Music of the Biospheres

"...it is in our capacity to be ther brain and the conscience of the biosphere, to be its self-reflective point.""

with John Allen

John Polk Allen was a driving force behind the development of the Biosphere 2 project in the Oracle, Arizona desert. Biosphere 2 is the largest self-sustaining ecosystem ever built, a masterpiece of human engineering that has been praised and condemned by a media that, for the most part, misinterpreted what it was all about. Both confusing it with a controlled scientific experiment or an entertainment spectacle missed the point. Inside the sealed 3. 15 acre biosphere are miniature replicas of all the earth 's environments, designed to function together as a single system.

Biosphere 2 was more than just a reductionistic scientific experiment. It was also bold visionary adventure, like going to the moon. As when the Wright brothers were building the first airplane, the biospherians were basically concerned with getting the thing to fly. Biosphere 2 has been a tremendous success; it broke and set many records. The relevance ofBiosphere 2 lies in the light it sheds an our understanding of the earth 's biosphere and its value as a prototype for permanent life-habitats on suitable locations in space.

John thinks in terms of whole systems, and he is an expert on ecological interrelatedness. Former vice-president of biospheric development for Space Biospheres Ventures, John wrote a classic article on closed life systems, which was published by NASA in Biological Life Support Technologies: Commercial Applications. He participated in the Jirst manned biosphere rest module experiment in September 1988, residing for three clays in the first fully closed ecological system that recycled all its wastes, setting a world record at the time. John is currently the chairman of CyberspheresTM, Inc., a private research and development firm that designs and builds advanced biospheric systems and semiclosed biomic systems.

In addition, he is cofounder and director of Eco Frontiers, Inc., which owns and manages several ecological research projects around the world, and Planetary Coral Reef Foundation, a nonprofit corporation devoted to studying the health and vitality of coral reefs. He has traveled extensively-very extensively--and this has contributed to his multicultural, whole-systems perspective. John has led expeditions studying ecology (particularly the ecology of early civilizations) to Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Ilzbekistan, Tibet, India, Belize, and the Altip Eano. As part of the researchfor Biosphere 2, John traveled in the ship Heraclitus to the Amazon and many other areas around the world to collect biological samples.

John is also an actor poet, film producer; and playwright. He has been a major force in the Theater of All Possibilities acting troupe far many years. He is a true global citizen who seems to he at home everywhere on the planet. He is also an accomplished author with more than two dozen publications to his credit, over half of which are scientific, while the rest comprise poetry, drama, prose, and film. John holds a degree in metallurgical-mining engineering from the Colorado School of Mines, an MBA from the Harvard Business School, from which he graduated with distinction as a Baker Scholar and a certificate in engineering physiology from the University of Michigan.

John is a swashbuckling frontiersman, an eccentric mix of scientist, artist, entrepreneur find adventurer He is warm and charismatic, filled with vision, and often appears larger than life. When he hugs you, he lifts you up off the ground. We interviewed John on April 16, 1994 in the living room of our mutual friend OscarJaniger (interviewed in our previous volume) in Santa Monica, California. Several weeks prior; trouble had been brewing at the biosphere, when its major financial investor Ed Bass, in his attempt to gain control of the biosphere, accused John and his associates of "mismanagement. " Subsequently, Bass took over the experiment. The story of the corporate takeover of Biosphere 2 is the subject of a forthcoming book by Abigail Ailing and myself entitled Storming Eden. Even with all the uncertainty hovering about him at the time of the interview, John was radiantly cheerful and contagiously optimistic.

DJB

David: John, how have your travels around the planet influenced your desire to create a self-contained ecosystem?

John: The unity that is around the planet earth, that is the biosphere, has only very recently been recognized as a self-organizing entity. That was a hypothesis put forward in 1926 by Vladimir Vernadsky. Before that there was a `great nature', a hypothesized `great being', creation of God or a fortuitous collation of atoms which accidentally produced life.

But as soon as you have the idea of the biosphere and you really begin to travel around the planet earth, looking at things from that point of view, you see that the oceans, the winds, the mountain ranges, the deserts, the tropical forests are not occurring at random at all. You see that they are organized, that they have a tremendous resilience and that they're evolutionary.

In science, the question becomes an experiment to test an hypothesis, so the idea of Biosphere 2 was to see whether a system modeled on Biosphere 1, self-organized or not. Many people in the press and many scientists predicted that the ocean in Biosphere 2 would die and that it would all turn to slime. In other words, they fundamentally followed the fortuitous collocation of atoms idea that life just happens on a planet the right distance from the sun. The wording in that kind of science, is that something is merely.

Rebecca So they didn't think you could consciously design a system that wouldn't just collapse into entropy.

John: Well, actually it's modeling a system more than designing it. The thing about Biosphere 2 that very few people got was that what we did was create conditions that emulated the conditions of Biosphere 1: there is something to produce tides, something to produce water flows, pipes taking the place of rivers, things like that. But the live systems were very much modeled on Biosphere 1, that is the earth, although naturally on a highly reduced scale.

For example, the Biosphere 2 ocean is actually portions that came out of certain coral reefs, water from the Pacific and water from the Bahamas. The rainforest is designed by people who spent a lot of time there. The basic way I formulated that for them was to say, let's create the quintessence of the rainforest, so that when you're standing in the middle of it, you feel that you are in the Amazon.

These were not just ordinary people. They spent decades in the Amazon studied it intimately. So that's how these terrestrial biomes went into making Biosphere 2.

Rebecca What culture that you came across in your travels had the greatest influence on you and your ideas?

