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Summer 2009

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55 WWW.HPLusmAGAzINe.COm sufficiency with the system improvements made during the transition period between missions. And, of course, there were plenty of surprises — like the desert beginning to transform into a chaparral ecology because moisture levels favored that part of the original species selected. And the rainforest grew so rapidly that our first generation pioneer species were cut down during the transition – they had grown from small trees to over 30 feet in height. But such developments added to our knowledge of ecological self-organization processes. Biosphere 2's biggest failure: not convincing the reductionist scientists and expansionist politicians who control America to include total systems sciences and engineering. This financial juggernaut and its ideological demagogues fatally cripple efforts to deal with the huge industrial and population expansion effects on our biosphere by restricting evaluation of its effects by species or by water valley or by shoreline or by city and country rather than by all effects on the total biosphere- geosphere-technosphere-ethnosphere system. so despite these remarkable achievements and the body of knowledge that came out of Biosphere, there were elements of the press that said because Biosphere 2 wasn't perfectly self-sufficient in the first two-year experiment, and there were unexpected developments, that it was a failure. Of course, they forget that Biosphere 2 was an experiment – we did it to learn about biospherics, confident that by doing something so radically new, we would learn from what went as planned, and perhaps learn even more from the few things that didn't. Biosphere 2 was also controversial because — though it combined both holistic (total systems) science and analytic (reductionist) science — it stirred up some opposition from some reductionist scientists, some of whom were jealous of the popularity Biosphere 2 achieved around the world, and others who simply don't work with complex systems and couldn't understand the levels of science possible in a facility like Biosphere 2. h+: What are you doing now? JA: my main line of new work is now in what I call cyberspherics — the development of a total systems feedback set of operations ranging from Chaos through Cosmos, Galaxy, sun, Geosphere, Biosphere, Technosphere, ethnosphere, and Noosphere. It's an extraordinary intellectual adventure; the age of Objective (real) science and engineering is just beginning to dawn. The settlement of mars, even just one settlement, would carry what we learned at Biosphere 2 and on the moon landing into a true total systems art, science, and engineering that could be applied with grace and certainty to deal with our present crisis on Planet Water (a more accurate term for what is usually called earth). meanwhile our team still works in closed life systems, doing research on relation of soils to agriculture in our small closed life system, "The Laboratory Biosphere" in New mexico. some of the technologies from Biosphere 2, such as wastewater gardens (constructed wetlands) are being used at ecotechnic projects around the world and implemented in a number of countries worldwide. "The Laboratory Biosphere" http://www.globalecotechnics.com synergia ranch http://www.synergiaranch.com Wastewater Gardens http://www.wastewatergardens.com

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