The 2009 Winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Biography/Memoir, Me and the Biospheres is the definitive autobiography of John P. Allen, inventor of the largest laboratory for global ecology ever built and one of the most luminous minds of our time.
Contained within a magnificently designed air-tight glass and steel frame structure, Biosphere 2 covered three acres of Arizona desert and included models of seven biomes: an ocean with coral reef, a marsh, a rainforest, a savannah, a desert, farming areas and a micro-city. Eight people lived inside this structure for two years (1991–1993) and set world records in human life support, monitoring their impact on the environment, while providing crucial data for future manned missions into outer space.
Humorous and Whitmanesque, Me and the Biospheres is a tribute to the ingenuity and dauntlessness of the human mind and a passionate call to reawaken to the beauty of our peerless home, Biosphere 1, the Earth.
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Why this book matters
- Winner of the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Award for Best Biography/Memoir — a landmark account of one of the most ambitious ecological experiments ever undertaken
- Written by John P. Allen, the visionary inventor of Biosphere 2 — a mind that bridged science, ecology, art, and systems thinking
- Documents the world record-setting two-year closed ecological experiment that generated crucial data for planetary stewardship and space exploration
- Humorous, Whitmanesque, and deeply human — a memoir that inspires as much as it informs
- A passionate call to reawaken to the beauty and fragility of Biosphere 1 — the Earth — at a moment when that call has never been more urgent