John: There were a number of them. Ethnology was the first science I studied, so when I traveled around I used the idea of Ruth Benedict and Franz Boaz that there is an arc of human potential and that each culture is a part of that arc. So I didn't go around looking for the specific culture, but rather cultures that had a bigger arc of human potential or a more incisive tranche than usual.

The Berber culture, the Sioux indian culture, Huichols, the Bora of the Amazon, the Polynesian culture, were all examples of this. The Hindu culture is exceedingly interesting because of the division of humans into castes in an old linear breeding and function program.

There is also what I call Globaltech which is the culture of the technicians of the West. It's not officially recognized by anthropology, but I think it's one of the most powerful cultures in the world today with probably about five million members. It includes people who can move from Moscow to Tokyo to Santa Monica to Biosphere 2, and never miss a beat; people who are basically inventing, innovating, maintaining and envisioning the next steps in the global technosphere.

David: Was there a particular culture that you encountered that forced you to reevaluate your entire belief system?

John: Yes. Actually it was a coming together of three cultures in Tangiers. There was the avant garde art culture with William Burroughs and the people around him, and then the Berber culture which is maybe 6,000 years old and has its roots in the ancient magical traditions, and also the imperial culture of the Spanish, French and British empires.

So the combination of the Western imperial culture, the native Berber culture and the Western avant garde forced a personal transformation of all values, not just on a mental and emotional level, but on a physiological and social level as well.

David: Physiological? How do you mean that?

John: Well, because the people from the avant garde were into all sorts of exercises; and then there were all the disciplines and fronts you have to put up to be part of the empire group and then the Berbers have a number of rites, ceremonies and sufi types of sciences.

David: Is this getting into what you refer to as `transvangardia'?

John: Yes. Well, eventually I and some other people evolved the recognition that there is a transvangardia. There's not only an avant garde of the West, there's an avant garde in every culture in the world which has an artistic tradition that is trying to reevaluate it and put it into a radically individual, contemporary way.

That cumulated existentially in our formulating the October Gallery in London in 1978. We called it the October Gallery because October is the time of the gathering of the fruits. We showcased transvangardia artists from places all over: Nigeria, Ghana, Pakistan, Jordan, Venezuela, Jamaica, Morocco, Mongolia.

We presented young artists who were just ready for their first show and also older artists like Gerald Wilde who had for one reason or another crossed the establishment and, after an initial period of fame, had been consigned to the dustbin by the powers that be. At that time, the only place in London that showed artists from a wide swathe of the world was the Commonwealth Institute which was nice but rather bureaucratic and reserved.

David: Tell us about Ecotechnics.

John: Ecotechnics was one of the first things that Mark Nelson and myself and a few others came up with and it was largely inspired by Lewis Mumford who wrote a book called Technics and Civilization. We found that technics is a very powerful way to understand what is happening. Most people divide science and technology, but technics means the world of science and technology. There is no pure physics - physics depends on the technology around it. There is no pure technology - technology depends on science and body and mind.

Mumford saw in history that there was a series of technics: there was a technics based on wind and water, a technics based on coal and steel, a technics in the 1900's based on the alternating currents in alloys, and so on. What he called biotechnics was based on what is called ergonomics today.

We saw that the next step would be an ecotechnics, i.e. an ecology of technics and a technics of ecology. Then we would be looking at the broadest possible scale, that is to say a biospheric scale, because the biggest ecosystem is the biosphere. We formed that as a concept in about 1973 and it was the think-tank that allowed us to put together the ideas for Biosphere 2.

David: How did the Biosphere 2 get inspired then?

John: In Ecotechnics we did two things. It was a non-salaried, non-profit organization and every year we did an ecotour, through central Asia, through Nigeria, through the Amazon - wherever it was interesting to us at the time. We also had a three day conference each year where we got together many outstanding scientists. We'd generally also have one outstanding artist come like William Burroughs and Ornette Coleman. Many of these people became the cadre of scientists that enabled us to build Biosphere 2.

Each speaker would have an hour to talk and there would be an hour or two for discussion so there was a total freedom of speech. There was no press invited so a person wasn't held to anything they said. We had Bucky Fuller, Thor Heyerdhal - many outstanding people. Bucky Fuller helped us design our first dome.

David: So you were doing quite a bit more than just theater and poetry before you got involved in Biosphere 2?

John: The first time I heard the word biosphere was at the Colorado School of Mines. That was a revelation in historical geology. The teacher said, there is a lithosphere of rocks, an atmosphere, a hydrosphere and a biosphere. Wow! I heard it all in one sentence - it was a direct transmission.

Then I carried that idea further because lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere are basically physical and chemical, they did exist with Mars and Venus as well as on Earth. So I figured that the biosphere must be the control level, and later on I found out that Vernadsky had a formal hypothesis to that effect. James Lovelock, who was completely unaware of Vernadsky, came to approximately the same thing with Lynn Margulis forty years later, but there are substantial differences between the Vernadskian geological approach to the biosphere and Lovelock and Margulis' atmospheric and microbial approach.

Rebecca Could you describe some of those differences?

John: Lovelock and Margulis found the medium and the feedback system that made the biosphere operate as a unity, namely the atmosphere and microbes. On the other hand, Vernadsky understood geologic history, the key importance of the necrosphere, or biogenically originated matter, and of the expansive power of the biosphere.

Rebecca Tell us a little bit about the voyages of your ship, the Heraclitus.

