By the time the crew was sealed inside the Biosphere, along with our personal belongings and all the equipment for our mission, the day had already been crammed with activity and emotional intensity. We woke up at 3:30 AM while the Biosphere was still dark, long before the sun rose. We needed those early morning hours to prepare for satellite links with the East Coast morning TV shows airing three hours ahead of Arizona time. A handful of staff visitors, wanting one last night inside this world they helped build, lay curled up in blankets on the couches in the mezzanine. It was the last night that anyone but crew members would be allowed to sleep inside.
Those few hours before closure were filled with many ‘last’ things for us: last walks in the early morning desert air, last hugs from family and friends, last checklists, last treats. A jug of coffee brought by a friend was the last cup for those of us who hadn’t already decided to wean ourselves from caffeine. Like many other luxuries, there would be precious little coffee inside the Biosphere; only having what beans we could harvest from the handful of young coffee tree saplings in our orchard and rainforest. And our teas were limited to herbal teas.
Opinions about how to prepare ourselves for such an unusual experiment were decidedly divided. Some crew members, such as Gaie Alling, Jane Poynter, and Mark Van Thillo (known as Laser), maintained that “the experiment begins when it begins,” and they’d continue their normal patterns until then. Others, such as Mark Nelson and Linda Leigh (both coffee drinkers), decided to avoid the bodily shock they endured each time we started a week-long trial eating only what we’d have within the Biosphere 2 experimental diet, and so gradually cut out caffeine in advance.
The coffee jug exited with the visitors and the final clean-up crew. Along with the jug went the last packaged sugar and Styrofoam cups that we would see for a long time to come. Our very last luxury was a large breakfast of ham, eggs, and bread with butter; which we enjoyed in the peace and quiet of the Biosphere after the ceremonies, final goodbyes, and closure were over. From then on, all food would be grown, processed, and prepared by our own hands inside the Biosphere under the watchful eyes of Sally Silverstone, our co-captain, Agriculture and Food Systems Manager.
PACKING OUR BAGS
After years of intense concentration on the design and construction of an undertaking as ambitious as Biosphere 2, our own personal preparations seemed insignificant by comparison. So perhaps it’s not surprising that some of us waited until the last two weeks before closure to get those needs in order. Many of us weren’t even sure exactly what those needs would prove to be. How many pairs of socks, shoes, shorts, pants, shirts, and underwear will we need? What about clothes for special occasions? Would we even have special occasions to dress up for? Which books, tapes, CDs, photographs, paintings, stereo, TV, mementos, and other personal items should we bring in for our inner nourishment? This was a far cry from packing for a trip to Europe or a summer collecting expedition.
Sally lived out of a knapsack for years as she worked on various agricultural projects in India, Africa, and Puerto Rico, so material possessions were not a burden with which she had to deal. But others had more complicated situations. Roy Walford had cars, a house, and over a thousand experimental mice in his University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical School pathology laboratory. His cars he loaned to friends, his house he entrusted to his daughter, and his mice became the responsibility of his lab assistants.
Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV), the parent company that created the Biosphere, helped most of us store our clothes, furniture, and other belongings. But Mark Nelson brought all his clothes inside—from fur hats and heavy overcoats to dark suits with black dress shoes to match. Roy brought his brightly colored lungis (one-piece Indian cloth wraparounds for men). Jane brought a set of vividly colored wigs and masks for parties and other lighthearted moments.
Jane and Gaie shopped for sneakers and blue jeans in the Tucson Mall. Jane was the Manager of Field Crops and Animal Systems. Gaie (or Abigail) was the Assistant Director of Research and Development and the Director of Marine Ecological Systems for SBV, as well as Scientific Chief inside Biosphere 2. Her responsibilities for the two-year experiment included not only the management of the marine systems, but overall monitoring and management of the Biosphere 2 experiment, its research programs, and safety of its crew. Gaie earned a bachelor’s degree in marine biology from Middlebury College and a master’s degree in Forestry and Environmental Studies from Yale, she had tracked whales and dolphins from Greenland to the Indian Ocean to Antarctica. Jane was a gardener, trained in farm management in Australia at an Institute of Ecotechnics’ project with a stint of marine ecology on the Institute’s ocean-going research vessel, the Heraclitus. Both of them were accustomed to isolation in the outdoors and living out of duffel bags. Even they miscalculated; they wound up with too many blue jeans (twelve pairs in all) but not enough sneakers (six pairs). They figured that their jeans would be the first things to wear out, because they’d be working daily in the farm area, what we call the Intensive Agriculture Biome (IAB for short). As it turned out, most of us wore out our work shoes before anything else. Jane and Gaie’s sneakers lost their heels and soles, which ended up in the scrap box. Indeed, by the end of the two years, bare feet “outdoors” (outside our habitat living area) became a common sight. In the habitat, it had already become a custom, since we had to remove our dirty shoes to avoid tracking mud on the carpeting. Sometimes going barefoot was a pleasure in our tropical world; but it also had the practical purpose of minimizing wear-and-tear on the limited supply of footwear.
Mark Nelson, knowing that half his time would be spent in manual labor in the fields and wilderness, did his shopping in a quick trip to a couple of Tucson thrift shops. A philosophy graduate from Dartmouth College, Mark, Chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, had spent the last twenty years working on ecotechnic agricultural, ranching, and ecological restoration projects in arid regions of the United States and Australia. He was SBV’s Director of Space and Environmental Applications, and the Communications Officer for the crew. In the Biosphere he helped Linda Leigh, the Director of Terrestrial Ecological Systems for SBV, and manager of the systems inside, with her work in the terrestrial zones: the rainforest, savannah, and desert biomes. He was also in charge of the ecological waste recycling system and provided fodder for the domestic animals. Piles of new clothes seemed pointless; there was no one to impress, and clearly plenty of ways to get dirty. Laser (Mark Van Thillo) felt much the same way; work clothes would be just fine for him, too.
Jane had the idea to make a special box of new clothes for her to open on the first anniversary. Mark, although he relied on second-hand clothes, liked the idea and also prepared a box for the one-year anniversary of closure. This might not have been quite like a day’s indulgence at the mall, but still there would be an infusion of something new.
We all had our Biosphere 2 jumpsuits, called by some our ‘Star Trek suits.’ The late Bill Travilla, one of Marilyn Monroe’s clothes designers, was inspired by Biosphere 2 and offered to design something special for us. The results were these lightweight wool jumpsuits in fire-engine red and dark blue. We dutifully wore them for our official closing ceremonies and basically never wore them again. After losing a good bit of weight from the Biosphere 2 diet, they wouldn’t have fit us again anyway.
Although Laser spent almost no time on his wardrobe, he meticulously prepared a collection of avant-garde music and a library of over three hundred books, rivaled only by Mark’s collection, which he hoped to read in his free time. Laser was in charge of Quality Control for the construction of Biosphere 2; and once inside, his role was that of co-captain in charge of emergency systems, as well as the Manager of Technical Systems. A daunting task—he was responsible for the maintenance and operations of our very extensive infrastructure of machinery, which he had to keep running. Because he was intimately involved with the building of the system, he knew more than anyone else how everything was put together; therefore, along with his team on the outside, he was confident he could fix anything. If he and Mark ever managed to finish those five hundred volumes in their apartments with everything else going on, then they could have gone on to another thousand in the common library at the top of the sixty-five-foot tower in the middle of the habitat; housing a broad range of books in history, art, literature, architecture, ecology and other sciences, as well as philosophy.
Such