Biosphere Earth

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The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2

Sabine Höhler
Online publication date: 19 March 2010
To cite this Article Höhler, Sabine(2010) 'The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2', History and
Technology, 26: 1, 39 — 58
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History and Technology
Vol. 26, No. 1, March 2010, 39–58
The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2

Sabine Höhler*
History
10.1080/07341510903313048
GHAT_A_431478.sgm
0734-1512
Original
Taylor
402009
25
Research
Hoehler@history.gess.ethz.ch
00000December
and
&and
Article
Fellow
Francis
(print)/1477-2620
Francis
Technology
SabineHöhler
2009
Ltd (online)
This paper studies an attempt to replicate the Earth’s biosphere in the second half of the
twentieth century with the aim of preserving and refashioning the environment as a self-
reproducing ecological system. Ecosystems dynamics framed the planet Earth as a closed
system and directed scientific attention to questions of global environmental
management. The image of the Earth as a spacecraft and operable in a similar way
supported ideas of placing the environment in a laboratory setting. Using the case of
Downloaded By: [Victoria University of Wellington] At: 02:12 13 July 2010
Biosphere 2, launched in the Arizona desert in 1983, this paper studies the images of
nature and environment contained in this quest to create an ecosystem and human habitat
as good as, or superior to nature on Earth (known in this context as Biosphere 1). The
second biosphere was designed as ‘a prototype for a space colony’ that would eventually
enable its deteriorating predecessor, the Earthly biosphere, to reproduce and allow
human settler societies to migrate to other planets. The paper draws on the cultural
history of the ship in Western culture and on ships and spaceships as archetypes of
autarkic enclosures set apart from nature. It argues that Biosphere 2 as an example of a
technologically controlled endosphere advanced an understanding of the environment as
a ‘life support system’ that emphasized not completeness but systems integrity, and was
based on principles of functionality and replaceability. The paper will explore how
notions of biospheric life support shaped demands on the natural and social environments
in Biosphere 2 and Biosphere 1.
Keywords: biosphere sciences; Biosphere 2; ecology; ecosystem; twentieth century
environmental history; environmental crisis; environmental management; life support
system
Environmental enclosures: refashioning nature in space

The opening sequence of a science-fiction film released in 1972 begins with close-up views
of an Edenic garden of plants – plentiful, precious, pure, and peaceful. It soon becomes
clear, however, that the richness on display is as unique as the biblical paradise. As the
camera draws back, we see that this botanical abundance is quite limited, contained within
a large glass dome. Pulling back still further, the camera reveals that the encapsulated envi-
ronment is actually situated in deep space; the dome is part of the Valley Forge, a huge
American Airlines space freighter.
Accompanied by majestic music, this sequence culminates in the revelation of the awe-
inspiring extent and importance of this US mission. A solemn voice reads out a declaration
written at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in which the last surviving forests on
Earth are dedicated to a conservationist journey through outer space that, as the story
begins, has been in progress for eight years. Astronaut and botanist Freeman Lowell, one of
four spacemen aboard, tends the precious cargo that will one day be returned safely to its
Earthly home. Freeman is a true disciple of the environmental movement of the 1960s and
*Sabine Höhler is Research Associate in the Graduate School Topology of Technology at Darmstadt
Technical University. Email: hoehler@ifs.tu-darmstadt.de
ISSN 0734-1512 print/ISSN 1477-2620 online

© 2010 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/07341510903313048
http://www.informaworld.com
40 S. Höhler
early 1970s. He still remembers when vegetables had taste, smell, and color, when the air
was fresh and the skies were blue (a time evoked by the film’s soundtrack of Joan Baez
performing folk music). Through Freeman we learn that, despite the warnings of environ-
mental activists, the Earth of the future has become a bleak and uniform place with a homo-
geneous temperature of 75°F. The planet is so densely populated that it has grown into one
massive, completely defoliated city; trees and plants are no longer essential for (human) life,
as nutrients are now laboratory-manufactured.
The startling contrast between the richness of life and the fragility of its artificial envi-
ronment, as well as the consequences of changed attitudes toward nature, are the issues on
which the 1972 movie Silent Running focuses.1 The film was produced amid heated debates
on resource exploitation, environmental pollution, and overpopulation. It reflects the popu-
lar images of impending ecological catastrophe and the questionable survival of humankind
at the time. It is certainly no coincidence that the film is set entirely on a spaceship. At the
height of the Space Age, the spaceship became a major symbol of the fears and the hopes
associated with the Earth’s transformation into an endangered planet. It epitomized techno-
scientific progress and rationality, but in providing a ‘view from above’ it also highlighted
the uniqueness of the Earth. The dynamic green and blue colors of planet Earth were attrib-
uted to three billion years of converting sunlight into processes of life.
The 1960s were also the peak time of the Cold War. With fears of total obliteration, the
Earth and its inhabitants were redefined metaphorically as a spaceship, Spaceship Earth. In
1965 the US ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai E. Stevenson, appealed to the inter-
national community by referring to the Earth as a little spaceship on which humankind trav-
eled together as passengers, dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil. In 1966,
the English economist and political scientist Barbara Ward chose the term to make a plea
for a new balance of power between the continents, of wealth between North and South, and
of understanding and tolerance in a world of economic interdependence and potential nuclear
winter.2 Other authors of this lyrical concept, like the economist Kenneth E. Boulding and
the architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller, set out to summon the engineering
elite to take control of an environment in need of extensive repair. They used the spaceship
to offer a blueprint of a self-contained and self-sustained Earthly environment yet to come,
a circulatory natural-technological system, largely autonomous, to be run, maintained, and
optimized through technoscientific expertise and rational management.3
This paper explores the emerging fascination with self-sustaining environmental
systems between 1960 and 1990, particularly those that took the closed world of the space
capsule as analogy. The focus of this study is Biosphere 2, a project launched in the Arizona
desert in the 1980s. Biosphere 2 was an ecological experiment of unprecedented kind and
scale. On a site of three acres, seven defined Earth ecosystems or biomes were established
and sealed under a glass dome. The ‘living laboratory’ was based on a concealed techno-
logical infrastructure and populated by nearly 4000 animal and plant species as well as eight
humans. Its originators stemmed from a small private group of eco-enthusiasts that had
formed in the early 1970s at the height of the environmental movement. Members consisted
of entrepreneurs, artists, architects, scientists, philosophers, engineers, and computer tech-
nicians spread across the world but united by the idea of developing the new discipline of
‘ecotechnics’ that would interrelate the human ‘technosphere’ with the ‘biospheric totality’
on the planet Earth. Inspired by systems sciences, including a fascination with informatics
and cybernetics, they strove to generate a ‘genial and creative atmosphere’ for producing a
‘synergetic system,’ a system ‘where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and
unpredictable from them.’4 In the early 1980s they established close working ties with
contemporary visionaries of a holistic ecology to gather expert knowledge and construct a
History and Technology 41
biospheric container for understanding and, ultimately, operating ecosystem processes on

