Can We Save Bioshphere 1?

A few weeks ago I read a book called ‘The Human Experiment’ by Jane Poynter.

It’s the story of eight ‘biospherians’ who spent two virtually uninterrupted years in the early 90′s inside a sealed environment called ‘Biosphere 2’ (Earth is Biosphere 1) designed to duplicate Earth’s ecology on a smaller scale. No material was allowed in or out during the entire two years. All food, water, and even the air they breathed were produced within the 3.14 acre structure, which had five ‘biomes’ representing the most important ecological zones on Earth.

Biosphere 2 had its own mini-ocean, complete with reef and sea-life. One of the many ongoing challenges for the biospherians was maintaining the ‘pH’ of their ocean, which continually became more acidic due to the persistently rising carbon-dioxide in Biosphere 2’s atmosphere (sound familiar?). Their solution was to regularly dump bicarbonate of soda into their ocean to counteract the acidification. They defended this practice by claiming that, in the past, such events on a greater scale would have been produced by volcanoes in the larger biosphere.

On TV this morning came the news that 95% of the scallops and oysters off the west coast of Canada had disappeared. Any guesses as to why this happened? You got it – according to ocean scientists, the Pacific has become too acidic. Why? Because of the persistently rising carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere of Biosphere 1.

The inherent problem with Biosphere 2 was that its environment was not properly ‘balanced’. The biospherians were forced to constantly ‘tweak’ a system far too complex for them to understand. There’s a lesson here. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes the Earth as a giant computer, and in many ways, that’s what it is – an extremely complex system perfectly balanced to maintain life as we know it (a better way to look at it is that all life evolved within the Earth’s environment, and therefore is perfectly adapted to it).

What a lot of people don’t seem to grasp is that the state of the Earth’s environment isn’t carved in stone – it can change – and is changing. Any major change is almost certain to be less beneficial to life than the original (since we all evolved to adapt to the original). Even if we were able to dump mountains of bicarbonate of soda into the ocean to raise the pH, other problems are bound to arise in the infinitely complex interaction of environmental factors.

So what can we do?

IF LEFT ALONE, our wonderfully complex computer, the Earth, can maintain its life-giving state indefinitely. All we have to do is GET OUT OF THE WAY. We need to drastically reduce our interaction with the planet, to allow it to maintain its perfect balance.

Will this require sacrifice or compromise on our part? Yes! But hopefully the people reading this are thinking adults, capable of making decisions to benefit not just themselves, but future generations, and all living things.