On a much more pleasant note, we're very pleased to welcome Jane Poynter author of The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2.0. Or not 2.0, sorry. Do you...louder. You can hear me okay? Is this? Okay. Jane probably has a much louder voice than I do. I have a very soft voice. It's something I was cursed with, I blame my parents. Anyway, please help me welcome Jane. Yeah, I was not born with a soft voice. They didn't call me Foghorn for no reason. Except the train doesn't help very much! Okay, well, good evening everybody. So what I thought I'd do is, first of all, read a little bit from my book, The Human Experiment, and then we'll turn it over to you guys and you can talk about whatever you want to talk about. Within reason. So. Here we go, I hope...nope. Okay, I'm just going to do the old-fashioned way and push the button. Eight o'clock in the morning on September the 26th, 1993. I stood in my prickly blue jumpsuit with the other seven inmates of the bubble, as some of us like to call it. We waited for the radio announcement that it was time to walk through the double-doored air lock. The mission was finally over. I would like to say that I was pondering heady thoughts about the future of mankind, but all I could think of was how much I wished that dear Jane Goodall would shut up! I have the deepest respect for my fellow countrywoman who has dedicated her life to the study and conservation of chimpanzees, taught us that apes use tools and laugh too, and caused us to re-define what it is that makes us human. But as Jane gave the keynote speech leading to our reentry into the world, into what we called Biosphere 1, the minutes ticked by with agonizing slowness. "Come on, people," I muttered to myself, "I signed up for two years...not two years and one minute, or two minutes. Only two years." 8:10: Jane...let us apes out of the cage. 8:15: Finally some screeching over the radio told us to scurry to the heavy metal airlock fashioned out of submarine bulkheads years earlier. It was 8:20. We stepped in, the door swinging closed behind us with a bang and scrape of the closure mechanism and the outer door opened. One by one, we stepped out of our simple life of milking goats and weeding the garden. Of weather reports that included, along with temperature and humidity readings, the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. We left the daily struggle with tedium and discord and stepped into applause, handshakes, a trumpeted fanfare, a sea of cameras, backslaps. For the first time in two years and twenty minutes, I inhaled the view of the bright desert sky with no white bars bisecting it into geometric patterns. The air seemed insipid, thin, not the thick atmosphere redolent with molecules from plants, fungi, animals, the pungent, pleasant, and unmistakable earthy fragrance of Biosphere 2. Since September 26, 1991, the eight of us had risked much to live as if on Mars, farming all our food, recycling our water, our waste, and even the oxygen we breathed in our hermetically sealed, 3.15 acre world. The rainforest, Savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh had been our in vitro test subjects for ecological research. But the glass and steel structure made a pressure cooker. Our human foibles boiling to the surface in what some named "The Human Experiment." Now ten years have soothed the searing anger I felt upon completing our mission. I can at last recall and assess the controversy and all that occurred in and around our New Age Garden of Eden, aided by the many people I had interviewed and the records I have read, with what approximates objectivity. I want to tell this extraordinary adventure tale of a colorful band of mavericks attempting what many said was impossible to set the record straight. To halt the maelstrom of misinformation that still swells around the project today. Even now, when I open boxes containing books and clothing as I had with me during my sojourn, the smell emanating from the cardboard transports me instantly back inside. So now, let's see if we can make this little thing work, I'm going to take a quick tour inside. So up here is the rainforest area inside the biosphere. Over on the right is the pan across the ocean. Down here, this is through the habitat. This is where we had our rooms, and the kitchen, and all of that. And then on the bottom right, this is what keeps the biosphere thermally comfortable. All of these things here are essentially giant air-handling units that are keeping the air at the appropriate temperature and the appropriate humidity. Oxygen Dilemma: It was early April 1992 when I sat at the small oak desk in my bright, comfortable living quarters in