Earth and beyond. They designed Biosphere 2 as a means to replicate and then leave its
deteriorating predecessor, allowing pioneering settler societies to migrate to other planets.
The Environmental Age, the peak time of environmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s has
been studied primarily for the conservationist concerns it raised, the emerging environmen-
tal movement, and the environmental regimes it stimulated.5 I maintain that the period also
demonstrates a growing interest in ecological concepts that framed nature and environment
in terms of self-contained and self-sustained ecosystems, provoking new images of nature
and environment as objects of scientific and technological expertise. Fundamental shifts in
scientific conceptions of the human habitat facilitated ideas of creating environments as
good as or superior to the environment of the Earth. This development reflects a familiar
theme of modernity: the power of humankind to create a technologically enhanced nature,
either to exert control or to facilitate some notion of improvement. Biosphere 2 provides a
paradigmatic example of how concerns for a threatened planet blended with the promise of
constructing efficient technological environments – enclosed living spaces, as secluded,
sanitary, and conditioned as space capsules, and more economic, resistant, and sustainable
than the living spaces that seemed literally at man’s disposal.6
The use of technology to reinvent nature has come to the forefront of technology stud-
ies in recent years.7 Still, the shifting boundaries between the natural and the technological
raise questions of commensurability, challenging in what respect, to what extent, and for
whom technoscientific habitats are as good as or even superior to the Earth’s environment.
Recreated nature entails its own specific politics and forms of governance regulating
inclusion and exclusion, allocating access and distributing resources. Biosphere 2 also
makes an exemplary case for studying how the project’s advocates defined principles of
ecological, economical, and technical minimalism and efficiency, and how they selected
the most useful and collaborative species to inhabit the new environment. This paper,
though, mainly addresses the provocation inherent in Biosphere 2, the provocation to
perceive the Earthly environment not as embedded into social relations, nor as embedding
humans, but to perceive the environment essentially as an enclosed object to be controlled
and managed from outside. Biosphere 2 put into effect a new image developed in space
flight and in systems ecology, the image of the biosphere of the Earth as a ‘life support
system.’
To illustrate the origins of the environment as a self-sustaining system the paper will
begin by stepping briefly through the history of the Earth’s biosphere in the twentieth
century. Originally defined as the sphere that encompassed all life on Earth in the late nine-
teenth century, systems ecology framed the biosphere as a self-contained and self-sustained
global ecosystem in the early 1970s. The biospheric system became a blueprint for ecolog-
ical and technological theories of engineering Earthly living space. I will then pursue
themes of enclosure, drawing on scholarship on the figure of the ship in Western cultural
history and on ships and spaceships as archetypes of autarkic spaces set apart from nature
unbound. I will introduce Peter Sloterdijk’s reflections on endospheres to examine some of
the motifs and consequences of isolating technologically controlled interior spaces. The
following section explores how descriptions of the Earthly biosphere and the ecology of
space capsules merged, as both descriptions based life on technical systems of life support.
Subsequently I will outline the Biosphere 2 experiment of constructing a materially closed
biospheric environment in the 1980s and early 1990s and describe how the project managers
answered to and challenged the US space politics of colonizing outer space. I proceed by
discussing the selective quality of the biospheric life support system of Biosphere 2. The
final section briefly summarizes perceptions of the biosphere as a life sustaining system in
42 S. Höhler
Earth systems science after 1990 and the questions this focus entails regarding the changes
in local and global environmental governance.
From sphere of life to global ecosystem: the biosphere

In September 1970 the ecologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson introduced a Scientific American
special issue with an article titled ‘The Biosphere’ that was later praised as epoch-making.8
Hutchinson defined the biosphere as the thin film of the Earth’s surface and its surrounding
atmosphere and oceanic depths in which life forms existed ‘naturally.’9 He was not the first,
however, to restrict life to a ‘terrestrial envelope’ roughly 20 kilometers in extent.10 In 1875
the Austrian geologist Eduard Sueß had reflected on the ‘zone’ on ‘this big celestial body
formed by spheres’ to which organic life was constricted; ‘on the surface of continents,’
Sueß asserted, ‘it is possible to single out a self-contained biosphere.’11 In 1909 Sueß
confirmed that ‘All of Life’ arranged itself into an ‘entirety’ that emphasized not ‘unity’ or
‘common descent’ but ‘solidarity.’12 This notion that had been opened up by Lamarck and
Darwin brought with it, Sueß argued, ‘the concept of a biosphere through which life was
assigned its place … and which at the same time encompassed life only on this planet with
all its demands as to temperature, chemical composition etc.’13
While Sueß considered life ruled by the particularity and destiny of the planet Hutchin-
son addressed the Biosphere – with capital B – in the terms of global geochemistry laid out
by the Russian biogeologist Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky who’s main work The
Biosphere was published in 1926 in Leningrad.14 That the Vernadskyan biosphere ulti-
mately received more attention than Sueß’ sphere of life might be attributed to the fact that
Vernadsky understood life not only as an effect of geological conditions but also as a
geological force producing geological effects. His project of a ‘physics of living matter’15
within the parameters of a spherical planet provided a powerful base to study energy and
matter cycles within the environment. The so-called ‘Vernadskyan revolution,’ the formu-
lation of a unified Biosphere Theory, led to translating Sueß’ ‘self-contained’ biosphere into
a ‘self-maintained’ biosphere.16
Hutchinson’s article illustrates the conceptual shift from a phenomenological under-
standing of the envelope of life to a physical, bio-, and geochemical approach to living matter
and to the environment as a self-regulating and evolving system designed like a planetary
machine. Hutchinson based the ‘the day-to-day running’ and ‘operation of the biosphere’
on a mechanical and functional idea and terminology of managing an ‘overall reversible
cycle.’17 The notion of the biosphere as a metabolism, a circulatory system, whose boundary
conditions limited the ‘amount of life’ on Earth, made Hutchinson conclude in respect to its
expected life span: ‘It would seem not unlikely that we are approaching a crisis.’18
The Scientific American special issue appeared as the environmental movement drew
prominently on the imagery generated by spaceflight. It is not without irony that the iconic
image of the ‘Blue Planet’ on its lonely course through space, came into focus as the Apollo
missions opened the possibility of humans moving from Earth to the stars. James Lovelock
asserted that it was ‘this kind of evidence from space research that led me to postulate the
Gaia hypothesis,’ which views Earth as a single organic whole.19 The special issue on the
biosphere verbalized this systems view as well as the concerns it entailed: the exploitation
of non-renewable resources, a growing world population, and the finite dimensions of the
planet, which were identified as the ultimate cause for the rising economic and ecological
pressures.20
Ecosystems dynamics provided a theoretical architecture for perceiving the Earth’s
environment as a global ecosystem that had to be properly managed and operated according
to its diverse and complex functions.21 Geoffrey Bowker has characterized the systems
sciences that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century as a new ‘interdiscipline,’
an assembly of scientific disciplines creating and sharing new technological infrastructures
of computer-based data processing and growing networks to circulate information on a
global scale. The interdiscipline, as Paul Edwards phrased it, epistemologically recreated
‘“the world” as an ecological and physical unity.’22 Computer programs that modeled world
dynamics used as an assumption that the Earth was a ‘closed’ system. The idea of closure
facilitated the mathematical analysis of global natural processes. The scientific modeling
and forecasting of nature as a closed system also went along with a politics of nature that
followed rational and technocratic planning ideals. The modelers’ view on the planet
favored the notion of the Earth as a small and isolated island and supported the idea of
rerunning and eventually recreating the Earth from scratch.
‘Qualitative and Quantitative Living Space Requirements’23 formed the core of the
‘Biosphere Conference’ in the UNESCO Headquarters in September 1968 in Paris. This

