How green is my garden?

Thursday, March 17, 2011

TUCSON, AZ — Green was the colour of the day today! Lots of trailers in the RV resort here are festooned with shamrock lights, banners and sparkly green garlands in honour of St. Patrick’s Day. The attendant at the park gates had a green plastic bowler hat and shamrock tie on as we drove past, and I caught a few bars of “Danny Boy” drifting out the window of his guard hut!

Val and I (suitably attired in green tops) headed for Biosphere2 today, north of Tucson, to tour the facility that had been the sealed-off home of eight scientists for a two-year experiment in self-contained living back in 1991.

The original premise of the experiment was to see if humankind could create a viable mini-world so that, when Planet Earth became too polluted to inhabit, the race could survive on Mars instead. The scientist-developers managed to convince a Texan oil magnate to fund the construction and operation of the three-acre facility to the tune of millions of dollars.

The Biosphere would be sealed off from the earth by a stainless steel platform and from the sky by a series of triangular laminated glass plates. Inside, biomes of a tropical rainforest, a desert and an ocean environment were established and humidity, air pressure and temperature were carefully regulated. The four men and four women residents would be expected to grow their own food, and take turns preparing meals for the group every day.

Our tour guide took us through the various environments, and we were enveloped in warm humid air in the rainforest first, where vines and ferns flourished and miniature waterfalls trickled down. I could actually feel my skin tingle as we passed into the desert environment, with its dry air sucking the moisture out of my pores!

A mini-ocean, complete with fish and coral, had its own wave producer so the coral could survive. We were told that a couple of species of birds were allowed in, as well as bees and cockroaches, worms and snails to ensure pollenation of the plants.

We got to see the basement section, where huge diesel-fueled generators provided power to run all the systems in the Biosphere, and enormous tanks gathered water from condensation and re-circulated it for efficient consumption. Two huge dome-shaped buildings were the “lungs” of the structure, allowing the sealed unit to “breathe” when sunlight heated the air and caused it to expand.

The complexity and expense of the facility were impressive, but both of us were left with a sense of malaise. Scientists had tried to play God as they chose various elements to populate their world, but there was no way they could possibly conceive of all the inter-dependencies of living creatures, plants and organisms. For example, they failed to consider the effect of wind on the trunks of trees; without it, the trees’ bark didn’t develop enough resilience, and some of them began to sag. They used glass on the dome that filtered out UV rays, so they had to consume vitamin D to compensate. The bush babies they introduced into the rainforest escaped into other areas and tampered with some of the equipment. After they chose Arizona for its high proportion of sunlit days, El Niño caused cloud cover to deprive them of it to the extent that they actually had to break the seal of the Biosphere at one point before they ran out of oxygen, since the plants weren’t producing enough!

Since the two sequential missions, which ended in 1994, Biosphere2 has undergone three changes of management, the most recent being the University of Arizona. Scientific experiments still take place there, but the facility is no longer sealed off, so it’s not functioning the way it was originally intended. We heard that its next life may be as a theme park! It was an interesting, if unsettling visit to a Garden of Eden with a few fatal flaws.