John: By 1974, Ecotechnics was launched and our theater was going. Theater is very important because it shows you the evolution of the inner life of man, whereas science deals with the evolution of the outer life of man - adventure is what holds them both together. We supported ourselves by building and designing over two million dollars worth of adobe houses in Santa Fe and other kinds of craftwork including agricultural experiments that led to the Biosphere 2 soil system.

So we designed and built a ship in the estuary at Oakland. The idea behind the ship was that the biosphere was essentially Planet Water and that the reason no one had really understood the biosphere before was that they always went out into the trees. James Lovelock's daisy model was wonderful, but if the daisies disappeared the biosphere wouldn't be affected very much. The ocean at about 70% of the surface of the planet is what drives the biosphere - it can be looked at as its blood.

The ocean also gives you access to the marshes and, if you build the right kind of ship, you can go up rivers and explore the tropical rainforest. So we built a ship that could go up the Amazon, safely explore the coral reefs and sail around the world. We called it the Heraclitus because he was the last philosopher who united the philosophy of the East with the practical approach of the West.

On our first voyage we sailed out of the bay and across the Panama canal, across the Atlantic, the Mediteranean, the Red Sea and to Australia. We set up projects along the way, in France and what eventually became the Vajra hotel, a joint project with Tibetan people in Nepal.

Rebecca What kind of projects were these?

John: In France we were involved in a restoration of an old Louis XIV farm where we did more agricultural experiments. Also, we had most of our conferences there because France was a really free country in the cold war, unlike America, anyone could get a visa to come there, a Russian scientist for example.

Margaret Augustine, who co-created Biosphere 2, was a key person in all of this and she designed the Vajra hotel. It's earthquake proof and very high-tech and it was a hotel for the merging of the East and West and North and South. We had the Tibetan canon in there, the Indian canon and the Western medical and scientific canon. So we had Rinpoches in there studying Western science and Western scientists studying the Tibetan and Hindu sciences. It's still operating today.

Rebecca So you were creating a sort of mandala of cultural experience.

John: Yes. And we thought this was very essential to Biosphere 2. It had to address itself to the planetary. The North-South dyad had to be transcended and the same with the East-West, without either being denied.

David: What would you say were some of the most important things that came out of the two year Biosphere 2 project?

John: Well, it's been over two and a half years actually because we had a six months transition. Basically what we learned is that the biospheric hypothesis is correct - it is a self-organizing system. Under the conditions that we put in, we had an increase of 87 coral colonies. There was someone from the Smithsonian who said something like, it's impossible for the ocean to live, therefore I know it's dead. They didn't even look at it. Newsweek printed these statements as if they were facts.

In fact, the ocean self-organized. We not only showed that the total system self-organized but that various ecosystems that we put in there did. The marsh worked, the ocean worked, the rainforest worked and all as a total system, although it's true that it works quite differently from Biosphere 1. Each biosphere will be unique in many ways, just like humans are.

Another consequence of the hypothesis that there is a class of entities in the universe called biosphere, states that there is an organized entity or being which is higher than Man and of which Man is just a part. For example, the Biosphere 2 carbon monoxide was running at about half of what it does in Biosphere 1, but the nitrous oxide was running higher and the methane was running higher. Things didn't just all go up or all go down. There was a distinct signature in the way that it was organizing its atmosphere. It's metabolism was quicker, the carbon dioxide circulates two thousand times more quickly than out here and also runs higher.

Rebecca And the initial conditions were that of the earth's atmosphere, right? Do you think that after a longer period of time Biosphere 2's atmosphere would have reorganized again?

John: It would have gone through changes in the same way that Biosphere 1 does. At one time Earth had much more carbon dioxide than it has today although everybody gets alarmed if it goes up or down even a tiny bit.

Rebecca So, Biosphere 2 is a way to study those changes occurring in a more intensified and dramatic way.

John: Yes, it's more dramatic. It's what I call a time microscope. In a space microscope you see more space objects, whereas in a time microscope you see more events in a shorter amount of time. Amazingly few people have gotten that. It was the first expedition in time and we even carried an Explorer's Club flag sent in recognition of the expedition.

Each biosphere has a different time, a different metabolic rate, and a different evolutionary history. The biospherians are within, in contrast to the usual expedition where people get into the plane or rocket which takes off somewhere else and leaves the crowd behind. A biosphere opens up and the people inside stay where they are - it's the crowd that leaves.

The biospherians enter a new time machine. Interestingly, the aging tests that Roy Walford used, showed that the rate of aging decreased. How meaningful this is in two and a half years is hard to say, but at any rate it seems that the physiological time began to change for the people inside.

Rebecca Wasn't there a problem with the oxygen levels where more oxygen had to be brought in from the outside?

John: People might call it a problem, but in an experiment you expect to find new things. Something came up with the oxygen that we didn't predict, namely because the carbon dioxide was at a higher level of pressure and so more of it went into the concrete. Out here, at a level of 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, if you have concrete in a bridge not very much carbon dioxide goes into it, but the more you have of an element, the more it does whatever it does. So, as the carbon dioxide went up, more of it began to go into the concrete.

Also, carbon began to be oxydized in the soil and what that was doing was pulling oxygen out. We had to put a lot of carbon in the soil because we started out with the approach of successional ecology. We began with about 15 tons of biomass. When we reach a climax it will be about sixty tons, and right now it's probably about thirty tons.

Rebecca Did the oxygen have to be pumped in because it was becoming difficult to breathe inside?

John: We pumped oxygen in at the first sign of difficulty for the humans, that the doctors caught. We ran an experiment with the consent of the biospherians. The scientific community that I consulted with on this said it would be very interesting and important to see what would happen. What is the lowest amount of oxygen that people can healthily live with? They called that `riding the curve down.'

