John Allen has had a lifetime love affair with planet Earth. In his new memoir, Me and the Biospheres (Synergetic Press), Allen takes the reader on an unparalleled ride through his life, introducing remarkable people places and projects along the way—and 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 who held lofty Jeffersonian ideals, Allen’s insatiable curiosity was spawned. A precocious publisher at age 10 of a bi-monthly newspaper called “Chit Chat,” Allen gathered the capital and the skills that would help him to capture the earth under glass several decades later.

Thrusting upward out of the Oracle, Arizona desert 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 experiment, Biosphere 2 was seen as one in a potential series of experiments to help us learn more about our own 3.8-billion-year-old Biosphere 1—planet Earth. The Russians and Japanese were already tackling less ambitious Biospheric projects.

Biosphere 2’s first mission. Mission One, was a two-year experiment (1991-1993) to have eight humans—four men and four women—live within this closed system. The eight biospherians worked the agrarian biome (or bioregion dome), benefited from the oxygen production by the rainforest biome, were inspired by the desert biome, collected data to monitor their impact on the environment, and maintained the myriad equipment and systems throughout the complex. They swam and fished the ocean biome. They lived harmoniously in their human habitat alongside the savannah and marsh regions—and above the impressive technosphere.

No detail seemed too small for Allen’s team of scientists and engineers, 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, which maintained air pressure and oxygen levels consistent with the outer atmosphere. Soil was carefully crafted, including thousands of earthworms and various microbes to maintain balance at the molecular level.

Ranked by Discovery Channel as the third greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century, Some of the enormous challenges of building the 3-acre structure in the are chronicled in the book.

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 through his farming enterprise.

Allen’s interest in the study of the biosphere began during his time spent at the Colorado School of Mines. He notes that during a 1953 lecture, his professor Ben Parker spoke of a sphere of life—the biosphere. What Parker spoke of came from the work of Vladimir Vernadsky, the inventor of Biospherics.

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. 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. He 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 by establishing a research facility in 1969 outside Santa Fe, N.M alongside the Cerrillos hills, called Synergia Ranch, 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.