Project Twin Streams Glen Eden | Matariki Planting Day

Q: What happens when a bunch of scientists and experimental actors head out to the desert to build a glass-sealed, lush wilderness world, complete with miniature rainforest, ocean, desert, organic farm, and plants from all over the Earth… and then eight of those folks lock themselves inside it for two years, on a survival mission to see if they, their technology, and all creatures can live in total interdependence?

A: Rebecca becomes obsessed and spends a surprising number of years writing a book about it!

And so, with happy thanks to University of New Mexico Press and the support of many wonderful people, my first book, Dreaming the Biosphere, a work of creative nonfiction about a miniature world, is now making its way out into our own world for you and hopefully many more people to read…

You can read about it here, excerpts, pictures, reviews and all:

http://dreamingthebiosphere.com

You might wonder why I became so obsessed with this little world of Biosphere 2, trekking all over the Southwest to track down its creators and bug them with my questions, locking myself in all manner of scenic shacks writing and rewriting, and generally doing all the borderline-insanely stubborn things that are entailed in making a book. Well, that’s a valid thing to wonder!

The simplest answer: from the moment that I arrived at Biosphere 2, that space age glass castle sparkling in the Arizona desert… I sniffed a madly beautiful hope there. I felt it again when I met the quirky and brilliant people who poured their souls into cocreating this mini-wilderness and felt compelled to lock themselves inside it.

“What? Hope?? Wasn’t that thing a massive, internationally-giggled-at failure?”

Okay so yes, those human “biospherians,” as they called themselves, got alarmingly skinny together under that glass roof while laboring to grow all the food for eight people on half an acre for two years. Yes they gasped for breath as they struggled to balance their atmosphere, yes they quarreled and spat on each others’ faces (literally… eep!), and finally they even watched their management overthrown at gunpoint by U.S. Marshals – and yes, still, I was oddly inspired. In spite of it all, I found that those Biosphere-builders had glowed with a passionate group energy beyond anything I had ever seen or heard about. They had cared and worked for their ecological world as if it were a part of their own body. They had actually believed that anything we can imagine together, might be possible.

In short, I sensed that in their experiences, from the beautiful to the downright traumatic, lay seeds of important lessons for the rest of us, about how we need to work together, with each other and with nature, in this bigger Biosphere that we call Planet Earth.

So the book tells the engaging story of a group of adventurers and the world they made – and in between the gasps of humid air, it pauses to gaze across cultural and ecological history, from the Garden of Eden to the Space Age, to tell a much bigger story about this world of our own. It’s a book about the power of community and the challenges of true cooperation; about how we see and live our role in nature; about science and its limits; and most of all, about the deep human hope for a more harmonious, ecologically balanced world, the huge difficulties of creating such a world, the abiding hope that we can do it anyway…

The book doesn’t contain nearly as many run-on sentences as this email, I promise! It’s been crafted, polished and digitally spit-shined into what I hope will be a thoughtful, flowing pleasure for you to read. It also could make a great holiday gift for any folks you know who still read books these days (hey there’s got to be at least several of us left, right?). So I hope you’ll enjoy it, and you have my profound thanks in advance for spreading the word and helping this baby get out into the world!

The webpage has links re buying the book, and you’ll find it for sale online at most major booksellers… though if you have time, I encourage you to drop into your local independent bookstore and request them to order it for you. This helps bookstores find out about the book and gets them to keep it in stock, and it also causes bookstores to keep on existing, which is an important thing for our society I reckon! (Please tell your bookstore to order it directly through their sales rep or from the publisher, as it seems that wholesaler middlemen have been driving the price up in some cases.) Or if you prefer the ease of buying the book online… I’ll still love you… especially if you write a glowing yet objective-sounding customer review which does not reveal that you are my friend! No really, I’ll love you anyway. We’ve got a big biosphere to dream together and it’s needing a lot of loving cooperation… no spitting please!

Yours,
Rebecca

http://dreamingthebiosphere.com

Tags: Sustainability