Bubbles within a Great Bubble

It reads like a modern parable, even though all the details come from newspaper archives.  In September of 1991, eight men and women, outfitted in blue jumpsuits, made an appearance before an excited press.  The small team was about to embark upon an experiment -- not going into space, but entering a human-made ecosystem called Biosphere 2.  Sunlight would enter the glass windows of the 3-acre complex of domes and pyramids.  But other than that solar intervention, Biosphere 2 was designed to grow its own food, create its own oxygen naturally, and filter its wastewater through the soil for purification.  A New York Times headline described it as a "Man-Made World."  An ABC news program held out the hope that the project might "save the world" -- because after all, Biosphere 2 would be sealing out the environmentally damaged, polluted world that the Earth had become.  The team in jumpsuits entered the Biosphere, and the airlock was sealed.

Any sci-fi writers worth their salt would know what should happen next if this were to be made into a Hollywood movie:  Competitiveness, jealousies, and sexual attractions would emerge among members of the team.  One member would turn into a Captain Bligh, fomenting a mutiny among the crew, who had been wanting the bountiful Biosphere to be an enchanted island of Tahiti.

As it turned out, the real Biosphere 2 soon had problems of a more ecological nature.  Even though its sealed world had included a miniature rainforest, coral reefs, and numerous species of animals, growing crops was difficult.  The team had to break into an emergency 3-month food supply they had kept a secret.  Despite that surreptitiousness, reporters discovered that deliveries were being made to the Biosphere twice a month -- seeds, vitamins, and mousetraps.  Mice were not the only pest needing controlling.  There were also cockroaches (no surprise), and nematode worms and mites attacking the crops.  Moreover, the honeybees and hummingbirds that were to have pollinated the crops had died.

Of more immediate danger, a surge of bacteria was reducing the oxygen level to such a point that it was as if the team were living at an altitude of 14,000 feet.  A truckload of liquid oxygen had to be called in and sprayed into the Biosphere.

As the ecologist Rebecca Stewart summarized it, “The Biosphere 2 experiment failed to generate sufficient breathable air, drinkable water and adequate food for just eight humans, despite an expenditure of $200 million.”  The bubble had burst.  Reflecting upon our scientific knowledge, the scientists Joel Cohen and David Tilman wrote:

“No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with
 the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems produce for free.”

A rare look at a rare planet

A century earlier, it was the idea of a much more immense "bubble" that had initially prompted the word "biosphere."  In the 1800's, scientists had coined that word to refer to the network of integrated living species, from microscopic to large, that surround the Earth.  In 1926, the Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky published a book about this living "skin" that surrounds our planet. The living beings in the biosphere not only draw upon the chemical elements of the Earth and air;  they also re-create the oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide.

We must marvel at what this Earth-Bubble, our home, can do.  But we might also draw upon the failed bubble-world of Biosphere 2 to ask if there isn't an intangible "bubble' we sometimes live in.  When we live in our high-tech human-made world without an awareness of how it is being sustained by the systems of Nature, are we not living in a mental bubble?  The danger of such a mental bubble is why our faith-traditions have cultivated prayers of gratefulness to use upon awakening, before eating, and when going to sleep, awaiting the sun's next rising.

~ ~ ~

(Do you have a way of remembering Nature in an appreciative way?  What is it?)

(Quotations and details are taken from "The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments"
 by Carl Zimmer, The New York Times, March 29, 2019.)
(The picture of Biosphere 2 and of the Earth are used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licenses.
 The picture of the nomad is in the public domain because of its age.)