I Don't Wanna Live in Biosphere Estates
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 05.30.06
It was a glorious idea- build a giant terrarium and see if a self-sustaining microcosm of earth could keep people alive without importing food, water or even air. Constructed in the middle of nowhere in the 80's, the $ 200 million project did not quite worked as planned- the plants did not produce enough oxygen and air was quietly pumped in; crops failed; ants over-ran the joint. Yet such experiments are as valuable in their failure as in success, for they demonstrate the complexity of the problem and 25 years later demonstrate the folly of our playing with Biosphere 1, our planet.
It should have stood proudly in the desert for years-after all there is no water, it is too hot to live without air conditioning and it is far from cities and who would want to live in such an environment, particularly when electricity is going through the roof, gas is expensive and water supplies are imperilled?
Evidently lots of people, as the entire desert between Phoenix and Tuscon is turned into subdivisions. Fairfield Developments of Tuscon has bought all 1658 acres and has registered Biosphere Estates. Soon it will be crawling with yet more subdivisions and there is no guarantee that the Biosphere complex will be maintained.
Some, like James Howard Kunstler, suggest that these subdivisions in the Southwest Deserts will be the first the first to be abandoned when they cannot be affordably cooled or driven to. Certainly we find it incredible that they are still being built and that people are still buying them. Biosphere 2 should be allowed to outlast them all. ::New York Times
well lets hope that they're eco homes at least.... (and somehow make water from air?) but otherwse it's a pretty lame ending to a pretty freaky building/concept-- funny story-- when Volvo launched tehir smog-eating grill, i somehow got invited to a press jucket for the car and it was at BiosphereII so we got to hjang out there for a few days... if they have to tear it down i hoep they make another movie there (without pauly shore) because the stories i heard that went on in there,,, one guy went totally nuts, one life was concieved... true pulp. funny who woulda thought that we aren't smart enough to create a biosphere?
On a side note, one of the miscalculations that came up in the Biosphere project was that the designers hadn't accounted for the effect concrete has on the atmosphere.
Oxygen levels were falling by 0.5% per month, but CO2 levels weren't going up correspondingly. It turns out that concrete has a very significant effect on oxygen and CO2 levels.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
I've heard a lot of strange stories about Biosphere 2. But truth is stranger than fiction... I recently read a book (The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2) by crewmember Jane Poynter that included naked running around in the building and other unexpected stuff. Maybe it was the oxygen deprevation that made them less inhibited? There's some good excerpts from the book that are PG at this link: http://janepoynter.com/excerpts.asp
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