Biosphere 2. Mine was like the other seven biospherians': split-level, with a small mezzanine where my queen-sized bed stood. Down a spiral staircase lay my ruffly fifteen by fifteen foot living room where I sat writing in my journal, as I did every evening I could summon enough energy. The room was my refuge. From my desk or bed I could look out the huge window over a half acre farm below. But it was outdoors with a twist. Beyond lay outside-outside. The Arizona desert. The rest of the world. On this evening, a few miles outside my hermetically-sealed home, the Catalina Mountains turned a glorious orange under the setting sun. I heard a soft knock on my door. Taber MacCallum walked in and plopped himself down on the sofa. Taber, a veritable bear of a man only a few months earlier, was now as thin as a rail. Thick brown hair spilled over a prominent brow, under which shone penetrating green eyes. He was attractive. But it was his mind that fascinated me, allured me. The son of an American astrophysicist, he was exceptionally intelligent, thoughtful and kind. Taber was my best friend and my lover. I could read him like an open book. And this evening, he seemed unusually tense. "Hi, what's up," I inquired. There was a long silence. Finally he broke the quiet. "I'm getting some strange readings in the lab." "What, the nitrogen generator giving you problems again," I asked. "No. Looks like we may be losing oxygen." Taber was the crew member in charge of the anayltical and other machinery in the lab. We all trusted him to tell us whether our air was safe to breathe, our food was safe to eat, and our water was safe to drink. We knew from experiments as far back as the days of the test module, a sealed chamber 1/400th the size of Biosphere 2, that our oxygen and carbon dioxide were locked in a permanent dance. The oxygen level went down in proportion to the amount the carbon dioxide level went up, and vice versa. Until this day in April, six months into our voluntary enclosure, Taber had tested the level of oxygen only with the sniffer system, a not terribly accurate system. But this time, Taber also ran the oxygen figures from the chromatograph. He was stunned to find data saying the oxygen level in Biosphere 2 had dropped to 17.4%. He didn't believe it. "No way! The oxygen simply couldn't be that low!" He ran the samples over and over again, and the data were unyielding. He arrived in the dining room for our morning meeting looking exhausted and pale. The seven of us around the gray granite table all knew by now that there was some issue with the oxygen. We braced ourselves to hear how bad it was. "Our oxygen is down below 17.5%," Taber announced in a flat toneless voice. The table erupted with questions. "What?" "How can that be?" "Are you sure?" "How?" "Where did it go?" "I have no idea," Taber said. "I didn't trust the instruments at first myself. But I've run so many samples, the data have to be right." The ramifications were immense, and they weren't lost on anyone that morning. It wasn't that we risked dying. We could walk out of the air lockers any time if our environment became unlivable. But how could we? At the outset, we had declared to the media and the whole world that we would stay inside for two full years. Leaving Biosphere early was out of the question. But if we stayed inside, we would likely be forced to pump in oxygen, which would break our promise that no material would go in or out of the hermetically-sealed enclosure during our two-year mission. The media had been hammering us for months, as for the scientific community. Surely they would both write us off after discovering this latest flaw in the workings of our biosphere. If the design was flawed, perhaps the whole idea that humans could successfully create an artificial biosphere was also flawed. And if that were true, then Ed Bass, the Texan billionaire who'd bankrolled the project, would have wasted his 250 million dollars. A quarter of a billion dollars. Perhaps Ed would stop funding us. And what if the precious self-organizing notion that we all shared whereby the biosphere its overall air, life, water and chemistry would seek its own equilibrium. And importantly, an equilibrium inhabitable by humans. Well, it was self-organizing, all right. Organizing us right out of the picture. We sat in stunned silence. The news was far worse than we had imagined. I felt a rush as the blood drained from my head down to my feet and my toes and fingers tingled with adrenaline. My brain was spinning and I heard a voice screaming at me in my head, "We're screwed! We're screwed!" So. Now for something completely different. This is taking place on one of the crew member's