University of Arizona Press, February 2018 Now that the hyperbolic coverage of the early years of Biosphere 2—e.g. “. . . this facility is a nightmare . . .” or “It’s going to save the Earth and colonize space!”—has receded, it’s possible to reconsider what was learned from its operation as a materially closed ecological system facility that supported human habitation for about three years in total.
There has historically been tension and sometimes open hostility between those scientists engaged in detailed analytic work and scientists who study phenomena at larger scales. This is unfortunate, because both approaches are needed to understand ecology: there is so much still unknown both about basic biology and about how our biosphere functions. Although while the experiment was on-going, nearly three decades ago, Biosphere 2 elicited early criticism from some reductionists who didn’t appreciate its design, the project’s success depended on brilliant reductionist scientists ...