first international ‘conference of experts’ on questions of the Earth’s habitat gathered to
develop a ‘Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of the
Biosphere.’ To solve ‘the problems of the biosphere in its totality’ the conference launched
the long-term research program Man and the Biosphere (MAB) that started in 1970.24 A
new form of protected area emerged: the ‘biosphere reserve,’ organized in a world-wide
network, reflected the internationalization of nature conservation strategies and global envi-
ronmental governance.25 Biosphere reserves were set up as ecological laboratories to study
and explore the wealth of nature, not only for protection and preservation, but also for
human benefit and future utilization. Reserve management focused explicitly on the recon-
ciliation of biodiversity conservation with social, cultural, and economic development. This
new form of human environmental stewardship marked a transition from a nature-centered
view of conservation to a human-centered view on the environment. When the international
UN conference in Stockholm in 1972, the first in a series of Earth summits, put the ‘Human
Environment’ on the agenda, the conference called for a combination of environmental
protection and efficient resource management. A study entitled Only one Earth: The Care
and Maintenance of a Small Planet, drawn up to prepare the conference agenda, supported
the familiar environmental alarmism, but it also took a guidebook approach to the Earth in
the form of a technical reference manual.26 The human environment as a global commons
was assessed and researched scientifically, negotiated internationally, politically adminis-
trated and allocated, monitored by technology, and rationally developed.
On the one hand the term human environment pictured humans as part of and affected
by their surroundings. On the other hand, the human environment projected an environment
that would primarily serve human requirements. In a similar way, images that framed the
Earth as a spaceship conceived of the environment as controlled, and eventually created by
human resourcefulness. Richard Buckminster Fuller published his Operating Manual for
Spaceship Earth in 1969 and stretched the spaceship metaphor provocatively, arguing, ‘We
are all astronauts.’27 ‘We have not been seeing our Spaceship Earth as an integrally designed
machine which to be persistently successful must be comprehended and serviced in total.’28
Because ‘no instruction book came with it,’29 humankind was confronted with the challenge
of learning on its own how to operate ‘Spaceship Earth and its complex life-supporting and
regenerating systems.’30
In 1966 Kenneth E. Boulding likewise chose the spaceship to prefigure what he called
the ‘closed Earth of the future.’ In a programmatic lecture titled ‘The Economics of the
Coming Spaceship Earth’ he delivered on the occasion of a conference on ‘environmental
quality’ in Washington, DC, he referred to the common experience of the Earth’s historical
44 S. Höhler
‘transition from the illimitable plane to the closed sphere.’ Boulding dated the ‘global nature
of the planet’ back to the immediate time following World War II and to space flight. Earlier
civilizations, he stated, had had the experience that there ‘was almost always somewhere
beyond the known limits of human habitation,’ so that ‘there was always some place else to
go when things got too difficult.’ ‘Gradually,’ he stated, ‘man has been accustoming himself
to the notion of the spherical Earth and a closed sphere of human activity.’ Boulding advo-
cated to abandon the wasteful ‘cowboy economy,’ the open, throughput-oriented economy
of the illimitable plains and prairies, by a frugal ‘spaceman economy.’ The spaceship to him
became a figure of self-reliance, a vehicle to promote the project of maintaining the Earthly
environment as a cyclical ecological system capable of continuous reproduction of material
form and externally sustained by energy inputs only.31
The significance of endospheres in Western history

From the early modern voyages of discovery to the Apollo program ships and spaceships
symbolized spatial expansion and the exploration of the unknown as well as transition,
frailty, and autonomy. Ships have been at the heart of Western culture’s most powerful
narratives. The French philosopher Michel Foucault considered the ship to be the ‘hetero-
topia par excellence.’ Heterotopia was his term for an exceptional site that exists within the
world and, at the same time, lies far remote from or beyond it. Heterotopias, according to
Foucault, are in relation with all other places and spaces, and yet in opposition to them. The
ship he described as a ‘floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself,
that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea.’32
Roland Barthes, French philosopher and semiologist, portrayed the ship as a symbol of
seclusion and refuge from life’s raging storms.33 In a confined space the ship provides a
home for a traveler’s valued objects; the ship forms a singular universe floating amid the
violent tempests of time. Barthes particularly referred to the fictional narratives of Jules
Verne, in which ships replicate and preserve the world on a small scale. Barthes describes
Verne’s ships as vehicles of the encyclopedic project of the nineteenth century, designed to
encompass and conserve en miniature all elements of a finite but rapidly proliferating world.
Appropriating and preserving the world by compiling, registering, and neatly arranging
the elements within it is a strategy not limited to the modern era of scientific collecting,
archiving, and interpreting facts. The procedure recalls the primal ship representing the
family of mankind, the inventory of the world: the biblical ark. This vessel from the Old
Testament (Genesis 1: 6–9), furnished with specimens of living creatures on Earth, differs
in a significant way from Verne’s crammed but comfortable floating interiors: Noah’s ark
is the paradigmatic heterotopia, a storm-tossed place of survival and salvation in the face of
catastrophe. In the second volume of his work titled Sphären, spheres, the German philos-
opher Peter Sloterdijk analyzes the ark as the perfect example of the ‘ontology of enclosed
space,’ a thinking and acting in essentialist terms of contained and exclusive spaces that he
considers prevalent in Western culture.34 Ark, from the Latin arca, is the word for ‘case’ or
‘compartment.’ The primal ship conveys a strong sense of authority, order, and rigorous
discipline, but the ark also suggests the uncertain course, the drifting voyage, and the
endless journey. Ultimately, it can be seen as an exemplary site of selection and selective
principles for survival or obliteration. To Sloterdijk, the ark denotes an artificial interior
space, a ‘swimming endosphere,’ that under certain conditions provides the only possible
environment for its inhabitants.35
While the historical actors of this period may not have consciously drawn on these
cultural motifs, the spaceship does fit into a tradition of thought, a trope for an insular habitat
for a small group of living beings facing a hostile outside world. At a time when the Earth
seemed a paradise in jeopardy, the spaceship, like the ark, held out the hope of preserving
life in all its diversity. The spaceship represented two prevailing attitudes towards environ-
mental degradation: ecological sufficiency and technological efficiency. Boulding’s refer-
ence to the cowboy ideology makes a good example: the spaceship could serve both to
critique post-war technocracy and to affirm it. It took the ancient motif of the ship as
the ‘greatest reserve of the imagination’36 and united it with the modern image of human
technological supremacy in space. Space flight also invoked the American cultural ideology
of the frontier. When the world frontier came to its end and the formerly distant ‘lost hori-
zon’ of the seas and the unknown continents became familiar territory, it was outer space
that seemed to hold new possibilities for exploration and expansion. Space became the
remote place to develop new frontier societies, which, similar to colonies fixed to an empire,
would be connected to the Old World, yet form distant places on the outer edge.37 A refer-
ence to Spaceship Earth and its future spaceman economy also cited and affirmed the rela-
tion of space flight, scientific and technological progress, and frontier exceptionalism and
expansionism.
Life support on Earth and in space