So the biospherians kept us informed on their health and we also closely observed their behavior and measured changes in their blood, because in the experiments you get what's called the heroic mode; everything becomes so important and so useful to humanity that a person might even kill themselves from excess enthusiasm. We also had medical tests and doctors checking blood, etc...All the submarine and space people were very interested in this because the less oxygen you have to put in say, a Mars base, you save immense amounts of money.

This was also especially interesting because as you go up a mountain oxygen drops, but so does everything else, like nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Here, everything else was staying at equal pressure, and only the oxygen was dropping. What we found was that people can go down to about forteen and a half per cent of oxygen and still perform, but they began to become sluggish at around seventeen per cent. So then we set the mission rules after that to be between 19 and 21 per cent.

Many people said that the biospherians experienced difficulty in breathing, but the oxygen could have gone in much earlier had that been true. Three of the Biospherians did use an oxygen sniffer during sleeping hours. It was an experiment. It was also interesting to see what plants would do with an oxygen decrease. We thought it might hurt their growth but we found that it probably increased it slightly.

Rebecca What did you discover are some of the qualities of a naturally occurring environment that were difficult to reproduce in Biosphere 2?

John: The biggest thing you get with increasing scale is more diversity and more what we call levels of trophic change - how many situations of `who eats who'. There's a rough law in ecology that says, it takes ten times the biomass of one level to support the next level. For example, in the ocean the biggest fish we could have was about twelve inches long, whereas of course there are whales in Biosphere 1's ocean. They basically were like Biosphere 1 systems with that exception. During the transition we added species in and thus built up a trophic level, but there will always be some total lesser diversity because of the scale.

Rebecca Were the ratios of the various species roughly equivalent to the ratios in which they exist outside?

John: Roughly. The coral reef was almost exactly in ratio to start with, but again the trophic pyramid would be truncated - it would have a limit; we couldn't support an octopus or a shark for example. Also, in our rainforest the trees could only grow ninety feet tall whereas in the real rainforest they can grow up to 150 feet. So the species that are evolved to be a 100 feet or above, which is a lot of species, aren't able to go in.

On the other hand, the agriculture in Biosphere 2 is more diverse than anything outside in any one system - there's over 140 cultivars in there. Everything else is modeled on existing systems outside, but the agriculture is a synthesis of many different tropical agricultures that had a track record of hundreds of years of sustained reproducibility such as the Polynesian sweet potato.

Rebecca The Biosphere 2 project has had a number of ups and downs since its first inception. Looking back, what, if anything, would you have done differently?

John: Well, firstly I don't think it did have ups and downs. It had media ups and downs, but I don't subscribe to the idea that the media is anywhere near a valid representation of reality. Biosphere 2 was one of the most successful experiments that has ever been done. We set all kinds of world records: it was the first time there has been a 100% recycled closed system, it was the most tightly sealed system that ever was - thirty times tighter than the space shuttle, it was the first time for total water recycling.

It came very close to the biospheric hypothesis. Eight people went in, one person damaged the end of their finger, but all in all everyone's health improved. In fact, it's a very interesting question as to why the media presented the project as problem riddled when it was a straight-ahead accomplishment.

David: As a result of what you learned from the first two year project, what readjustments do you need to make and what new research questions have developed as a result which you will study for future projects?

John: Biosphere 2 represents an air ethic. We had a land ethic that was developed in the 1930's, we had a water ethic with the clean water act, we've never had an air ethic. Biosphere 2 shows the way to do that with total measurement and effect of all the molecules in the air.

Neither the American people, nor any other people, have yet received a readout of what is in the air they breathe. That's only the beginning of an air ethic. Again, the media didn't report anything about this. But many questions have been raised like the differentiation of carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and methane, just to name three. Why did these act differently and in reverse directions to Biosphere 1?

David: How did Margulis and Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis influence the project, and do you see the Biosphere 2 as being something like a baby Gaia?

John: That hypothesis didn't influence Biosphere 2 at all because the Vernadsky hypothesis is not just the forerunner, it's the hypothesis. But Lovelock's and Margulis' work influenced it. Lovelock studied the atmosphere with a device that could measure parts per trillion and showed these fine molecules there. Margulis' work with microbes showed that they would increase their populations and eat these molecules. In other words, a mechanism by which the biosphere could maintain its equilibrium was found by Lovelock and Margulis.

The Gaia hypothesis is a cyclic hypothesis, it's not a geological hypothesis. Vernadsky's ideas are on a much larger scale and he describes biospheres as a cosmic phenomena. Any materially closed system with enough energy going through, will tend to cause a self-organizing system that releases the free energy - that's the thermo-dynamic definition of the biosphere. Lovelock doesn't work with that at all.

In the myth of Sisyphus it shows the man moving the stone up the hill where it falls back down, and then he moves it back up and on and on. The biosphere is a Sisyphus with an urge to move the stone up the hill - that is free energy - and the stone doesn't fall down again. As long as the energy is coming through, it keeps moving it up the hill. The biosphere is increasing its ability to make the migration of matter. It is free energy increasing - it's not cyclic.

David: It's energetically and informationally open and chemically closed, right? Is there a life span to Biosphere 2?

John: We know for sure that it can go for as long as 3.8 billion years!

David: But the earth is chemically open though, meteorites can fall for example.

John: That's a hundred thousand tons a year. It's a minimal amount on a sextillion ton planet.

David: But it could have been one of those meteorites that brought the first life to earth.

