Back to the biosphere for lessons in survival, and entertainment.
Former ‘Biospherian’ recalls his two-year quarantine
You think your quarantine’s been rough? “We were in quarantine for two years,” says Mark Nelson. “Or we put the rest of the world in quarantine for two years.”
Nelson is a former “Biospherian,” one of a group of intrepid researchers who shut themselves inside an experiment called Biosphere 2 in 1991. Their aim was to try to live in an enclosed, self-sustaining system for 24 months. The huge complex featured a miniature rainforest, desert, ocean with coral reef, and an abundance of flora and fauna, including eight humans.
It didn’t go perfectly. Some of the animals — bees and hummingbirds, notably — died out. Others, including cockroaches, those apex survivors, were fruitful and multiplied. And the humans ran low on food and oxygen, to the point where the sealed domes had to be opened up to allow fresh air to circulate inside.
Nevertheless, Nelson and his colleagues completed their twoyear tour of duty, their data and wisdom helping to pave the way for future experiments, better management of Earth’s resources and, perhaps, eventual colonies on the moon, Mars and the asteroids.
Today, Nelson continues to live and work on the Synergia Ranch, a working farm, ecology research centre and retreat in New Mexico that he first joined right after graduating from New Hampshire’s Dartmouth College in 1968. He’s 77 now.
“I don’t feel frail but we have some elderly people here, we’re obviously taking some precautions,” he says by phone. “Even volunteers for the farm go into isolation and quarantine.” New Mexico has seen 172 deaths from COVID-19 as of this writing, but only one in Santa Fe County, where the ranch is located.
Nelson is happy to share lessons learned from two years cooped up in a giant terrarium. And — no surprise — food proved to be key to mental wellbeing and social cohesion.
“Any time there was a special occasion of drink or food, all the conflict drained away,” he says. “No one wanted to spoil it.”
Matt Wolf ’s new documentary Spaceship Earth, available on demand, backs him up on this point. In the film, the Biospherians are seen bickering and grousing as the air grows thin. It didn’t help that the diversity of crops fell as the pollinators died, meaning more and more meals were beetroot- based. But a homemade cake and a little moonshine would revive their spirits, at least temporarily.
“Whatever food and drink really makes people happy in quarantine should be pursued,” says Nelson today. “This isn’t fun unless we can have feasts and parties and do home brewing.”
And he wouldn’t be a Biospherian if he didn’t have some advice related to that other biosphere. Biosphere 2 was so named because
“Biosphere 1” already existed in the form of planet Earth. And while the coronavirus may feel like an attack from that environment, there’s still much to love about it.
“Wherever you are, you are supported, and you are living, because we have a healthy Earth biosphere,” he says. “Fall in love with every bit of it. The plant on the windowsill, the tree on the corner. We have to understand that every breath of air that we take, every drop of water, every bit of food is produced by our biosphere.”
He continues: “That’s the awareness we need to come out of this pandemic. We’re all connected. It’s showing us the downside of it. But we need to recognize the flip side. Think of this amazing biosphere that’s given us birth.”
Spaceship Earth is a fascinating introduction to the story of Biosphere 2, a tale that captivated the world at the time but has since been largely ignored. Wolf, who was only a child when the experiment took place, says he was moved to make the film after coming across “a striking image of eight people in jumpsuits in front of a big glass pyramid. I thought they were images from a science fiction film that I hadn’t seen.”
Once he realized it was real, he was hooked. “I make films that deal with forgotten histories,” he says. “It had basically faded from collective memory.”
What remained straddled the line between a failure and a farce. There was the 1996 comedy BioDome, starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin, and remembered by many of its participants as a career low. There was the media pile-on in 1992 when the experiment ran into its oxygen problems, coupled with allegations that one member who left for surgery had smuggled in supplies on her return.
And there was the change in management in 1994, involving a now- infamous figure from the world of U.S. politics. Wolf asks me not to name him, but his appearance makes for a bizarre last- act twist in the documentary.
But the fact remains that Biosphere 2 was never meant to be a flawless second Earth. Rather, the researchers were as curious about what could go wrong as they were about what went according to plan.
In an interview with The New York Times on the eve of the experiment, millionaire patron Ed Bass gave this assessment: “Leonardo da Vinci talked about flying machines. Centuries later the Wright brothers built one. Biosphere 2 may prove to be the Kitty Hawk of biospheric life- support systems. Then again it may prove to be one of those airplanes everybody sees in the movies and laughs at that had 16 wings flapping at the same time.”
Or as Nelson sees it today: “Biosphere 2 was so far ahead of its time that it offered an understandable way of getting around what a biosphere was. We weren’t making a model of planet Earth, thank you very much. It was a little slice.”
And like the astronauts whose appreciation of our planet reached its peak when they looked back at it from the moon, Nelson learned something about the wider world from his two years in that little slice of it.
“It totally transformed me and everyone else who was in there,” he says. “I’m still digesting it.”
Part of that had to do with his relationship to his environment. “The incredible bodily connection that all of us felt with that living system, to where it was unthinkable that we would harm it in any way. The mindfulness with which we took care of the biome. The tender loving care that we took, and the visceral sense that we were connected was also part of the human dimension. That knowledge and that love went from my brain, my mind, to my body. To where my body got it. My bodily understanding that I was connected to that world.”
And then there was the human component. “On one level, being alone with seven people was like being in an encounter group, or group therapy, for two years. I got to see ways I related to other people that I didn’t like. I had to change who I was.”
But by the time the door opened up again, 731 days later, he realized he needed much more than those seven intimate companions. “People love other people,” he says. “You hungered to interact with strangers.”