[THERE IS] A CRISIS OF MISALIGNMENT BETWEEN THE BIOSPHERE AND THE TECHNOSPHERE. THESE SEEM TO BE OUT OF BALANCE; A CATASTROPHE…BIOSPHERE 2, INSTEAD, CREATES A BALANCE BETWEEN BIOSPHERE AND TECHNOSPHERE
bodies, yet allowed heat, photons and electricity to pass freely. Telephone, email, videophones, satellite TV and radio all cycled through a control room at the center of the Habitat.34 Biosphere 2 performs equations of efficiency and contingency that decide who is present, who is responsible to whom and who gets their way. Each of its spheres defines a broad constituency including humans and nonhumans, enclosed territories and sites of shared concern. The global environmental crisis is not just scarcity and global warming. It is the failure to contest standards of distribution, efficiency and value necessary to run the house. Biosphere 2’s own crisis engages in debate over research priorities, ecosystem construction and resource distribution. Having never proved eco-holism, it becomes a machine for actively connecting sites, organisms and systems according to shifting eco-politics. Biosphere 2 began with the belief that we can be most responsive to the pressing charges of environmental crisis with ascetic sensitivity to homeostatic equilibrium. It claimed to provide an architecture of limits based on the authority of Nature, an updated container for a lowimpact life. But at the same time, it cleared land, synthesized ecologies, manufactured infrastructure, patented new building systems, expanded universities and published volumes of data. In doing so, it became the scale model of an ambitious new collective.35 Dreamland of a Warm Age Walt Disney sought to showcase life in a utopian city with futuristic life support systems and no
usage and zero-energy standards—they suffer from the same domestic problems as Biosphere
private property: a vision ultimately spun off into edutainment (EPCOT) and New Urbanism (Celebration). Biosphere 2 is today’s Lilliputia. The life of the future is tested in a contained environment, then broadcasted to the public. “Self-sufficient buildings” and “eco-cities” such as Masdar (in Abu Dhabi) or Dongtan (near Shanghai) seek their appropriate place in the biosphere by acting as biospheres themselves. Responsibly efficient—with zero-carbon, zerowaste, zero-greenhouse-emissions, zero-water
2. That is, pursuing conservation as though it were possible and desirable to withdraw from nature. What if this were reversed? Biosphere 2’s crisis offers possibilities for aggressive, informed inclusion of nonhumans in an expanded city. As Biosphere 2 reunites with Biosphere 1, Cañada Del Oro Ranching and Development LP (CDO)—who purchased the Biosphere 2 site in 2007—draws plans to build a retirement village with commercial and resort developments