Shooting a white elephant
A property story is coming to end in the aptly named Oracle,
After spending a reported $200 million on the Biosphere, the Texas oil heir Ed Bass is about to sell the building and its surrounding 1,658 acres to Fairfield Homes of Tucson.
Biosphere 2
The Times does its sensationalist best to see this as the sunset of the Age of Aquarius:
The Biosphere was designed to simulate the Earth’s environment. By succumbing to sprawl, it may have done just that.
As it turns out, the real science experiment was going on outside, as development conquered vast swaths of the
Ruining the planet, are we?
The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980’s, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from
Oracle,
The Times has its causality exactly backwards – and the morality as well. It’s not sprawl that’s ruined Biosphere 2’s utopian dream.
Twenty years ago, Mr. Bass chose the Biosphere site, in the town of
Other factors were involved.
Satellite view of Biosphere 2.
The rectangular ziggurat is the actual ecosystemic greenhouse.
The two circles represent flexible breathing ‘lungs’ for expanding and contracting air.
No, Biosphere 2 failed as a science or economic proposition a decade ago, and the expanding metropolis is rescuing the owner, at least partially, by offering stop-loss exit strategy:
Richard Foerster of Tucson Realty & Trust, a veteran broker in the area, estimated the property to be worth about $25,000 an acre, or $40 million. At that price, Mr. Bass would be losing at least $160 million.
Actually, Mr. Bass, who’s worth over $1 billion, lost his $200 million a long time ago:
[Said Martin Bowen, the president of Decisions Investments, a holding company controlled by Mr. Bass], “Forget the money. It’s sunk money.”
A ’sunk cost’ is money that having been spent, cannot be unspent. So let’s go back to Biosphere 2’s origins. Probably inspired by the pre-Star Wars Douglas Trumbull movie Silent Running,
Wonderfully visual, but even less practical than Biosphere 2
Biosphere 2 sought to explore whether small closed ecologies could be sustainable:
In 1991, eight researchers in dark blue Star Trek-style uniforms entered Biosphere 2 — a vast terrarium in the Arizona desert north of Tucson — hoping to spend two years inside without importing food, water or even air. The goal was to see whether the sealed environment, considered a microcosm of the Earth’s, could become self-sustaining.
A decade later, in early 2001, Nancy and I visited Biosphere 2, by which time its original conception had long since been refuted:
During the first two-year mission that began in 1991, the Biosphere was beset by one problem after another: Oxygen dwindled, and the sea became acidic. Crops failed, causing the bionauts to lose weight rapidly, while ants and other insects thrived.
In terms of potential ecology, Biosphere 2 was too small (just over 3.1 acres) and too densely inhabited (nine human beings, who are large, apex-of-the-food-pyramid consumes).
The four biomes are mostly distinct, but the ants went everywhere.
As a result, it proved unsustainable for people, despite premise-breaking efforts by its managers:
Biosphere administrators later admitted that they had secretly pumped 600,000 cubic feet of fresh air into the Biosphere, supplemented the bionauts’ home-grown diet with stored food and smuggled in emergency supplies. Then, two bionauts were arrested for breaking the Biosphere’s seals. Soon the 100-year experiment was abandoned, and the Biosphere was reopened as a tourist site. Visitors were now allowed inside, where the sights include 3,800 species of plants and a million-gallon sea.
At that point, around 1997, Biosphere 2’s management innovated, as I wrote in my travel notes:
To accomplish the changeover, all the animals were removed, leaving only plants and insects. Though originally Biosphere 2 held nine ant species, greenhouse ants took over everything, wiping out all the other ants in a shocking breach of planetary ecological amity. Now the scientists, having given up trying to remove the greenhouse ants, are trying to figure out why they rule. Isn’t nature wonderful?
That is, Biosphere 2 proved spectacularly sustainable, just not for the species we wanted.
Joaquin Ruiz, the dean of the
Dr. Ruiz participated in a conference at the National Academy of Sciences in
“The consensus was that it could,” Dr. Ruiz said. “It is indeed an enormous terrarium, but the scaling of that terrarium allows you do to large-scale ecology experiments that cannot be done anywhere else.” For example, he said, the Biosphere could be used to simulate the effects of the loss of small amounts of moisture in a desert, helping scientists understand the effects of a drought.