John: That is possible. But you're talking about two things here. One is the initial causal stuff which we don't really know about right now, and the second is how it operates once it starts. The biosphere was here before life. The definition of the Vernadskian point of view which I've extended is a thermo-dynamic definition. As long as you have a closed system with energy going through increasing free energy - that's a biosphere.

So the biosphere, in other words - the total system, cuts deep as a self-organizing system. It cuts just as deep as the idea of the human mind as a self-organizing system, versus the idea of the necessity of building the mind - from first grade to second grade and so on. The biosphere can begin self-organizing even before the carbon molecules reach the state of what we now call life. That's not accepted in the West, but the Russians think that and I think there is a lot of evidence for it.

David: Do you have a teleological view of the universe? Do you see life as being an accident or part of a conscious order?

John: Basically, when you look at the history of the universe, first there was energy, then there was matter, then there was life, then there was mind and technics. As soon as you have life, you have purpose or a goal, and when you have purpose you have a distinction that something is better than something else - it's called tropism in biology. So as soon as you react in a way of something being better than something else, you have a value or a teleology.

David: You're saying that this could occur at the point when life begins, but could there be a teleology before life?

John: When you look at it, you could even say that it must have been before because there's certainly more potentiality now than in the past. There are cosmic directions, and directions also imply a teleology. That direction is towards negentropy, more free energy and using self-organizing techniques at an ever-increasing amount as simplified in chaotic mathematics. I also think that the values of beauty, that is wholeness, harmony and radiance, are becoming ever-increasing components of the value system at evolution's edge.

Rebecca Did you consciously develop an aesthetic for Biosphere 2 or was the selection of organisms based soley on their function and usefulness?

John: When we go to Mars, plants and animals will be selected on the basis of whether they're beautiful or not as well as whether they're useful and we did the same in Biosphere 2. Biosphere 2 was what I call the beginning of artistic selection as well as Darwinian selection. There are many plants or animals that could have done the same function, but when given a choice you pick the one that is more beautiful.

David: What have been some of the technological spin-offs that have come out of Biosphere 2?

John: One is the Airtron TM which is an air purifier and another is the Wastron which purifies human or animal waste.

David: What do you think the Biosphere 2 project has done to help improve environmental awareness on the planet?

John: The main thing it's done is to create the technics of closed systems. Take biotechnology and the question of whether a new genetic mutation useful or dangerous? Under normal circumstances it could take billions of dollars and a number of generations to find out the answer. But the material circulation of Biosphere 2 goes 2,000 times faster than it does outside, so you can get answers back a lot quicker and a lot more accurately than from other kinds of tests.

You could also create a polluted biosphere which is an idea that we're working on right now with the Russians. You could take the water and air of Los Angeles on a smoggy day and see how much time and biomass it takes to clean it up. The President of Toyota came by and said, why don't you put a Toyota car in there? And I thought, well, that would be interesting. How much biomass would it take to support a Toyota car?

Rebecca So the potential of using biospheres for increasing environmental understanding is vast. Has the FDA shown any interest in this work?

John: There's been practically a total blockade by the entire American establishment, but it has created interest in Russia, Europe and Japan. Bill Riley and thirty-five administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency came by, said how great it all was, and we never heard from them again. Tom Lovejoy of the Smithsonian, Gerald Soffen with NASA and the bankers now in charge, Bannon and Bowen, have tried to limit the use of Biosphere 2 to reductionist science. These people would like to have a Disneyfied project there which naturally we oppose.

Lovejoy and Soffen, for example, demanded that we use a reductionist approach to it and conducted a ruthless media war against us for using a total systems approach. Biosphere 2 is useful, they say, if we study some specific mechanism in the ocean in there, or what happens, let's say, to the passion vine species in the savannah. By doing this they will generate hundreds of doctorate degrees and violate what its big teaching is - that it's all a total system.

I was just in Japan and the Japanese are terrified because there's going to be a cloud of brown smoke coming from industrialized China using highly leaded coal. Japan has already agreed to give two hundred million dollars to China to help try and put the lid on it. It doesn't matter what Japan's policy is - the smoke from China is going to blow across anyway. After Japan is Alaska, it doesn't stop.

The EPA doesn't recognize that. Tom Lovejoy who is the ecosystem advisor to Bruce Babitt represents the present American policy, an improvement over Bush, which was to save the spotted owl. The Lovejoy approach, which is not flying with the environmental community, was let's save the Oregon woods. It's not the Oregon woods that need saving, it's the whole fucking thing!

The biggest thrust of the Lovejoy bankers' approach is that we should make Biosphere 2 into a reductionist science apparatus and study small detail, but total systems are more data oriented than reductionist science. For example, a reductionist scientist will make a study related to methane in a rice field, but you have to look at the methane together with the nitrous oxide - all of it, and their relations.

Reductionist science is very powerful if you want to send a projectile somewhere or if you want to knock out a specific arms system. However, the side effects, the law of unintended consequences, is never taken into consideration except in total systems. But total systems or holism got a bad name in science, partially because it's not in the interests of the ruling class...

Rebecca To say that we're all connected.(laughter)

John: ...because they've disconnected themselves from that. Also, some people who call themselves holistic aren't scientists and are peddling cheap psychological cures. Total systems science, which has created cybernetics and biospheres and certain physiological approaches, is much more difficult than linear cause and effect science, which is hard enough, and necessary. But it wasn't Biosphere 2's mission.

David: I'd like to know if psychedelics have influenced your work?

John: (pause) The Biosphere 2 couldn't have been built without the help of a number of shamen who are probably the primary ethnobotanists in the world. It's impossible to fully appreciate the Amazon, or anything as complex as a tropical rainforest, without special states of consciousness.