birthday in a rice paddy that we had just harvested. That's Taber on the right, and Ray Wolford, who was our doctor, on the left. It is soft mud. Don't worry, nobody was hurt in the filming of this piece. All righty. Oh no that's not supposed to happen. Hang on. Here we go. It Takes Four Months to Make a Pizza: "Break time!" I yell, the sound echoing across to the others stooping in the rice paddies. Everyone straightened up in unison and began to wade to the edge of the fields, looking like a flock of heron stalking through the rice in search of food. After hosing the dark green mud from our calves and feet, we all trudged out to the plaza for our morning peanuts and mint tea. It was springtime, the sun was out, and this morning every biospherian was working feverishly to save our young rice crop from the ravages of an infestation of loompas, moth larvae that can eat every leaf on the plant in only a few days. I had already sprayed a natural insecticide on them, but it wasn't working and the green half-inch long caterpillars were growing rapidly and beginning to wreak havoc. As the bacterial killer had been ineffective in halting the tiny green armies' rampage, we were picking each insect off one by one. I fed them to the chickens, who didn't seem impressed. I modeled our agriculture on Chinese farming, and my bookshelf held several tomes dedicated to its history and techniques. The Chinese long ago devised synergistic rice paddy systems similar to the one we were lovingly protecting from the little green army of caterpillars. It's a brilliant way to maximize resources. Swimming around the plants were Tilapia fish, which live largely on small creatures growing in the paddies that would otherwise attack the rice. The fish also graze azola, a small fern floating thickly on the water. The Tilapia nosed around in the roots for food, thereby aerating the plants with oxygen, and they added nutrients to the water via their feces, thereby boosting rice production. When we harvested the rice, we also harvested fish dinners. The animals were good for the soul most of the time. One morning I walked into the chicken pen and picked up a hen that hadn't laid any eggs. We couldn't afford slackers. I carried the bird into the small butchering room and gently placed her on the cutting board, stroking her long neck to soothe her. I hated the next bit, but Roy was filming so I couldn't hesitate. I took a sharp knife, laid it across the animal's neck, took a deep breath and sliced off her head. In an instant, the bird leapt up and off the table and ran out of the butchering room. I shrieked with surprise, charging around trying to catch the headless chicken. I finally grabbed the hen and dumped her in a pot of boiling water in order to loosen her feathers for plucking. It was like a Quentin Tarantino movie, blood squirting from the neck stump. Roy chuckled at the black humor. He had captured the scene for posterity. I was finding it harder and harder to butcher the animals, though. Living on a mostly vegetarian diet, I had lost the enzymes that help digest meat, so I was giving all mine to Taber. I felt even more connected to the darlings once I knew I wouldn't be eating them. In March, we harvested the first wheat field. It was a decent harvest, so I made a pizza to celebrate. As I savored it, I considered how it had taken four whole months to make. We had all participated in the creation of this pizza, either by planting, watering, weeding, or finally harvesting. Never had my connection to my food been so direct or so satisfying. Although I had projected being able to grow only about 80% of our food, we were doing much better than that. We were eating entirely from what we were growing, 100% Biosphere 2 grown food. Unfortunately, we accomplished this by eating a great deal less than we would have liked. We were all losing weight. The guys had lost, on average, 18% of their weight. Taber had shed almost 60 pounds and was so skinny that I started giving him some of my food. The women lost about 10%. None of us was in danger of malnutrition, as the diet was complete. We were, however, becoming ever more obsessed with food. After dinner, some of us sat around the cold slab of granite that was our dining table and engaged in a recurring form of therapy: food fantasies. We imagined and described in exquisite detail a rapturous meal we wished we were eating. Sometimes I could smell a flourless chocolate tort as I brought the empty fork to my mouth. As I placed it on my tongue I could feel the gooey, creamy consistency and taste the full, rich, pungent dark chocolate. And I washed it down with an imaginary cappuccino. Or I would sink my teeth into an