The Anthropocene. Christian Schwägerl

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      In the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, other scientists were undertaking similar, strictly confidential research. In 1972 three scientists managed to survive for half a year in BIOS-3, an artificial ecosystem, without external supplies of water and oxygen. By the end of the 1980s, Russian scientists succeeded in producing three quarters of the food they needed, in “closed” systems. Since a diet consisting entirely of algae made them feel bad tempered, they started growing cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, peas and other container plants, and even created a new type of soil that was dubbed “soil-similar substrate.”

In time, the Russians became more daring. When the political climate in the Soviet Union began to change in the mid-1980s, they even started doing tests to measure environmental problems that, by definition, did not exist in a “socialist” society, even though everyday Soviet life was full of them. The scientists pumped pollutants into containers to investigate the effects. “The ability to buffer these kinds of substances and transform them is limited,” stated a terse summary in one report. What was meant by this was clear: ecosystems can handle stress for a long time but under continual stress they will eventually collapse.¹⁸

While the Russian experiments were being carried out in secrecy, a group of scientists and idealists in the USA, meanwhile, were working on a significantly more complicated artificial ecosystem. In 1991, with great fanfare, Biosphere 2 was inaugurated by John P. Allen, a maverick with a background in mining and metallurgy, who had a strong personal vision that Biosphere 1, planet Earth, was in big trouble. Allen once held the rights to a coal seam worth a fortune, but according to him, the expected course of his life completely changed after a transformative experience with the psychotropic plant peyote which made him directly aware of the biosphere.¹⁹ Consequently, in the late 1980s, he formed an unlikely alliance between ecologically-minded friends and associates, American scientists and the Texan venture capitalist Edward Bass, in order to build the largest self-contained ecosystem in the world.

Between 1991 and 1994, two groups of “biospherians” lived in an enormous, sealed glass, cathedral-like structure, in the Arizona desert, which had taken four years to build. The first crew of eight spent two years inside. Biosphere 2 was a manifestation of research, environmental education and media hype. Like Yevgeny Shepelev, both John Allen and Edward Bass were interested in future settlements in space. Biosphere 2 may have looked like a study of how humans can live in an artificial environment but it turned out to be the complete opposite.²⁰

      The Biosphere 2 project generated a great deal of interest worldwide. For an admission fee, visitors were even allowed into Biosphere 2, itself. The grandiose white structure housed a man-made rainforest, an ocean, a coral reef, a mangrove swamp, a desert and a savannah, all in miniature forms. Two and a half thousand square meters of agricultural land were set aside to produce food for the biospherians and a diverse selection of animals, ranging from bees for pollination to pygmy goats, were also included.

The first crew of eight biospherians moved into the enormous complex in 1991. Their aim was to live in the synthetic ecosystem for at least two years or for as long as possible, researching and observing how conditions for life changed over time. Serious problems arose, early on. The concentration of oxygen in the air dropped continuously during the first year and a half, from nearly 21 percent atmosphere, as in Biosphere 1, to 14.5 percent, similar to mountain air at four thousand meters above sea level. It took a while to ascertain the cause: Bacteria in the virgin soil, was consuming oxygen in the air while at the same time chemically active concrete walls were absorbing oxygen and producing calcium carbonate. Fatigue set in among the biospherians, so measured amounts of liquid oxygen were pumped in. The food supply was erratic, too. Pollinating insects died off while ants and cockroaches thrived. The harvest produced a smaller yield than expected, partly because of two consecutive years of the El Niño weather phenomenon, so reserve food stocks had to be used. The first mission ended after the prescribed two years setting world records (by far) for duration in enclosed human life support experiments. A second crew entered Biosphere 2 in March 1994 but the mission was terminated prematurely as a result of disputes between Allen and his design/management team, with his partner, Ed Bass and his team. After the partnership dissolved, the goals of the project shifted away from human enclosure experiments.²¹

While many in the media suggested it was a failure, Biosphere 2 had made an incredible contribution, not least with the many research and scientific papers it has produced and indeed is still producing.²² It is because of the difficulties the project encountered that it became even more significant.

      Each problem with living in an artificial ecosystem symbolizes the present situation of humanity. The scores of deriders who made fun of the bionauts in Russia and the biospherians in the Arizona desert must have forgotten how much harm people in the real world cause to the ozone layer, or to precious animal species that could become extinct before our very eyes. People forget what causes a shortage of food supplies for nearly a billion people or how we risk making the earth’s climate very uncomfortable for ourselves.

      The Russian and American projects yielded an essential insight: the earth is constantly providing us with a multitude of services and processes that have evolved over the course of hundreds of millions of years, thanks to the work of early earth “revolutionaries.” If you want to re-create these services in the form of huge artificial ecosystems that can sustain hundreds of millions of people, the costs will clearly rocket into infinity. Even 150 million dollars was not sufficient for the Arizona experiment to sustain eight people in a 1.2–hectare artificial ecosystem. These biospheric projects therefore showed that nature sustains human civilization and the world economy.

      Today, the University of Arizona owns and directs research at the Biosphere 2 facility. It would be good if there or elsewhere, bionauts or biospherians would again move inside enclosed systems to determine if humans can survive in strictly confined spaces.

It is telling how much people appreciate the oxygen created by cyanobacteria or simple plants or fruits when they are cut off from nature. In November 2013, Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata tweeted an image from the International Space Station. It showed a tomato in a state of weightlessness, while the earth could be seen in the background. “One fresh tomato for dinner makes us happy in space. It came up with us on Soyuz TMA-11M, two weeks ago,” read his text about the red marvel, seemingly appearing in front of the Blue Marble.²³

      In the Anthropocene, the earth itself becomes one giant biospheric experiment, but without any emergency exits or windows to let in additional fresh air. So, when you take your next walk outside, look closely, not only at the results of what wind, fire and water have carved out and what other organisms have left behind, but also examine the results of thousands of years of human activity. These cumulative actions stack up to look like a new geological epoch that puts us on a par with the cyanobacteria and other earth-transforming species: Welcome to “The Club of Revolutionaries.”