What's used in the Amazon by the shaman are substances such as Banisteriopsis caapi and beta harmaline. These substances put people in a state where they can see eidetically, instead of just sensationally. The forests and this eidetic ability is what makes the shaman an essential partner of all ethno-botanists. The people who painted the Lasceaux caves were eidetic - that is, they must have seen the animal so clearly that they could copy the eidetic image and nobody could paint like that until the Renaissance.

Without this eidetics of sensation and memory, which are successionally linked, you can't, in my opinion, comprehend a complex totality. Eidetics are so unknown to people in the modern world, and without that kind of vision I doubt that total systems will spread very far because people just won't see it.

Our senses are reductionist. If you go by memory then we're remembering only our successive sensations or we're combining them by an active imagination which produces an element of fantasy. But if we've had an eidetic image, then we can have a memory which when we train it, can then reproduce that image, but it's possible to have an eidetic experience without being able to remember it.

Coca chewing is quite legal in South America and is used for endurance. If you're doing major studies in the mountains or in the forest with the Indians, then you need to use it to keep up with them.

I've also participated in shamanic ceremonies because I think that it's important to see the total system in a very literal sense.

David: How do you see biospheres leading to or helping us with extra-planetary migration?

John: Well, of course it won't just be helping, biospheres are essential to planetary migration. If you take up a picnic lunch, when the picnic lunch is eaten, that's it. Anything short of a biosphere, by definition, would be an entropy increaser - therefore, at best, a picnic. Only a biosphere increases the free energy and it's the only way for a long, colonizing settlement to exist. That's why we called our corporation Space Biospheres. The bankers changed it to Decisions Investment.

Rebecca What interest has NASA shown in the project?

John: NASA people who are looking to go to the moon and Mars have shown intense interest and have flocked there, except when they've been forbidden by some of NASA's upper management who are committed to a Landsat approach. This entails a satellite supervision of the planet earth and is a relic of the cold war, part of the military-industrial-academic complex.

There is no program to go to the moon and Mars today so the attitude of the part of NASA carrying out the official mandate has always been anti-Biosphere 2. On the other hand, people from the Russian and Japanese space programs are highly enthusiastic. The Russians actually sent up a closed ecological system in 1989. They want to go to Mars and Japan wants to go to the moon.

Rebecca What do you think are the benefits of space colonization?

John: I think it's one of the greatest adventures of all time. I think adventure is where human beings can find the best route to the answer of the question, who am I? You don't have to justify climbing Mt Everest, you don't have to justify diving deeper into the oceans than anyone before, and you don't have to justify going into space. It's an end in itself because it leads to contemplation. It might also be a practical art, but first and foremost it opens up whole new territories of perspectives.

Rebecca What about the practical applications?

John: The practical applications are quasi-infinite, if not infinite. Number one is efficiency. We don't learn how to use the space out there, but the space of the vehicles we go in. With the population at its present level, efficiency, without a drastic reduction in the standard of living, cannot continue the way it is.

Also, it inspires an attitude of intellectual rigor and honesty - you cannot go into space and lie, because you die. So I think that space is the one hope of continuing the scientific world view of humanity, because the fundamentalist reaction around the planet earth is so great, the forces are so big, and science itself has fallen under the sway of a reductionist approach that everybody can see is ultimately meaningless.

Outdated world views thousands of years old are calling into action masses of human beings committed to violent methods to take over bigger slices of this earth. But space appeals to everybody. Every human being can see the planet earth, the moon, the sun. It takes you out of superstition and fanaticism. That may be its greatest benefit.

David: Why do you think that children are so eager to go into space?

John: I think like William Burroughs said, we're here to go. Kids know that. They haven't been told yet that we're here to stay until we die and get buried next to the trees. The Sufis have a saying, `traveling polishes the rust off the mirror of the mind.'

Rebecca When do you think that fully manned space stations could become a reality?

John: If there were the political and cultural will to do it, then very quickly, maybe in ten years. In fact, we had it at one time with Skylab, but it was deliberately destroyed.

David: I thought the problem with Skylab was that it descended from orbit and eventually fell down to earth.

John: Because they didn't give it a boost to keep it up. By the way, it costs nearly 200 million dollars for the external fuel tank of our shuttles to drop back into the ocean. If you took the Wright brothers' airplane, its first flight could fit inside one of those external tanks. The nose cone alone, with Biosphere 2 techniques, could support two people with the agriculture you could grow there. Anyway, the Russians already have a permanent space station up there - MIR.

Rebecca So you think that one of the main reasons that space stations haven't become reality in America, is that we're still recovering from the cold war hangover?

John: Right. In the cold war they wanted something that went around the earth and stayed there, looking back. The famous phrase they used was that they wanted to see Kruschev pissing off the back porch. They actually got it down so that they could see two soldiers marching in lock step.

It's also extremely expensive and therefore profitable. You have a tremendous military-industrial-academic investment, with millions of people earning a good living, and there's this huge, lumbering momentum from the cold war where thinking is not appreciated. Witness the attitude to Biosphere 2 during this management takeover. The American system at the top is now sot in its ways - it's not just set.

Rebecca So if a space station went up tomorrow, would you go and live on it?

John: Sure. I don't think I'm as qualified as a lot of people (laughter) but if I got a chance I would.

Rebecca Why do you think that humans have this seemingly insatiable urge to create environments that go far beyond basic survival needs. Do you think it has something to do with us trying to prove our independence from `mother' earth?