Fuller chose the spaceship to describe an innovative technological model of a natural envi-
ronment yet to come. Boulding envisioned the spaceman economy of the closed Earth of
the late twentieth century as the rational management of circular material flows in order to
secure ‘stock maintenance.’38 His programmatic vision of an efficient technologically main-
tained ecosystem was shared across disciplinary boundaries and by much of the general
public. As the spaceship was fused with the system planet Earth became a habitat based on
systems and cybernetic principles. The global environment was conceptualized as function-
ing by means of technology-driven control systems, similar to the control systems inte-
grated into space capsules. Ecosystems sciences regarded the environment as an economy
of efficiently cooperating parts, composed and operated like a machine. While the term and
concept of the ‘ecosystem’ had already been introduced in 1935, the British ecologist
Nicholas Polunin attempted a general definition of the Earthly biosphere in ecosystems
terms in 1984, defining the ‘Biosphere (with capitalization also of the initial letter of “The”
(sic) when immediately preceding it)’ as follows: ‘The integrated living and life-supporting
system comprising the peripheral envelope of Planet Earth together with its surrounding
atmosphere so far down, and up, as any form of life exists naturally.’39
Bios – life – now acted as an autonomous system, purposeful and directed but neverthe-
less wholly contingent in existence, so as to create an organization capable of self-identical
reproduction.40 With systems sciences and principles of thermodynamics entering ecology,
the concept of life increasingly centered on structural order and functional complexity, on
metabolic processes and endless reproduction. The conception of life as the ‘optimization
of functional efficiency’41 became a prerequisite for spaceflight to define elements and mech-
anisms of ‘life support,’ to modularize and combine these elements and to substitute them
technologically, and vice versa: similar to life in a space capsule, the biospheric life support
system of the Earth emphasized not encyclopedic completeness but systemic integrity; it
required and sustained the optimum combination of collaborating organisms. Sloterdijk has
pointed to this kind of selectivity that characterizes all stories of the world as the journey of
an ark. In all ark narratives, he observed, the choice of the few is declared a holy necessity
and salvation is found only by those who have acquired one of the few boarding passes to
the exclusive vehicle.42 The emerging spaceship ecology not only created new metaphors
46 S. Höhler
for understanding the fragility of the planet but also inspired a rigid classification and selec-
tion of life and nature in order to determine what would be useful and what was redundant,
what was to be conserved and what discarded.
Making an enclosure: Biosphere 2

‘Why not build a spaceship like the one we’ve been traveling on – along with all its inhab-
itants?’43 The provocative question of Phil Hawes, the architect of Biosphere 2, character-
ized the entire Earth as a temporary environment, opening up the prospect of abandoning
the planet altogether. ‘Men in a spaceship are not locked in one place, but become perpetual
travelers,’ William Kuhns had remarked in a chapter on Buckminster Fuller in 1971.44
Sloterdijk reminds us that ontologies of enclosed space, as they are represented in the ark
mythology, imply the radical idea of completely removing the endosphere from nature and
to re-present it as an artificial construct.45 In 1929 the British physicist John Desmond
Bernal had predicted that globes would one day replace the Earth. In detail he outlined how
a spaceship or a permanent space station – a ‘globe’ or ‘colony’ – would have to be
constructed to take over the Earth’s vital functions. As if in anticipation of Biosphere 2, he
projected an artificial sphere that ‘would fulfill all functions by which our Earth manages to
support life.’46 I argue that the project of Biosphere 2 represented just such an artificial
construct of a nature materially isolated from the outside environment, a veritable ‘second
nature’ to be operable at any terrestrial or extraterrestrial location.47 In slight modification
of Fuller’s quote about all of humankind being astronauts, observers of Biosphere 2 claimed
that, ‘Actually, we are all biospherians.’48
The simulation of Biosphere 1 (as the living Earth was now addressed) rested on the idea
that the most powerful way to understand biospheres was to build and to operate them.
Earthly nature was to be artificially recreated and separated from the outside environment
to study closed ecological systems and to develop a self-contained and ultimately self-
sustaining living system materially closed and informationally and energetically open – not
unlike the spaceship that Fuller and Boulding had had in mind when devising the Earth’s
future. The reproduction of planet Earth on a small scale aimed at constructing a robust
ecological system that would be capable of longer-duration and supporting greater diversity
than common life support systems in space. Anticipating that in the long run, life on Earth
would have to expand to other planets, the experimenters hoped to develop ‘a prototype for
a space colony’ and to settle future ‘Sustainable Communities’ on Mars.49
The inventors of Biosphere 2 considered going to space a ‘historic imperative.’50 The
lifespan of Biosphere 1, they warned, was at best equal to the life of the Sun. They thought
it more probable yet that the life of the Earth would be shortened further by Sun changes,
cosmic impacts, and by the failure of ecological homeostasis and an ensuing entropic reac-
tion. As a likely reason for the death of the Earth, the project managers considered the abuse
of atomic weapons and the subsequent environmental catastrophe of a nuclear winter. In
addition, they pointed to the human-induced ‘burdens of population explosion, agricultural
stress on the environment, technological paralysis, mineral and fossil fuel depletion, and a
number of other potentially debilitating conditions of an overburdened planet.’51 Before too
long, they cautioned, the singular ‘window of opportunity’ to turn humankind into a space-
faring civilization, a window characterized by an unparalleled concentration of wealth,
resources, and energy, and adequate technologies at hand, would close again, and the first
biosphere would be ‘doomed to die within a small fraction of the life of the cosmos.’52
According to the theory of living systems the project planners endorsed, biospheres were
living entities that evolved in Darwinian fashion, to survive or go extinct: ‘Biosphere I must
disappear sooner or later unless it can participate in sending forth offspring biospheres to
populate other regions of the cosmos.’53
A joint venture called Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV), founded in 1984, owned and
operated Biosphere 2. SBV had two components: the Decisions Team, a private group of
researchers, developers, and investors, contributed managerial as well as scientific and tech-
nical expertise and the Decisions Investment Corporation supplied the capital. Funding also
came from two minor private sponsors, the London-based company Synergetic Architecture
and Biotechnic Designs and the Institute of Ecotechnics, an ecological think tank of which
the leading figures in Biosphere 2, John Allen and Mark Nelson, were founding director and
chairman.54 While Allen had trained as an engineer and business administrator and demon-
strated working experience in local ecological and development projects, Nelson held
degrees in philosophy and environmental studies and a PhD in environmental engineering.
Allen considered himself the inventor of Biosphere 2 and the head of the group of environ-
mental entrepreneurs involved in the project, mostly individuals who were widely traveled
and could prove ample project experience. Their backgrounds were in philosophy, biology,
architecture, or environmental engineering, and they were interested in designing, construct-
ing, and managing ecological architecture and communities.55
Although a private endeavor, the plan of building a contained living system simulating
the Earth soon spread widely. From the mid 1980s onwards the group organized interna-
tional workshops and symposia on closed ecological systems and biospherics, to draw on
the ideas and expertise of well-known eco-visionaries of the time. Among them were archi-
tect Buckminster Fuller and also microbiologist and ecologist Lynn Margulis. Margulis was
a close collaborator of Gaia concept originator John Lovelock.56 The group also extended
its network of affiliations through involving numerous consultants from universities and
international educational institutions to Biosphere 2, including representatives from the
National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The media covered the effort
extensively when preliminary closure experiments involving humans began in late 1988.
Allen himself volunteered to be Vertebrate X, the first human to be locked into the test
module for three days. Popular lifestyle magazines and daily newspapers praised the exper-
iment as a pioneering endeavor. Also environmental journals hailed Biosphere 2 as a ‘glass
spaceship’ ‘ready to go.’57
SBV acquired an area of three acres in the Sonoran Desert about 25 miles north of
Tucson. The area housed an enclosure of steel and glass, a modular structure of ‘space-
frames’ projected to last at least a century. To meet the problem of longevity the construc-
tion demanded new techniques, know-how, and endurable materials that would not leak out
trace elements and be able to carry a structure of up to 30 meters in height and a glass
surface of more than 15,000 square meters. The glass and plastic panes used for the dome
had to be transparent to permit sunlight to enter. They had to be airtight and watertight
according to a 1% leakage standard to ensure that the biosphere was materially isolated
completely from the outside world. The fully ‘sealed’ enclosure, however, posed the prob-
lem of balancing the fluctuations in air pressure within the dome. Two huge flexible expan-
sion chambers or ‘lungs’ constructed outside of the rigid building solved this problem.
Furthermore, the greenhouse climate developing under the huge sealed dome had to be
controlled. Quickly rising temperatures forced the Biosphere 2 designers to abandon the
plan of a purely solar-powered facility. To operate the indoor ventilation, heating, and cool-
ing system, a plant capable of generating more than 10 MW of electrical power was erected
outside of the glass dome.58
The enclosure of Biosphere 2 housed an ecological ‘mesocosm.’ The large model
ecosystem allowed unprecedented experimental ecological work at the mesoscale of
48 S. Höhler
‘biomes.’ Biomes were ‘large-scale complexes of life communities, soils and climates in
characteristic geographic positions.’59 They represented distinct ecosystems that were held
to contribute the essential natural parts and processes to the major material and energy
cycles of the biosphere. Seven such individual biomes were laid out underneath the glass
roof. The five ‘wilderness biomes’ encompassed a tropical rain forest, an ocean including a
living coral reef, a savannah, a mangrove-marsh biome, and a desert. Next to the wilderness
an ‘intensive agriculture’ biome and a ‘micropolis,’ a small ‘city’ for eight human biosphe-
rians were created. The wilderness and agriculture biomes were to cooperate in the effort to
sustain the human habitat at the top of the food chain.60 Biosphere 2 marked a new scale of
ecological experiment to study the Earth’s ecosystems functions and interactions and to
research the impact of humans and their technologies on the overall biospheric system.
The closed living laboratory also presented a new type of ecological experiment that
included humans. Eight biospherians, four women and four men, were sealed into the
enclosure. The balance of the sexes was in line with the overall schemes of ecological
symmetry and equilibrium in Biosphere 2. Social relations did not enter the biospherical
equations. The human beings introduced to Biosphere 2 had to meet specific physical crite-
ria in order to function as useful and skillful agents in the biospheric metabolism in a simi-
lar way as the soils, plants, and animals selected. All of them were trained to perform a
multitude of tasks, from diving to gardening to butchering to cooking. The biospherians had
to be ‘self-sufficient in everything from running tests in the labs to doing their own repairs.’
They had to be ‘their own plumbers, electricians, and tailors, too. … They’ve been trained
to be good observers and researchers, as well as competent farmers and computer users.’61
Resembling the scientist-astronauts entering US space stations, the eight biospherians were
educated scientists and engineers with backgrounds in physics, medicine, biology, ecology,
and electrical engineering. On 26 September 1991, they entered their enclosure in the famil-
iar way astronauts enter their spacecraft: in orange jumpsuits and intensely covered by the
media. A two-year closure period began, Mission One.62
The glass ark

