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They were looking almost like the band Devo, except they were in front of an enormous glass pyramid.
(Biosphere 1 is Earth, of course.)
To create a closed system capable of fostering life on a long-term scale.
We avoided being put into any box.
Im a product of the 60s.
I graduated from Dartmouth in 68 and decided I didnt want to do anything conventional.
I wanted to contribute to the world, but I also wanted to live a balanced life.
What if such research conditions could be re-created on land, on a grander scale?
What if so that contribute to the world, they needed to build a new one?
With significant financial contributions from eccentric billionaire Ed Bass, Biosphere 2 became a reality.
They invited me to come work, and I dropped what I was doing, and that was that.
And those snafus made for tempting headlines.
What began as an ambitious, futuristic scientific adventure was soon cast as New Age nonsense.
I didnt really care [about the cult accusations], Leigh says.
People can say what they want to say.
I was thoroughly entrenched in it, and it was an excellent lifestyle for me.
I let it roll off my back, the whole cult being a negative thing.
What we did was extraordinary.
Those pieces, put together, provide an unusual history of an environmentalist movement, imperfect as it was.
My editor David Teague and I really leaned into a concept that Mark Nelson talked about, Wolf says.
It was about small groups of people being engines of change.
We recognize a unique model within this group that we think is instructive about realizing unprecedented ideas …
This group defied the traditional cliches of hippies.
They were real capitalists pursuing enterprises around the world they hoped would be both ecologically and economically sustainable.
Thats the neoliberal dream.
Through the course of their epic journey, you see the shortcomings of that.
That felt profound to me.
And I just lost it.
Where does your oxygen come from?
I just blurted it out.
He probably thought I was a nut.
Im proud of what we did.
Id do it again in a heartbeat.