exceptionally ripe sweet fantasy strawberry, the aroma wafting up my nostrils as it came close to my mouth. It sounds masochistic, but we imagined the food so vividly, it was almost as if we had eaten it. Our hunger wasn't only for quantity, but for the delight of a good meal with a luscious glass of wine. We were hungry for stimuli. When watching a film, I would focus on the eating scenes, forgetting the plot. Taber and I would talk about what was on movie plates and on movie glasses. We took to watching cooking shows on TV. Once, we so wanted to taste the shrimp and melon balls that a Hong Kong chef was cooking that we phoned and bought every book that he had written, although we couldn't possibly use the cookbooks for another eighteen months. Margaret, the CEO, had placed a hot dog stand not far from the biosphere to serve the hundreds of hungry visitors. Sometimes we lined up in the second story windows of the habitat and took turns peering through binoculars at fat people, for everyone seemed overweight to us then, even the slender people, who were spurting ketchup on sausages and shoveling them into their mouths. We were culinary voyeurs. But despite my hunger, I could not embrace the tradition of eating insects. Mark claimed to have tasted the crickets that were chirping throughout the biosphere. That sounded quite disgusting, and to my English sensibilities, stooping far too low, tantamount to admitting we were scrambling for our survival. Even so, we had numerous discussions about whether it would be remotely possible to turn the enormous cockroach population into food. But I'll leave that up to your imagination. That was lady bugs. There were handfuls of ladybugs. Yeah, I've got one more piece to read, and then you can ask me whatever you want. I don't have to answer though, right? Lines Drawn in the Sand: Ten months after closure, the four of "us" would huddle at one end of the dining table for lunch, and the four of "them" would either leave and eat elsewhere, or crowd together at the other end of the table. Sit-down dinners gave way to people grabbing their food and running away to their rooms. One afternoon, Taber and I were walking along the hallway to the dining room. Gay and Linda were walking toward us. As we passed them, we hugged the wall and averted our eyes. So did they. That was the way it was for the remaining 14 months. We never looked each other in the face again. With nearly palpable hostility hanging in the biosphere like a cloud, Taber and I looked for ways to escape. We watched totally unmemorable TV programs. Sometimes we hiked the 200 feet down the stairs and through the basement to the beach and sat looking out through the space frame at the stars. We would search for Mars in the night sky and contemplate how different things might be if our biosphere was suddenly transported there and we were looking not at a tiny red speck of Mars, but at the bluish dot of our home planet. Perhaps on Mars, with the safety of our home at least 48 million miles away, we would have been able to pull together. But then again, perhaps not. I wondered if people are really meant to be enclosed in small spaces. Even as large, beautiful, and varied as Biosphere 2. The human species, after all, did not evolve indoors. The enclosed life was often one of a sort of monastic contemplation. Not only were we food-limited, and increasingly oxygen-limited, we were impression-limited. The simplicity of life was at once fiercely liberating and crushingly oppressive. In spite of the controversies and turmoil, my brain was not bombarded with the millions of stimuli we all experience in modern life. I couldn't distract my mind by driving into town to see a movie, go to the theater, have a fancy dinner, or go dancing. Despite the melodrama, the social spaghetti, as Roy called it, was vastly simplified. I dealt face to face with only seven other people, and my interactions with those on the outside were largely filtered through Mission Control. I didn't have to deal with the many day to day complexities of the well-oiled outside. Nope. I had to find my entertainment, my satisfaction, from within the 3.15 acres of Biosphere 2, and from within the 1300 cubic centimeters of my brain. I found this the most difficult thing about our enclosure, being somewhat used to looking to the outside for satisfaction, from the age of 18 I had been riding a wave of constant external stimulation until the day the door on Biosphere 2 slammed shut. I had almost no time nor energy for introspection. I had almost never lived alone, been alone, to face myself and my own angels and demons. Now I was thrust into the position of staring inwards. Thank you.
member. 