I completely agree with that; having been built, it’s a great laboratory:
From an engineering/ ecological perspective, Biosphere 2 is cool, from its four ecological zones (temperate, rain forest, savannah, ocean) to its ventilation system (air expands when warm, so with the large temperature swings possible from radiant sunlight, they had to build an enormous underground black rubber diaphragm to expand and contract. The ecological research is legitimate and valuable. If you believe – as I do – that global warming is real, man-made, and potentially apocalyptic, then you must support serious efforts to analyze its causes and explore solutions. So you politely put up, minimizing your muttered sardonic asides, with the aging-flower-child claptrap and the touchy-feely propaganda (how Volvo is really ecological).
A noble effort, and endlessly photogenic.
It is, simply, wildly uneconomic:
When your $100 million investment turns to dust, what do you do?
1. Persuade your billionaire to keep funding – these days (2001), Mr. Bass shells out about a million a month.
2. Make yourself educational – Biosphere 2 was donated to the Earth Institute of Columbia University, Columbia University, which took it on assurances of the continuation of Point 1.
3. Reinvent your mission. Biosphere 2 is now as a laboratory to study planetary ecology – for which it is indeed well suited. Inside the controlled environment, researchers can raise and lower carbon dioxide and ambient temperature, allowing slow replicable microcosms of a global-warming world. Not only can they directly observe the impact on coral reefs and plants, they can try biological solutions (such as adding iron to their small ocean to see if, as predicted, it sucks carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and so lowers temperature).
Unfortunately, the university-partnership experiment also failed:
But the partnership unraveled, and Decisions ended up suing
“Here,
“Hey, you think I want it?”
Soon thereafter, Mr. Bass directed CB Richard Ellis to sell the 140 acres at the center of the site, where the Biosphere and dozens of auxiliary buildings were constructed.
In other words, after a decade’s continuous investment, with no end in sight to the losses, Biosphere 2’s patron had had enough.
“Clearly, you can’t run it as a tourist attraction,” said Mr. Bowen, the president of Decisions. “It’s too expensive to maintain.” (According to a sales brochure for the Biosphere property, Mr. Bass has spent $18 million on maintenance and another $9 million on major improvements in the last eight years.)
Because of the investment and maintenance costs, “you can’t just keep it sitting empty,” Mr. Bowen said.
He compared the Biosphere with the Spruce Goose, the giant plane built by Howard Hughes. “That’s a good analogy,” Mr. Bowen said. “The Spruce Goose is a fantastic aircraft, but what good is it sitting in a hangar?”
Actually, the Spruce Goose (which the Boss and I have also visited) is a better (and less flattering) metaphor than perhaps Mr. Bowen intended.
Not exactly proof of concept.
While it’s a fantastic creation, the stuff of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the Spruce Goose was a terrible airplane. Built by Howard Hughes when he was on the cusp between brilliancy and madness, it is engineered beyond the tensile strength of wood and the lifting power of propeller-driven engines. Today it is only a tourist curiosity.
The Spruce Goose is too big to fly profitably (and it only flew once, in
On a recent Friday, traffic was bumper to bumper on
Because (see map above) it’s the main arterial through a canyon area!
Roads were torn up, as construction crews dug trenches for water mains to serve the growing population. But at the Biosphere, there were about 10 cars in the parking lot and about that many people in the visitor center.
To quote the great Yogi Berra, “if people don’t wanna come to the ball park, nobody’s gonna stop ‘em.”
Mr. Bass, who is 60, was not available to answer questions.
People value only what they pay for. What they do not pay for, they evidently do not value. Crocodile tears cost as little as public contrition. If Biosphere 2 is a scientific and national treasure, let it then be bought, by the state of
For a decade and a half, Mr. Bass let his actions speak. From his visionary conception, unflagging financial support, reinvention efforts, and now proposed liquidation, Mr. Bass has said everything he needs to about Biosphere 2.
