Like Bruce Dern’s spaceship in the cult film Silent Running — an oft-cited inspiration — the real-life Biosphere 2 was built to be a sealed environment containing samples of the Earth’s flora and fauna, especially the edible species, fully sustaining a small human crew. Unlike the movie, Biosphere 2 was essentially a giant greenhouse in the Arizona desert rather than domed disks in deep space. It’s remembered now mostly as a trendy early 1990s news story and a failure, neither of which begins to capture its long history and complicated execution, as detailed in the documentary Spaceship Earth.
Spanning the past 50 years, the film begins 25 years before Biosphere 2 with the development of a cultlike community led by charismatic ecologist John Allen. Funded — we eventually learn — by a friendly billionaire, Allen and his youthful team ran a San Francisco theater company, founded a New Mexico ranch and built their own sailing ship before creating Biosphere 2. The gutsy, elaborate experiment captured the public imagination and a glut of media attention in 1991 when eight “biospherians” from different disciplines were locked inside the glass-walled would-be utopia for what was to be two years of biological isolation.
Director Matt Wolf reconstructs this long, complicated history with the help of fresh, frank interviews with most of the participants as well as exhaustive contemporary film footage of the Allen team before and during the Biosphere 2 years. Wolf declines to delve into much scientific detail and treads lightly on the much-reported interpersonal tensions within the Allen team, but he underscores the experiment’s prescient focus on climate change, back when it was called “global warming,” and its introduction to the world of a corporate villain named Steve Bannon.
While you’ll learn more factoids and gossip about Biosphere 2 from Wikipedia than you do from Spaceship Earth, the documentary offers immediacy and direct access to the players and makes clear the experiment’s importance in focusing attention on the planet’s health at a crucial moment.
Available to rent starting May 8 via fineartstheatre.com and pisgahfilm.org
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