Candy Jones

BOOK REVIEW

Biosphere II inventor, John Allen, "Me and the Biospheres"

Living Green Magazine, May, 2009

by Candy Jones

John Allen has had a lifetime love affair with planet Earth. In his new memoir, Me and the Biospheres, (available through Synergetic Press at http://www.synergeticpress.com/authors.html#jd). Allen takes the reader on an unparalleled ride through his life, the remarkable people places and projects along the way ultimately culminating in his invention, Biosphere 2.

From a childhood spent observing a grandfather who excelled in innovative and ecological pre-dust bowl farming techniques and lofty Jeffersonian ideals, the insatiably curious Allen was spawned. A precocious publisher of the bi-monthly newspaper, “Chit Chat,” 10-year-old Allen gathered the capital and the skills that would help him to capture the earth under glass several decades later.

Thrust like an enormous Oz under glass and steel, the Biosphere 2 was the first American attempt to create a biosphere. Designed to serve as a 100-year-old experiment, Biosphere 2 was seen as one in a potential series of experiment/missions, much like Apollo, to help us learn more about our own 3.8- billion-year-old Biosphere, planet Earth. Biospherics seemed to appeal to more nonwestern cultures, the Russians and Japanese have taken their stab at less ambitious Biospheric projects.

Sprung from the Oracle, Ariz., desert, Biosphere 2’s first mission. Mission One was a two-year experiment (1991-1993) holding eight humans – 4 men and 4 women – within its closed system. The eight biospherians co-existed with seven biomes fashioned for them. The biospherians worked the agrarian biome, benefited from the oxygen production by the rainforest biome, were inspired by the desert biome, collected data, maintained systems, swam and fished the ocean biome, lived harmoniously in their human habitat alongside the savannah and marsh regions as well and above the all too impressive technosphere.

No detail seemed too small from the transport of rare species, to the development of real live coral reefs within its small ocean biome, to the invention and later patent of the “lungs” of the biosphere maintaining air pressure consistent with the outer biospheric pressure. Soil was carefully crafted, thousands of earthworms installed along with microbes worked to maintain balance at the molecular level.

What spawned such an enormous undertaking? This philosophical question is a complex one as its genesis was long and involved. Certainly, John Allen’s beloved Texas grandfather, Brune Wall, imprinted his grandson with reverence for life and the value of recycling as his farming enterprise did manage. But perhaps, the lecture Allen ascribes to setting his intentions toward the study of the biosphere was during his time spent at the Colorado School of Mines. During a lecture conducted by Professor Ben Parker in 1953, he spoke of a sphere of life. The biosphere. What Parker spoke of came from the work and inventor of Biospherics, Vladimir Vernadsky. Allen was taken with the notion that the Earth’s unique biosphere is credited with having allowed humans to evolve and to create the “ethnosphere,” the “sphere of cultures that manifests differing aspect of the human potential.” Vernadsky’s Biospherics, coupled with visions Allen experienced (of Biosphere 2) during two shamanic ceremonies in the desert Southwest in 1962 and 1963, have been seen as the creative sparks which set the bonfire of Biosphere 2 into existence.

This memoir, this celebratory life tale, is more than a mere retelling of the delicate balance of life under glass that Biosphere 2 claims, but rather the book is a celebration of life in the broadest sense. Allen, the most exuberant of life’s participants, literally set sail around this planet and systematically spawned project after project and created a kind of global college to prepare his team of scientists and close colleagues for their ultimate challenge, the creation of Biosphere 2.

Allen began with establishing a research facility outside of Santa Fe, N.M., alongside the Cerrillos hills called Synergia Ranch in 1969, where he and many of his colleagues reside today. There Allen and his team built an organic farm and ranch buildings from largely recycled lumber. Next they initiated several building projects in Santa Fe. These projects not only fueled the economic wagon from which future projects would come, but they developed working relationships among the team members. Having successfully completed Project Llano Urban development and Project Tibet, Allen sent his crew in search of a more challenging engineering projects, the building of a seafaring boat. Called Heraclitus, this Chinese Junk ship to date, has sailed to each of our Earth’s seven continents, up the Peruvian Amazon to study the rainforests and provided a means by which team members could closely study the planets coral reefs. From there, Allen spearheaded the acquisition and development of an organic farm and conference center in Provence, an art gallery in London celebrating trans-vanguard art, a traveling theater group where team members could develop their emotions and drama on stage (not off) in the Theatre of All Possibilities, built the Hotel Vajra in Kathmandu to study the ethnosphere in Kathmandu’s most diverse culture, and the erecting of the Caravan of Dreams Art Center in Fort Worth, Texas. Later came the land purchase and development of Savannah Systems in Australia where the grassland biomes could be closely studied; the purchase and development a tropical rainforest in Puerto Rican Rain Forest where sustainable forestry and erosion problems could be explored.

From this steady development of environmental studies, team building and economic development came the 1990 building of the Biosphere Test Module designed to contain one individual at a time. The success of the test module signaled a green light for the mightily ambitious Biosphere 2 calling for seven performance requirements which the experiment was successful in meeting are:

1. Health of humans maintained
2. 100 recycle of human and animal and technical waste
3. 100 recycle of water
4. 100 recycle food
5. 100 recycle of air minus a leakage rate of 10 percent a year (330 ppm/day by far the world record)
6. Recycling CO2 between 300 and 5000 ppm
7. Data (collected by 2000 sensors as well as detailed observation by biospherians) to provide an exact picture of the total system operation.

But beyond the considerable creation of the Biosphere 2 itself, was the camaraderie and commitment demonstrated among its team members. To this day the majority of original members dating back to the 1970’s still work together. All living biospherians still work in the field of Biospherics. John Allen has demonstrated a unique ability to inspire, to invent, and to successfully lead multi decade projects analyzing and celebrating the miracle of life on Earth from microbes to the systems that work together to create the biosphere, which sustains us. When I asked Mr. Allen what Biosphere 2 had demonstrated, Allen replied, “it showed that science and engineering could work on a biospheric scale.”

What Allen’s memoir celebrates is not only our Biosphere, but the life Allen has lived upon his beloved biosphere, planet Earth. The message I gleaned from his moving memoir is that each and every day for John Allen is Earth Day.