‘The prospect of travel to other worlds began to make us realize that the biosphere of Earth
was unique in our solar system and we would go nowhere off this planet for long without a
similar life support system.’63 Employing the familiar view of whole Earth as perceived
from space, Allen’s statement claims that a major aim of the project was to comprehend and
to maintain what had become ‘life support’ on Earth. His assertions also demonstrate that
the second biosphere was intended to simulate and reproduce planet Earth’s ‘life support
system’ in such extent and complexity that the travel to other worlds would also permit their
colonization. Biosphere 2 was to ‘create living art forms appropriate to the Space Age
which celebrate the epic of evolution and which will produce heroes of a new kind – heroes
who are champions of life and explorers of space.’64
The project team strongly supported NASA’s plans to build a permanently manned
Earth-orbit space station as a first step on humankind’s way to Mars. They welcomed US
President Ronald Reagan’s endorsement in 1984 of the Earth-orbital station ‘Freedom’ to
be launched by 1992. ‘Space Biospheres Ventures drove to get Biosphere 2 built and into
operation by that date, anticipating the possibility of putting the first small space life system
into orbit by 1995.’65 Yet SBV criticized the NASA space vehicles for their lifelessness and
artificiality: ‘SBV’s vision of a created biosphere was 180 degrees from what they were
thinking about at NASA. The space agency’s idea of a space station was of high-tech “cans”
containing lots of plastic, metal, computers, and walls painted in psychologically approved
colors. There was little room for the odors, textures, sights, and sounds of a complex living
assemblage of plants, animals, and bacteria.’66
NASA had addressed the challenge of autarky and miniaturization for future space
travel as early as the 1960s: ‘Life might be sustained in space as it is on Earth if enough of
the “Earth” becomes transportable. The task of miniaturization is to make more things fit
into less space.’67 From the late 1970s onwards, the agency conducted design studies on
‘Controlled or Closed Ecological Life Support Systems’ or CELSS. The system configura-
tions would supply not a mere minimum of life support functions but a true environment
that could produce food, water, and air on site. Complete recycling and recovery of oxygen
and water would close the ecological material and energy cycles. Some projects pondered
about plants and algae to be taken on board to decompose and regenerate waste. The image
of the ‘Interstellar Ark’68 signified this new dimension of space travel. According to the
truly visionary space travelers it would not suffice to equip a spaceship on an interstellar
voyage with the most basic supplies for the transportation of a handful of discoverers.
Rather, the space ark would have to serve as ‘a mobile cradle of civilization – a self-
contained small world, prepared for birth and death and for the cohabitation of many gener-
ations of humans that never saw their planet of origin.’69
Biosphere 2 was termed a ‘Glass Ark’70 to denote the plan for a future space voyage of
more than one generation of duration, self-contained and self-sustained. ‘SBV was on the
verge of launching its own spaceship, so to speak, with eight people in it. It needed at least
a rough draft of an operating manual.’71 The operators of Biosphere 2 set up their manual
with the help of two new disciplines they called ‘biospherics’ and ‘ecotechnics.’ Biospher-
ics they developed from Vernadsky’s biosphere theory combined with Lovelock’s Gaia
theory. They then further elaborated their concept of the biosphere into an evolving homeo-
static feedback system, a complex superorganism that would follow its own evolutionary
interests and provide its own source of energy by means of microbial processes. The
concept of a holistic Earth as a living regenerative organism did not oppose the cybernetic
view of Earth as a global automated machine and control system. It was this analogy of the
holistic and the cybernetic approach to life that the biospherians put to work. Biospherics
understood life not as an individual property but as an ecological property and the biosphere
as a homeostatic or cybernetic system of living and nonliving components. Ecotechnics or
‘biotechnics’ denoted the corresponding technology based on and compatible with such life
systems. Ecotechnics aimed at the construction of a ‘technosphere’ that would ‘stand in’ for
the geological functions of the planet and for its weather and climate systems.72
Ecotechnics conceptualized ecological relations as physical and biochemical causal
relations and transformed them into cybernetic servomechanisms. An elaborate infrastruc-
ture of electrical, mechanical, chemical, thermal, and hydraulic transmissions formed the
fundament of a new hybrid version of nature. As the infrastructure was hidden in the foun-
dations of the glass-covered area it remained nearly invisible to visitors above ground.
Biosphere 2 conveyed an image of containing pure Earthly nature under its glass dome. The
nature of Biosphere 2, however, was stretched like a thin organic skin on the surface of huge
machinery. An intricate network of more than 2000 sensors, the ‘nerve system’ of the plant,
continuously monitored the designated parameters to effect stability and safety of the life-
support system. A circuit of cables, ventilators, pumps, and turbines was responsible for
circulating, flushing, cleaning, and cooling the air and the water, for moving wind and
waves, and for regulating the climate – air pressure, temperature, humidity, precipitation.73
Biospherics held that principally, species could be replaced as long as they would fulfill
identical biogeochemical functions. This functional concept of life and life support made
replacement, the substitution of single parts, into a principle that worked along the lines of
50 S. Höhler
the necessary and the practicable. The equipment emphasized not completeness or affluence
but ‘diversity,’ modeled using biological agents that were chosen following criteria of effi-
ciency and replaceability.74 ‘Residents had to earn their keep, performing some useful func-
tion in the ecosystem,’ Allen explained.75 The 3800 species taken on board were determined
in a strict selection process: ‘Unlike the ark, Biosphere 2 welcomed animals to a web of life,
as participants in the oikos logos. From the Greek origins oikos (house) and logos (govern-
ing rules), ecology literally means the “rules of the house.”’76 The number of human beings
was restricted to a working population of eight: ‘Eight was the original number for the crew
of Space Station Freedom. The number eight had also been suggested as ideal for an
international manned mission to Mars. And eight had long been the size of the basic unit of
military life; a squad consists of eight soldiers.’77
The politics of nature reserves

