John Allen (pen name Johnny Dolphin)

John ‘Dolphin’ Allen, is author, poet, playwright who invented, conceived and co-founded the Biosphere 2 project – the world’s largest laboratory for global ecology. Biosphere 2 set a number of world records in closed life system work including, among others, degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste recycle and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system (eight people for two years). Allen has also conceived and co-founded nine other projects around the world, pioneering in sustainable co-evolutionary development.

He is currently the Chairman of Global Ecotechnics Corporation. This is an international project development and management company with a Biospheric Design Division engaged in designing and preparing to build the second generation of advanced materially closed biospheric systems and ecologically enriched biomic systems (www.biospheres.com); and an EcoFrontiers Division which owns and operates innovative sustainable ecological projects of which he was the co-founder and chief designer in France, Australia (5000 acre savannah regeneration project), Puerto Rico (1000 acre sustainable rainforest project) and England (www.ecotechnics.edu).
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Read an interview with John and David Jay Brown

Allen began the first manned Biosphere Test Module experiment in September 1988, residing in the almost fully recyclable closed ecological system environment for three days and setting a world record at that time, proving that closed ecological systems would work with humans inside. As the vice-president of Biospheric Development for the project, as well as Executive Chairman, Allen was responsible for the science and engineering that created the materially closed life system, as well as the development of spin-off technologies.

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf was born in Austria, and he studied anthropology at the University of Vienna and University of London. In India he began his field research with a study of the Naga tribes and extended his studies to the tribal populations of Hyderabad state, Orissa and Arunachal Pradesh. He served with the Government of India in the North East Frontier Agency from 1944 to 1945. In 1951, as Chair of Asian Anthropology at the University of London, he established the Department of Anthropology in the School of Oriental and African Studies. He concentrated on the study of the hill people of Nepal from 1953 to 1983 and laid the foundation for the anthropological exploration of Nepal with his book The Sherpas of Nepal, Caste and Kin in Nepal, India and Ceylon and Himalayan Traders. Since his retirement in 1976, he has continued his studies of tribal groups of India and Nepal, and authored numerous articles and books including The Sherpas Transformed and The Renaissance of Tibetan Civilization which documents the rebuilding of Tibetan culture in India and Nepal since the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959.