John: Our ancestors lived in caves for survival reasons but they also decorated them - they created an environment. There's an old story in Indian theater where Barata puts on a play and everyone's ecstatic because it's the first play they've ever seen. Then Shiva comes down and says, that was pretty good but you could have doubled the effect - you could have made it inside a theater, the walls of the theater would have reflected the energy and you could have created a much higher state.

So you have an environment to create space and time and to redo the boundary conditions of existence. Most people don't realize - even after Einstein - that there is no space out there. Space is generated by the relative movements of things. Time is different in every biosphere and in every human relative to their location in space. So if I can create an environment that basically makes a location in time and space, then I become a master of my existence rather than a slave.

It goes very deep in human beings, this artistic and creative urge to make environments. You can say that a spaceship is a moveable cave and that instead of sitting there with cobras and leopards outside, you have freezing cold and solar radiation to combat. We're always vulnerable, but creating these environments is the challenge, the adventure, and you make them artistic, that is, valuable, and you get together with people you like.

Rebecca I can't imagine a man-made environment that would turn me on more than one created by the superhuman forces of nature. Diving in an ocean or walking in the woods - part of the beauty of that experience is that it's not man-made.

John: But you see, you don't dive in the ocean. You have a very manicured beach, you have lifeboats for the undertow - it's a created environment. Even if you found a beach where no human being had ever been before, you're in a certain perceptual philosophical scheme. Wherever it is it's a created environment.

Rebecca I can see that the perception of the environment is created by the human mind, but the environment is affected by humanity, not wholly created by it.

John: Highly affected. You don't have an unaltered environment left on planet earth. You don't walk in a natural rainforest anymore, either. I've walked in parts of several rainforests, and the atmosphere has changed, pharmaceutical collectors have been by and so have surveyors. Nobody walks in an unaltered tropical rainforest. You may imagine you're doing that but by your size and stature you can't do it. Natural and artificial are now interpenetrative.

Rebecca But in purely artistic terms it's still far more beautiful than anything that has been created by humans. There's a paltry amount of art that's inspirational in the world today and inspirational environments are even fewer. Why would space biospheres be any different?

John: We need to deepen our perceptions. Stanislavsky said, we should become fighters for truth and beauty. You're right, humans have historically, been able to create messes out of anything. Heraclitus called the process, turning into the opposite.

Rebecca During a recent trip to Las Vegas I was amazed to what extent they're attempting to create artificial environments there. Considering that Las Vegas is the fastest growing city in America, is perhaps the future of artificial environments not this visionary exploration of ecosystem interaction, but rather a commercial orgy of materialistic fantasy?

John: Well let's get rid of this Aristotlian either/or business. When you say artificial environment, it's a long way from Biosphere 1, to Biosphere 2, to Las Vegas. Las Vegas is already itself an artificial environment - if you put a roof on it, it just becomes a little bit more so. But that's an artificial environment dedicated to wasting energy.

Rebecca Actually, I was using Las Vegas as representational of a mentality - I wasn't suggesting that Las Vegas itself was a biosphere.

As you've mentioned, the technosphere is by and large unoriginal with commercial interests overwhelmingly given priority - isn't it more likely then that space station biospheres (in keeping with the definition you've used) would reflect those values more than those of artistic, visionary adventurers - at least to begin with?

John: Yeah, but it's necessary to keep these issues alive so that we don't just surrender to the "battleship grey" syndrome. The word biosphere has become very popular. I've had people invite me into their living room that they've decorated with some rocks and rugs and they say, "welcome to my biosphere." A biosphere, as I said earlier, is a materially closed system and has energy and information flowing through it that produces free energy. Las Vegas is not an example of this.(laughter)

The technosphere of the planet earth which is the major driving force for these artificial environments is, like Las Vegas, lowering the free energy of the planet, it's lowering the complexity and diversity. It's bad for thinking and feeling. The technosphere needs to be renovated. The word for that is noosphere and it describes a biosphere and a technosphere working together. Biosphere 2 is really Noosphere 1.

David: Wasn't noosphere a term coined by Teilhard de Chardin?

John: It's debatable whether Vernadsky or Teilhard de Chardin coined that term. They were both in Paris at the same time and Chardin was a student of Vernadsky. Chardin gave an idealistic tilt to the word and Vernadsky gave a scientific interpretation.

Rebecca Was the Biosphere, as many have claimed, partly inspired by an apocalyptic vision of the world's future?

John: No, no, a thousand times no. This is the media for you. I said, the Biosphere was a refugia. This word has a technical meaning in biology - it means a place that has a concentration of life diversity. In the Amazon, for example, if there are huge movements in climate etc.. it's a place where the genetic diversity of the rainforest concentrates. Well this became, in certain sensationalist hands, interpreted as me being the head of an apocalyptic cult of survivalist savages protecting billionaires and the Pentagon in the middle of Arizona! You can't live in Biosphere 2 if Biosphere 1 were destroyed - at least on earth. It was a dumb smear job.

David: What were some of the biggest challenges that you and your colleagues had to face during the project?

John: The media.(laughter) I know it seems that the media was all negative, but there was actually a period when this was the greatest scientific project that had ever happened on the planet earth and it was going to save the world and so on. So then we had people going around totally conceited and some never recovered - they actually believed that!

Then there were those who said that it was the worst thing that had ever happened, and some of our people went around thinking that and were feeling all guilt-ridden.(laughter) It's a pattern in the American media - they build you up, then they take you down. The big challenge was how to keep it out of the public eye, and we succeeded in doing that for a long time.

Rebecca But then there was controversy about that, about the fact that you weren't available - the media took it as having something to hide.

