Getting Back to Earth

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

For two years the Biospherians held their silence. Locked inside a palatial 3.15-acre glass-and-steel structure outside Oracle, Arizona -- but connected to the outside world by telephone, television, computer and fax -- they heard the reports hinting at scandals and cult connections. They read the accusations of scientific fakery. They watched the parade of embarrassing -- and sometimes inaccurate -- disclosures: the "hidden" food stash, the duffel bag of covert supplies, the fresh oxygen pumped in from outside. But through it all, almost nothing was heard from the four men and four women living within the $150 million prototype space colony called Biosphere 2.

Until now. Having completed their sojourn inside the largest self-sustaining ecosystem ever built -- and having set a world record for time spent in a sealed environment -- the Biospherians were more than ready last Sunday to come back to planet earth, or, as they call it, Biosphere 1. Just before their release, they finally began to speak out. For observers outside (including 600 tourists a day who spent as much as $12.95 to peer through the glass), it is as if laboratory animals suddenly started to describe life inside the maze.

What did they talk about first? Food. From interviews conducted during the last week inside, it is clear that the Biospherians (who lost, on average, 13.5% of their weight) became obsessed with food -- with growing it, gathering it, preparing it, consuming it. One of them, Sally Silverstone, has published a cookbook called, appropriately, Eating In. The plan was that the Biospherians would grow their own abundant supplies of fruit and vegetables. But their garden was designed by the crew's doctor, Roy Walford, author of a book (The 120-Year Diet) that advocates longevity through an extremely low- calorie diet. As a result, they were often hungry -- a situation that seems to have put everyone but Walford on edge. Tempers flared when the chili sauce got too hot. Crockery got thrown the day peanut rations were announced. A crew member who cooked a distasteful green sauce once too often was warned that the next time it was served he would wear it.

What are the Biospherians not talking about? Sex. The crew deflect questions about what went on in their private quarters after dark, although a source close to them confides that there were romances before they went in. The crew often laugh about what outsiders must think of these eight unmarried folks living together under one roof, however large. (In one inside joke, As the World Turns becomes As the Biosphere Recycles.) But it is also apparent that interpersonal relations were tricky enough without unnecessary complications. "I can't say we were all angels in there," confesses co-founder Mark Nelson. "It has been a challenge to live with a small group. You work with people whether you are on speaking terms with them that particular day or not."

There was plenty to get upset about. Two years of unusually cloudy weather cast a pall over the entire operation. The hummingbirds died, and so did the finches. The bees failed to pollinate the squash, and mites feasted on the beans and white potatoes. One crew member, Jane Poynter, lost a fingertip in a thresher accident. (She was whisked out for emergency treatment and then returned.) The rest came down with assorted complaints: diarrhea, back pain, eye and urinary-tract infections and a cold that made the rounds until there was no one left to catch it.

The crew members were chronically overworked and, until the oxygen supply was replenished after 16 months, had less and less energy to work with. To liven up the drudgery, they used any excuse to celebrate: a beach party near the ocean habitat, a picnic on a blanket in the savanna, a dress-up party in clothes suddenly two sizes too big.

But what bothered the Biospherians most was their bad press. After the first wave of glowing articles, reporters zeroed in, sometimes unfairly, on the project's New Age roots (its "guru" was John Allen, an eccentric engineer who used to go by the name Johnny Dolphin), its commercialism (it was financed by Texas billionaire Edward Bass in part to develop marketable ecotechnology) and its scientific flaws (an advisory panel issued a report criticizing the project's scientific methods and later resigned). Ironically, some of the same researchers who ridiculed Biosphere 2 are now making the pilgrimage to Arizona to see why so much oxygen disappeared (apparently some of it was consumed by microbes in the soil and some combined with limestone in the concrete). Jack Corliss, a former NASA scientist who was hired as research director last March, may be forgiven if he sounds a bit touchy. "There are two kinds of scientists," he says. "Those who see the power of Biosphere 2 and those who don't." In five months, eight more adventurers who see the power will pass through the air locks. The period of their confinement has been mercifully cut from two years to one.

With reporting by Edwin M. Reingold/Oracle