentence
within it. "I think, well, there is a group of pcople and some of them
involved with the Institute of Ecotechnics and indeed some of them go
back-- we founded that institute in 1973. In fact, we started working
together some years before that. Margret and [co-architect] Phil Hawes
have an independent architectural group-- no, but the thing is that
there a number of different organizations and a lot of them have
parallel interests. For example, we contracted with Margret and Phil--
fantastic architects-- to do some of the architecture we have
developed in projects in Australia and around the world. So there is
an association that goes way back. One thing about the Institute of
Ecotechnics is that we're trying to break down the differences between
science and art. . . The artists are a very important part of the life
of humanity. . . they tap into our dreams of the future. So what are
the other questions on your hit list?"
"I'm just trying to have you answer whether or not this is indeed
the same group that was together in New Mexico," I reply.
"There are some people like me, Margret, Bill Dempster, that
track back 20 ycars. Other people got involved in another project five
or 10 years ago. Now if there's a group-- it's really a sort of iffy-
iffy thing. I guess you are only interested if you are going to do a
hatchet job on SBV-- you know trying to find a mysterious agenda
that's behind the project."
The truly mysterious aspect of Biosphere 2 is just how little
effort is made to disguise their real agenda. Sure, lip service is
paid in every press interview to save-the-Earth ecology and the theme
is hammered home by hired earthly consultants like ERL's Hodges or the
Smithsonian's Walter Adey. But there can be no question whatsoever
that Biosphere 2 has been conceived in full accordance with the same
febrile survivalist notions that powered John Allen's dinnertime
harangues on the Synergia Ranch: escape from a dead Earth and
colonization of Mars. If in "poking through the ruins" of a dead
civilization Allen can find a few hungry scientists and a gaggle of
complacent reporters to construct a facade of concern for the Earth,
so much the better.
But every one of those same reporters who have written such
humdinger accounts of valiant efforts to better understand our own
planet have been given the same booklet I was-- [ITALICS]Space
Biospheres[italics]-- the
same publication that is aggressively hawked to the thousands of
tourists who {*filter*} tbrough the Biosphere Gift Center each month.
Within its 90 pages, penned by John Allen and Mark Nelson, repose
some of the most crackpot doggerel that has ever passed itself off as
serious science or philosophy. "I read that booklet," says University
of Texas researcher Dr. Basset McGuire, who has been working with
enclosed life systems for 35 years, "and I found no science at all.
What I found looked like a religious tract."
And it is a dark religion. In its introductory chapter, the
pamphlet openly declares: "The major motivation behind creating
Biosphere 2 and developing the capacity to create other microscale
viable biospheric systems is to assist the Biosphere [i.e., our
current life system] to evolve off planet Earth into potential life
regions of our solar system."
The last third of the book emphasizes the "historic imperative"
of specifically colonizing Mars, given the "inevitable doom" of the
Earth, which is described as a "local blind alley." So much for the
ecologists.
And, for those honest space enthusiasts who might agree that
Earth, after all, will disappear one day, and mass migration to Mars
might save humanity, they would be well-advised to not start packing
their bags quite yet-- even though the booklet assures us that the
first Mars colony can be established by 1995. Though a minute
description of how the first settlement will function is included
("Strategic command. . . meetings will operate under [ITALICS]Roberts Rules
of[italics]
[ITALICS]Order[italics]"), it is made clear that the "first Mars
Base...will be
corporate in form...[and] the population can range from 64 to 80
people. If more population arrives they will have to begin their own
communities." In other words, they will have to find their own Texas
billionaire and build their own Biosphere.
[BOLD]Why Big Goldfish Bowls Are Right-Wing [bold]
Before lift-off, however, important earthly science is presumably
to be done under the Arizona sun. Mark Nelson, co-author of the Mars
tract, assures me that Biosphere 2 is "real science," albeit mixed
with the "new discipline called Biospherics."
But experts in related fields interviewed by the [ITALICS]Voice[italics]
see little
if any scientific value in the endeavor. From Texas, Dr. Basset
McGuire says the current state of the art in enclosed systems is more
or less on the scale of "goldfish bowls." Standard scientific method
requires, he says, "that you run replicates. You don't run just one
experiment because that way you have no way of what the variability of
the experiment is. How can you learn if you have no control? The real
pity is that this will be taken by the public at large as real when it
isn't. It could impact funding for real research."
Forest ecologist Dr. Donald Dahlsten at the University of
California at Berkeley agrees that the lack of control models renders
Biosphere's scientifc value "trivial."
"If they came to me and asked me to do this project I would say,
`Are you kidding?'" Professor Dahlsten continues. "I'd ask, What is
your background on this? What have you done to bring you to the
conclusions you are about to test? I mean all that scientific
background is not there."
Defenders of the Biosphere, Mark Nelson among them, answer that
traditional science is too narrow in its criteria. They refer
constantly to the Gaia Hypothesis, developed by a British researcher
in the 1970s that posits a sort of macrohomeostasis-- a notion that
natural life systems find their own balances. Such thinking underlies
much of the Biosphere's "scientific" recipe: take three or four
thousand variables, enclose them in a glass container, throw in eight
humans, shake 'em up like a Margarita for two years, and in the end
you'll get a nice, smooth blend.
Admittedly this is a gross simplification of the Gaia Hypothesis
as applied to the Biosphere. But science historian David Kubrin,
author of the pro-Gaia book [ITALICS]Earthmind[italics] and a sworn enemy of
traditional
scientists, claims it is "ridiculous" to affirm that the Biosphere is
a productive application of Gaia.
"The Gaia hypothesis applies to an entire atmosphere and really
beyond that. How our atmosphere as a whole seeks and achieves a
natural balance with surrounding elements, like an ever-hotter sun."
But the hypothesis has no applicability, Kubrin argues, in the
confined, limited space of Biosphere 2 where each individual ecosystem
is allotted no more than a couple of hundred square feet. "In any case
I would approach with great suspicion," Kubrin adds, "any supposed
ecological experiment that relies so heavily on technology, computer
models, and software systems."
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Brian Siano, Delaware Valley Skeptics
Rev. Philosopher-King of The First Church of the Divine Otis Redding
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