Any nature reserve comes attached with exclusive ‘rules of the house’ – claims of access
rights that settle who in a case of ecological emergency will utilize and command the natural
resources stored. The question of who will have control over a nature reserve comes up even
more so in closed artificial environments like Biosphere 2 that are operated according to
strict economic principles. Formerly global commons like water, air, and soil are subjected
in new ways to questions of distribution. Access to these goods is governed according to a
new set of rules. Biospheres and Biosphere 2 in particular make excellent examples of the
politics involved in natural as well as in artificial technological structures.78
Timothy Luke has called Biosphere 2 ‘denature’ to denote a construction that allowed
neither emptiness nor affluence, neither bleakness nor proliferation; a nature that followed
a closely monitored program of ecological balance. Luke argues that Biosphere 2 repre-
sented a simulation of nature for which an ‘original’ did not exist.79 Drawing on Bruno
Latour’s observation of modern societies seeking to separate nature and society clearly,80
one could reason that ecology and ecosystems sciences constitute nature as the exception
from culture, to be contained as pure wilderness or sacred space, or controlled as a techno-
logical simulation. Biosphere 2 carried to extremes the image of nature in a ‘state of excep-
tion,’ to employ a concept developed by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to
explain a different context of emergency rule.81 Biosphere 2 established a form of environ-
mental governance that claimed and exerted control over a nature refashioned according to
ecotechnological potentials and ideals. Acting on the assumption of a situation of ecologi-
cal emergency, the biospherians created a concept of nature which made the natural an
object of detention, exploitation, enhancement, and optimization. Biospheres are material-
izations of what Luke identified as ‘green governmentality’ or ‘environmentality’ – forms
of ecological sovereignty taking hold in the name of managing nature and life for the
greater ecological good.82
The sovereign principle applied to the natural environment but it also extended to those
eight humans that were enrolled as objects of ecological management. In a recent biograph-
ical account about her habitation under the dome Jane Poynter refers to Biosphere 2 as
the ‘glass cage’ that kept her and her fellow biospherians as ‘inmates.’ After two years
and twenty minutes, they finally ‘escaped.’83 The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard
addressed Biosphere 2 as a ‘glass coffin,’ thereby expressing his criticism of a project that
worked on conserving and musealizing nature during its lifetime. The term glass coffin
reflects his observation that Biosphere 2 aspired to immortality by adhering to a minimalist
principle of ‘survival’ through steady regenerative succession – ‘just like in paradise.’
Baudrillard suggested that the experiment centered on ‘dissolving, shrinking the metaphor
of the living into the metastasis of surviving,’ the reduced continuation of life that avoids
death.84
Indeed, neither acid rain nor overpopulation nor pollution posed a problem within the
artificial environment of Biosphere 2.85 Instead, harvest failures and food shortages, a
decline in pollinating insects, losses of vertebrates and other species and the explosive
proliferation of ants complicated life under glass.86 ‘Noah’s ark is a metaphor, not a sched-
ule,’ conceded Peter Warshall, Biosphere 2’s savannah ecosystem designer; ‘restoration or
construction of a community cannot be instant, but requires patience and attention.’87 And
William Mitsch, editor-in-chief of Ecological Engineering, acknowledged that ‘CO2
concentrations soared and O2 concentrations dipped during those first years,’ in a preface to
a special issue on Biosphere 2 in 1999.88 Though ‘heavily subsidized,’ Mitch commented,
the closed material cycle could not be made to work, not even at all costs.89 Like so many
myths, the story of the Second Biosphere met its fate in hubris. The endosphere turned out
to be an exosphere. The only environment to live in turned out to be outside.
Conclusion: life support and biospherics past 1990

