There will be bickering
Spaceship Earth chronicles fascinating capitalist-hippie-hybrid experiment
Do you remember Biosphere 2? No, not Bio-dome. You’re thinking of the Montreal tourist attraction, or the 1996 Pauly Shore comedy, and I heartily recommend you see the one that didn’t win a Razzie award, just as soon as it’s safe to do so.
Biosphere 2 was a self-sufficient ecological system — complete with mini-ocean, rainforest, veldt, etc. — constructed in the Arizona desert in the late 1980s. In September 1991, eight “Biospherians” wearing snazzy red jumpsuits that made them look like a doomed-starship landing party sealed themselves inside the huge glass structure for a two-year experiment in closed-system living.
It didn’t go perfectly. One of the crew had to leave briefly for surgery after injuring her hand, and returned with a duffel bag containing a few non-food supplies.
The media had a field day with that — as they did when it was revealed that the supposedly all-natural system included a space-age carbon dioxide scrubber, and that even with that the experiment required fresh air to be pumped in to avoid hypoxia among the crew.
But as filmmaker Matt Wolf explains in his well-researched and sympathetic documentary Spaceship Earth, Biosphere 2 was never intended to be some kind of Olympian test of endurance. The crew, along with their charismatic leader John P. Allen and their patron, Texas billionaire Ed Bass, viewed the experiment as a way to test what could or would go wrong. They weren’t hubristic enough to think they could re-create a functioning biosphere on the first try. But the media saw it differently.
Wolf ’s film opens by introducing the project and its photogenic occupants, an “ethnically diverse” group according to one reporter at the time, although I’ve seen more variety in a bag of potato chips. But rather than focus entirely on the two-year “mission,” Wolf then rolls the story back 25 years to introduce Allen and his businesses, including the Synergia Ranch in New Mexico, the Institute of Ecotechnics and the Theater of All Possibilities.
With their love of William S. Burroughs and The Whole Earth Catalogue, and their penchant for creating free-form dance productions, Allen’s acolytes come across as quintessential ’60s hippies. But as the film explains, they also had a capitalistic streak — sure, they floated around the world on the good ship Heraclitus (which they built themselves), but everywhere they went they set up corporations — a research institute in Australia, a hotel in Kathmandu, an art gallery in London — that helped fund their activities.
Soon enough the film returns to Arizona and the construction and launch of Biosphere 2. (Its name is meant to evoke the question: “What happened to Biosphere 1?” To which the cheeky answer is: “You’re living on it.”) We get a taste of the media frenzy over the “bio-nauts,” and a lot of self-shot video from inside the experiment, where food shortages and the thinning atmosphere led to some bickering. “We were suffocating and starving,” someone notes.
Wolf ’s previous documentary was last year’s Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a fascinating deep dive into the life of a woman whose 40-year odyssey to record and preserve television broadcasts was either the work of a visionary genius or a mad hoarder. (Researchers agree the resulting VHS archive is a trove beyond value.)
He takes a similar methodology to this project and, in the process, brings back to life a
’90s phenomenon that has left relatively little mark on modern culture. Some of that may have to do with the ignominious way the Biosphere’s experiment came to a shattering conclusion in 1994, with the arrival of a figure — I won’t say who — familiar in the Trump era for entirely different reasons.
But time can’t dim the enthusiastic, optimistic energy of the Biospherians, many of whom are interviewed today. It’s apparent from their recollections that, for all the problems they encountered in their sealed Garden of Eden, it was a formative time in their lives. Like astronauts returning to the Earth, they’re happy to be back among us, but more than a few would clearly relish a second trip.