John: Right. This added to the media fuel and they said, why didn't anybody know about you from 1969 until 1988? What great secret did you have to conceal? (laughter) But some critics were really beneficial to the project. Hundreds of people came up with excellent critiques.

Rebecca What was it do you think about this project that inspired so much controversy?

John: It was a challenge - to reductionist science, to the idea that space stations should just survey planet earth, and to the school system. Kids love it. Biosphere 2 has the same impact on a kid as seeing the earth from space. Kids from the fourth and fifth grade would insist that they would make their teachers teach them about biospheres.

Rebecca Many people also seemed to have a problem about the fact that you've taken patents out on some of the technology developed for Biosphere 2.

John: Yes, then there's the nihilist left.(laughter) They said we were contaminated because we dealt with business at all, but they didn't offer to finance it! We could have gone to the government, but they were too conservative, so we got one adventurous capitalist and now he's taken it over. But at least he got the idea out - at least humanity now knows that this is possible. And now that the idea is out, it can't be stopped.

David: I was reading in Science magazine that there's an attempt being made by the Biosphere team to accommodate more scientific research by outside scientists.

John: The first two years was like a maiden voyage. On a maiden voyage you need to have people who are highly skilled, who can react quickly to emergencies - not your usual scientific type. Now we have it down to where it's operating more regularly. Like NASA at a certain point needed the `right stuff,' and now they put scientists up into space because they no longer need somebody with a jet pilot reflex - the same with Biosphere 2.

David: How did the biospherians deal with the psycho-social pressure of living in such tight quarters for so long together?

John: A little better than a nuclear family in a suburban house.

David: A little better? How did you measure that?

John: Oh, by the divorce rate, the murder rate...(laughter)

Rebecca Did they live together before they went into the Biosphere 2?

John: We did expeditionary training. We'd had ship voyages and we'd worked in remote stations. We had sophisticated medical measurements and psychoanalysts monitering things. The main thing I looked for every morning was if anyone had a black eye. (laughter)

Most importantly (and NASA did a lot of work on this) we saw if anybody refused to eat with anybody the night before. Nobody ever did, even though they sometimes refused to speak with one another. It's a long held tradition in nomadic tribes that if you eat together you don't kill the other person.

Rebecca What are some of the characteristics do you think that are necessary for somebody to survive well under those conditions?

John: The first condition in a complex experimental situation is that you have to be knowledgeable in many different areas. Also, you have to relate to other people whether you like them or not. If somebody says, "jump" you have to jump if they're in charge of that particular area.

Most of all you must see some value in the task. The biggest secret anybody's ever found to high morale is if people think they are doing something interesting and important. As soon as it starts to bore people or they think it's insignificant then you have to go to a whole moral-building stimulus deal. The present mode in the United States is, I'm okay, you're okay, let's all feel good, and so on. But the older school, which I believe is more correct, is that an army outfit that doesn't gripe is going to be wiped out during their first engagement with enemy forces.

David: Can you tell us about the present situation at the Biosphere 2, the allegations of mis-management and what this will mean for its future?

John: Well, they're totally false. We had developed a whole series of products with budgets and five-year plans, so basically the financial partner just took it all away. I don't know what the consequences will be because that's under negotiations but I would hope that a reasonable solution will be found. I'm often accused of being a sanguine type who perhaps tends to take a cheerier view towards life than the facts would justify.

David: I hope it's contagious, I could use a little bit of that. (laughter) Can you tell us about the plans for an underwater biosphere and future biosphere projects?

John: There's a whole series of biospheres that have an extreme importance to human beings. One is underwater, one will be a desert biosphere, a low atmospheric pressure biosphere at 20,000 feet, a polluted biosphere etc...At what point will the planet earth be wiped out because the large system can no longer adapt to the rate of change? There's a lot of argument about that and some people say, (in a dumb voice) "well, we can keep on doing it because there's going to be a technofix along the line."

Let's suppose you take the smoggiest day in Mexico City or a real disaster like Love Canal and build a biosphere around it to find out if it can recover. You see, it's masked out here because you have the total biosphere working to repair it. It's like if you have a hole in your head. You would recover because the total body would go into a healing trip. But at some point with say 23 holes the whole system would break down.

One hole at a time can be repaired, but in a closed biosphere we could figure out to a degree, allowing for scale factors, what would be the point of no return for the total system. Of course, long before that there should be mass and intelligent action against it, and we're probably very close to that. But who can say? The biosphere has lots of resilience. Do we have what it takes to support ten billion people? This is one of the biggest areas where the Biosphere 2 can help us to find answers.

Rebecca You've been described variously as an entrepreneur, a charlatan, a genius and a megalomaniac. How would you describe yourself?

John: (laughter) A human being behind those four faces and probably a billion others. That's why I'm so interested in theater, because there you get to be all those things. As a playwright or a drama teacher you can accelerate it even more because if you have fifteen people in an acting class or fifteen characters in a play, you can multiple yourself by fifteen.

I entitled my book about Biosphere 2 `The Human Experiment.' Human beings can come and go, but the biosphere will outlive us all. The real experiment is, can human beings become not a parasite but a symbiote. Can human beings learn to do their duty to the biosphere and take it into space? The biosphere is doomed when the sun explodes. To be a human being is the highest state that we know in the universe, except to be a biosphere, which is beyond our capacity. But it is in our capacity to be the brain and the conscience of the biosphere, to be its self-reflective point.

David: Do poetry and theater still play a part in your life?

John: Oh, of course. I have my third book of poems coming out; it’s called Mysteries. In a way I think that mystery is the highest of all values. Beauty attracts, but mystery… lures.

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