In this paper I turned to Sloterdijk’s philosophical reflections on what he calls the ontol-
ogy of enclosed space, the long tradition in Western culture of casting the world in terms
of contained spaces or clearly bounded endospheres, as a way to understand the develop-
ment in the late twentieth century of sciences and technologies for replicating the Earthly
biosphere. I argued that ideas of managing the environment of the Earth as a global
ecosystem coevolved with framing Earthly nature into terms of a self-contained and self-
sustained biosphere. In the age of environment the view from space of planet Earth
became a metaphor of fragility and transience, but it also endorsed notions of planetary
control and enhancement. Biosphere 2 extrapolated and implemented the notion of the
environment as a life support system that could be operated in direct analogy to a space-
ship environment.
Public and professional perceptions of the project differ widely. I have shown that ample
critical scholarly literature exists on the effort, and the media virtually tore it to shreds. The
managers of Biosphere 2 go as far as acknowledging a loss of certain species and an oxygen
imbalance that called for an injection one and a half years into the experiment, but they
remain convinced that the project was successful and have actively rejected criticisms from
the public and professionals. When Mission One ended in 1993, Abigail Alling and Mark
Nelson maintained that ‘At the end of its two-year maiden voyage, Biosphere 2 is like a
well-tested ship, ready to carry on research in biospherics for decades to come.’90 What
interests me is not whether the project worked or failed, but its presumption that a small
group of experts were able to define what nature consisted of and how it worked. Although
the builders of Biosphere 2 claim to have taken a descriptive approach to the Earthly
biosphere, the normative dimensions of the project have been enormous. Biosphere 2 made
a normative statement as to what purpose nature should serve at the turn to the twenty-first
century, and for whom. In this regard the experimenters reversed the relation between the
model and its ‘original,’ turning model into model nature. Perhaps the experiment’s major
provocation consisted in the proposition to perceive the environment not as embedded,
permeating human affairs and humans, but as an enclosed and external object of human
management. Thus, it is not without irony that Biosphere 1 ultimately had to fill in as a
reserve for Biosphere 2. The act of enclosing and detaining nature in an exceptional space
made the ‘natural state’ reappear – a state of nature the biospherians believed to have
harnessed and mastered.
52 S. Höhler
‘The real point that resonates with me about Biosphere 2,’ editor Mitsch contemplated,
‘is the sheer magnitude of what it costs in money, material, and energy to create enclosed
healthy ecosystems, not a trivial point if we are some day interested in habitation in
space.’91 The biome structure of Biosphere 2 offered a broad field of research and insights
into the works of nature and it turned out a wealth of peer-reviewed results.92 Nevertheless,
in 1999 scholars of ecology, among them the pioneering ecosystems scientist Howard
Odum, would admit that the ‘experiment thus far has shown the difficulty in recreating the
viability of our planet, Biosphere 1. Scale and an over-packed inventory of the familiar
plants and animals that we know, may not be enough or may require a longer time to more
resemble planet Earth.’93
Yet Biosphere 2 embodied widely shared cultural motifs of the period. In 1982, when
the Biosphere 2 project was gaining momentum, a Spaceship Earth was inaugurated in
Florida’s Walt Disney World. The spherical structure followed Buckminster Fuller’s geode-
sic dome design, and its 18-floor interior was furnished with a geosphere of the Earth, built
to transport visitors across the farthest reaches of time and space. The view from the outside
was that of a shiny silver spaceship of more than 50 meters in height and resting on a tripod
as if ready for take-off. Until today, Spaceship Earth forms a central part of the theme park
EPCOT, the acronym for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.94 Aspirations
of humans leaving the Earth in artificial biospheres did not subside. In the summer of 2006
the renowned British physicist Stephen Hawking posted an entry in a Yahoo! Internet forum
that illustrates this position. Hawking asked ‘How can the human race survive the next
hundred years? In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can
the human race sustain another 100 years?’95 Addressing the future of mankind facing
viruses, terror, and war, along with resource exploitation and global climate change,
Hawking then answered his own question by suggesting that the survival of humankind
could in the long run be secured only by humans swarming out into space and colonizing
other planets. He proposed that by manipulating their genetic material humans could be bio-
engineered to make them capable of tolerating environmental conditions on other planets.
A new species adapted to life elsewhere in the galaxy – homo spaciens96 – could be created.
Second natures, even those that have proven dysfunctional, tend to set new standards to
their firsts. Both Hawking’s analysis and his visions of human survival rely on principles of
life support that were elaborated in space sciences, systems ecology, and biosphere technol-
ogy. Devised to sustain life where life had previously been considered impossible, these
principles came to define the very meaning of the Earthly biosphere. In the ecosciences of
today, a life support system is defined broadly as ‘any natural or human-engineered
(constructed or made) system that furthers the life of the biosphere in a sustainable fashion.’97
Notes
1. Silent Running, USA, Universal 1972, directed by Douglas Trumbull, starring Bruce Dern in the
role of Freeman Lowell.
2. Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth, xvii–xviii; Ward, Spaceship Earth.
3. Boulding, ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth’; Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual
for Spaceship Earth; Höhler and Luks, Beam us up, Boulding!; Anker, ‘Buckminster Fuller as
Captain of Spaceship Earth.’
4. Allen, Parrish, and Nelson, ‘The Institute of Ecotechnics,’ 205, 209, 207.
5. The 1960s are considered the ‘time of awakening’ of the environmental movement, while the year
1970 is regarded as the beginning of the ‘Environmental Era’ in the Western world. Jamison
speaks of the ‘age of ecological innocence’ coming to an abrupt end with the oil price shock in
1973–1974; Jamison, Making of Green Knowledge, 87.
6. On the close relations of ecology and space flight to improve the architecture and design of inte-
rior spaces see Anker, ‘Ecological Colonization of Space’; Anker, ‘Closed World of Ecological
Architecture.’ On Biosphere 2 see Haberl, Weisz, and Winiwarter, ‘Kontrolle und Kolonisierung
in der zweiten Biosphäre.’
7. Among the growing body of literature on technology recreating nature see Cronon, Uncommon
Ground; Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women; Hughes, Human-Built World; Merchant,
Reinventing Eden; Price, Flight Maps.
8. Hutchinson, ‘Biosphere.’
9. Ibid., 3.
10. Ibid.
11. Sueß, Entstehung der Alpen, 159.
12. Sueß, Antlitz der Erde, vol. 3, 739.
13. Ibid. On the term ‘biosphere’ see also Grinevald, ‘Sketch for a History.’
14. Vernadsky, Biosphere. The editors of the volume attribute the trifling reception and spreading of
Vernadsky’s work until the 1980s to the Iron Curtain, the trans-European barrier of the Cold War.
The pre-war time of the 1930s and 1940s prevented the immediate translation into English. A
French translation, prepared in 1929, became the master copy for the first abridged English trans-
lation in 1986 done in the course of the Biosphere 2 project. Ibid., 15–17. Vernadsky visited Sueß
in 1910. See Levit, Biogeochemistry, Biosphere, Noosphere.
15. Vernadsky, Biosphere, 15.
16. Ibid., 91. Compare Samson and Pitt, The Biosphere and the Noosphere Reader, 23, for the differ-
ent translations of Sueß’ original phrase with ‘self-contained’ or ‘self-maintained.’
17. Hutchinson, ‘Biosphere,’ 5, 8.
18. Ibid., 7, 11.
19. Lovelock, ‘Gaia Hypothesis,’ 16.
20. The Biosphere, vii–viii.
21. See Sachs, ‘Natur als System’; Hagen, An Entangled Bank; Elichirigoity, Planet Management.
22. Bowker, ‘How to be Universal,’ 108; Edwards, ‘The World in a Machine,’ 242.
23. Use and Conservation of the Biosphere, 251–7.
24. Ibid., 191–235; concerning the research recommendations see 209ff. Recommendation 1 reads:
‘International Research Programme on Man and the Biosphere,’ 209–211; see also Dasmann,
Planet in Peril?, chap. 7 ‘An International Programme,’ 127–32, quote 127.
25. Biosphere reserves reflected the simultaneous emergence of national environmental movements
all over the world as well as a rising global environmental movement that was mirrored in institutions
like the WWF and the UNEP that took up work in 1972, and also in the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that was founded in 1948 as the world’s first global environmental
organization. Hays, ‘From Conservation to Environment’; Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology.
26. Ward and Dubos, Only One Earth.
27. Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, 46.
28. Ibid., 52.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., 54.
31. Boulding, ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,’ 3, 4, 9.
32. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ 27.
33. Barthes, ‘The Nautilus and the Drunken Boat.’
34. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 251 ff. (translations are mine).
35. Ibid.
36. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces,’ 27.
37. Frederick Jackson Turner had proposed his ‘frontier thesis’ in the year 1893, asserting that the
center of American history was actually to be found at its edges. Turner, The Frontier in
American History. On the closing world frontier see Osborn, Limits of the Earth, 78. On the
relation of the American space program and the experience of frontier exceptionalism and
expansionism see for instance Logsdon, Decision to Go to the Moon, Introduction: ‘A Great
New American Enterprise,’ 1–7.
38. Boulding, ‘Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,’ 9.
39. Polunin, ‘Our Use of “Biosphere,”’ 198, emphasis in the original. Compare Siebert, ‘Nature as a
Life Support System.’
40. Monod, Chance and Necessity.
41. Eigen, Stufen zum Leben, 65 (translation is mine).
54 S. Höhler
42. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 260–1.

43. Architect Phil Hawes as quoted by Allen, Biosphere 2, 16.
44. Kuhns, The Post-Industrial Prophets, chap. 10 ‘Leapfrogging the Twentieth Century: R.
Buckminster Fuller,’ 220–46, quote 222. In a comment written in 1980 Boulding referred to
the colonization of space as a vision closely connected to the metaphor of the spaceship;
Boulding, ‘Spaceship Earth Revisited.’
45. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 254.
46. Bernal, The World, The Flesh and The Devil, 23.
47. For a critique of the ‘engineering approach to the age of biology’ and ‘creating a second nature
in our image’ see Rifkin, Algeny, 252; for an affirmative view see Sagan, Biospheres, 195. On
culture becoming ‘a veritable “second nature”’ at the moment ‘the modernization process is
complete and nature is gone for good’, see Jameson, Postmodernism, ix.
48. Gentry and Liptak, The Glass Ark, 82.
49. Allen, Biosphere 2, 1, 59.
50. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 1, 59.
51. Allen, Biosphere 2, 147.
52. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 40.

