Excerpt: Richard Weller on the “Grand Tour”
From Steve Jobs' Apple Park in California, to the Great Green Wall in Central Africa, a new book offers a grand tour of the most pertinent places in the world today.
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In a new book, To the Ends of the Earth: A Grand Tour for the 21st Century, Richard Weller, professor emeritus of landscape architecture and co-founder of The Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism & Ecology, riffs on an English, aristocratic custom dating back to the 18th century to take the reader on an intellectual adventure through 120 places that can be understood as metaphors of contemporary global culture. Scattered across all seven continents and spanning the depths of the ocean to outer space, the places are divided into six categories: Paradises, Utopias, Machines, Monsters, Ruins, and Instruments. This excerpt, from the Utopias chapter, tells the story of Biosphere II, the largest closed ecological system ever created.
The Department of Landscape Architecture is hosting a book launch on Thursday, April 26 at 6:00pm in Meyerson Hall.
The illustrations in the book, including this one of Biosphere II, are by Oliver Atwood, a dual Master of Landscape Architecture / Master or Urban Spatial Analytics student at Weitzman.
Biosphere II
Arizona, United States
Biosphere II was an experiment to see if, and for how long, a small group of humans could live within an entirely artificial, self-contained ecosystem. The pet project of a group of entrepreneurial hippies along with a team of scientists, Biosphere II’s mission was reported in the media as everything and anything from saving the world to seeding new ones.
As it happened, eight ‘biospherians’ or ‘terranauts,’ as they were variously referred to, entered the enclosure in designer space suits on September 26th, 1991 and didn’t come back out until two years later. Reports vary, but by the time they reemerged, the artificial ecosystem for which they were responsible — featuring microcosms of the earth’s major biomes — had almost completely collapsed. All pollinating insects had died, cockroaches had overtaken, and oxygen levels were dangerously low. In addition to this ecological decline, the ‘crew’ (four men and four women) had splintered into factions and were plagued by ‘he said, she said’ scandals. On a more positive note, as a scientific experiment the biospherians did achieve 83% food self-sufficiency and some individuals recorded some significant health improvements.
Though originally touted as the greatest scientific experiment since the moon landing, in 1999 Time Magazine called Biosphere II one of the 50 worst ideas of the 20th century. Either way, much was learned about our capacity—or rather, our incapacity—to design and then manage the complexity of an ecosystem in a closed environment. Above all, Biosphere II reminds us that the only reason Biosphere I (the earth) works so well is that it is an open system with billions of years of practice fine-tuning its interrelated systems in a way that ensures the survival of the whole.
The moral of the story is of course that we can’t reproduce the sophistication of the earth’s ecosystem and therefore we should be more grateful for and caring of the earth system, which provides everything we need to survive for free, every day. Not to be humbled, the fantasy of living in high-tech terrariums is alive and well in Dubai where Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid is funding a third Biosphere experiment in a cluster of space domes known as ‘Mars Science City.’