53. Ibid., 52.
54. Building Biosphere 2 was estimated to cost US$30 million. The Texan oil millionaire Edward
Perry Bass owned about 90% of Decisions Investment. See Allen, Biosphere 2, 2, 18.
55. For more information on the key people of Biosphere 2 see the Biosphere 2 website at http://
www.biospheres.com (last accessed on 20 February 2010); the site also offers a view into extracts
from Allen’s most recent book: Me and the Biospheres.
56. Allen, Biosphere 2, 7–8.
57. Kelly, ‘Biosphere 2 at One,’ 105; Kelly, ‘Biosphere II.’ The Biosphere 2 managers supported this
favorable impact by using their own outlet, Synergetic Press in Arizona. For contemporary news-
paper coverage of Biosphere 2 see Luke, ‘Environmental Emulations.’ The scandalizing and
taunting treatment of the project only began with the first long-term closure experiment in 1991,
picking up and commenting on internal controversies among the organizers and the crew.
58. On spaceframe design, the specially designed transparent panes, sealing, pressure equilibration,
and cooling see Allen, Biosphere 2, chap. 5, ‘Technics,’ 59–68.
59. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 21; Alling and Nelson, Life Under Glass.
60. Allen, Biosphere 2, 95–6 on ‘Microcity,’ ‘Micropolis,’ and ‘Habitat.’ On ‘intensive agriculture,’
see chap. 6, ‘The Farm,’ 73–87.
61. Ibid., 69–70.
62. Allen and Nelson, ‘Biospherics and Biosphere 2, Mission One.’ Mission 2 started in March 1994
and was terminated after 6 months.
64. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 55.
66. Ibid., 33, emphasis in the original.
67. Whitney Matthews from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in 1961. See Matthews,
‘Miniaturization for Space Travel.’
68. Die Kolonisierung des Weltraums, 111 (translation is mine).
69. Ibid.
70. Gentry and Liptak, Glass Ark.
72. Ibid., chap. 3, ‘Biospherics,’ 33; chap. 5, ‘Technics,’ 60, paragraph on ‘Ecotechnics,’ 71.
73. Ibid., chap. 9, ‘Cybernetics,’ 115; Zabel et al., ‘Construction and Engineering.’
75. Ibid., 35.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 127.
78. Latour, Politics of Nature.
79. Luke, ‘Environmental Emulations,’ 101, 109. See also Luke, ‘Biospheres and Technospheres.’ In
a similar vein: Hayles, ‘Simulated Nature and Natural Simulations.’
80. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13 ff.
81. Giorgio Agamben brought forth the view that sovereign power over life closely associates with
the idea of the sacred or ‘bare life.’ Agamben, State of Exception; Agamben, Homo Sacer. For a
recent argument ‘against ecological sovereignty’ on the global scale of environmental politics see
Smith, ‘Against Ecological Sovereignty.’ Smith maintains that the declaration of a state of global
ecological emergency following a modernized Gaian reasoning would end in suppressing politi-
cal liberties ‘in the name of survival’ rather than encourage ecological politics. Quite on the
contrary, Smith argues, the recognition of ecological crisis would go along with impositions of
emergency measures and options for technological and military fixes (110).
82. Luke, ‘Environmentality as Green Governmentality.’
83. Poynter, The Human Experiment. Hers is a telling account of foibles and conflicts among the
group. See particularly chap. 12, ‘Cabin Fever,’ 167 ff.; chap. 18, ‘Dysfunctional Family,’ 261 ff.
84. Baudrillard, ‘Überleben und Unsterblichkeit,’ 338; Baudrillard, ‘Maleficient Ecology.’
85. Gentry and Liptak, Glass Ark, back cover: ‘Pollution, acid rain, global warming – these are prob-
lems caused by people that must be solved by people.’ The authors claim that Biosphere 2 was
marshaled to solve these problems.
86. See Haberl, Weisz, and Winiwarter, ‘Kontrolle und Kolonisierung in der zweiten Biosphäre,’
247 f. on the additional work that the species losses caused the crew. Among the problems the
authors also list temperature regulation, maintenance of the water cycle, and atmospheric compo-
sition. They refer to the German edition of Kelly, Out of Control, and to a one-page note of
correspondence by Eugene Odum in Nature, in which Odum comments on the ‘extremely high
cost of providing nature’s free life support services with the use of non-renewable fossil fuels’ as
well as on the monetary costs of the project in general. Odum, ‘Cost of Living in Domed Cities.’
The monthly electricity bills the crewmembers would have to face if they had to pay for utilities
at the US residential rates would be more than US$150,000. ‘At anywhere near this cost, very
few of the billions of people on Earth could afford to live in domed cities,’ Odum concludes.
Biosphere 2 was placed under the management of Columbia University. See Marino and Odum,
‘Biosphere 2.’
87. Warshall, ‘Lessons from Biosphere 2,’ 27.
88. Mitsch, ‘Preface: Biosphere 2,’ 1. See also Kelly, Out of Control, chap. 9, ‘Pop Goes the
Biosphere,’ 150–65.
89. Mitsch, ‘Preface: Biosphere 2,’ 1. The actual costs of Biosphere are as contended as everything
else about the project. Poynter, The Human Experiment, 5, speaks of US$250 million; the New
Scientist mentions US$150 million; see Lewin, ‘Living in a Bubble’; Veggeberg, ‘Escape from
Biosphere 2.’
90. Alling and Nelson, Life Under Glass, 233. Until the present day Nelson and Allen are convinced
that the experiment was a success (personal communication in 2007).
91. Mitsch, ‘Preface: Biosphere 2,’ 1.
92. Allen, Nelson, and Alling, ‘The Legacy of Biosphere 2.’ Biospherians Poynter and Taber
MacCallum filed US Patent 5865141 for ‘Stable and reproducible sealed complex ecosystems’ in
1996, claiming an ‘apparatus and method for establishing a sealed ecological system that is self-
sustaining, remains in dynamic equilibrium over successive generations of organisms.’
93. Marino and Odum, ‘Biosphere 2,’ 13.
94. ‘Spaceship Earth: Attraction at Epcot Theme Park.’ Establishing an experimental spaceship
community like EPCOT harmonized well with the goals of NASA’s space program in the 1980s
during the Reagan administration, that projected a permanent US Mars station to be in place by
the year 2030, nuclear-powered and complete with greenhouses, living modules, and working
spaces. During the 1990s, Robert Zubrin, a former astronautical engineer, authored several
science fiction novels and a range of popular books on ‘terraforming’ Mars for human settlement
and on testing this Earth-shaping practice in remote regions on Earth. In his 1996 book The Case
for Mars, Zubrin included a chapter titled ‘The Significance of the Martian Frontier’ in an obvious
recollection of Frederick Jackson Turner’s American Frontier thesis.
95. Hawking, ‘How can the human race survive the next hundred years?’
96. Sahm et al., Homo spaciens; Sandvoss, Vom homo sapiens zum homo spaciens.
97. ‘Definition of Life Support Systems in the Context of the EOLSS.’
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The environment as a life support system: the case of Biosphere 2

Environmental enclosures: refashioning nature in space

ISSN 0734-1512 print/ISSN 1477-2620 online

biospheric container for understanding and, ultimately, operating ecosystem processes on

From sphere of life to global ecosystem: the biosphere

‘Biosphere Conference’ in the UNESCO Headquarters in September 1968 in Paris. This

The significance of endospheres in Western history

Life support on Earth and in space

Making an enclosure: Biosphere 2

The glass ark

The politics of nature reserves

to be an exosphere. The only environment to live in turned out to be outside.

Conclusion: life support and biospherics past 1990

42. Sloterdijk, Sphären, vol. 2, 260–1.

52. Allen and Nelson, Space Biospheres, 40.

Bantam Books, 1990.

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