I went to college in a warm, flat, southern place, so I never gave much thought to a place like Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. It is perched above the Connecticut River, but owns part of a mountain. Not flat. I stumbled over the alumni website and read articles about the Biosphere project and climbing Mount Everest. That was a lot of fun.

https://dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/articles/biosphere-2-what-really-happened One passage in this article, about the experimental habitat that eight people lived in for two years in the 1990’s, reminded me of a similar passage I read in a book about Carthusian monks. The Biosphere author says, that although all the inhabitants had to live with each other, they had a big disagreement at one point. He comments on how they would pass each other going about their daily duties, and refuse to speak to each other, deliberately, coldly, meanly, trying to freeze each other out. Eventually they worked through this problem.

In the book An Infinity of Little Hours, Nancy Maguire explains the lifestyle of the Carthusian monks. They live “together” but they spend most of the day alone, meeting for the daily liturgies but not speaking to each other about other things, except for once a year when they go on a hike together. One of the monks told Maguire that during the liturgy they passed a bell from one to the next. He said that one could become expert at expressing angry emotions in that simple gesture. Quite fascinating.

The Biosphere article said such coldness was a psychological phenomenon called ‘irrational antagonism.’ I don’t know about that. The Biosphere people were having a serious disagreement about the direction of the project and who should manage it.

The guy who wrote the article wants to say that Biosphere 2 was a success (Biosphere 1 is the earth itself), and in lots of ways it was. It provided a lot of information that can be considered. However, the experiment did not succeed in proving that people could build a proper terrarium for themselves. The Biosphere 2 operation needed extra oxygen early on, or everyone would have died. The plants could not keep up with the carbon dioxide that people were generating. Instead it was being absorbed by the raw concrete — says the article. Hence the oxygen shortage.

I had to go look up this concrete business. I had casually read elsewhere that concrete was responsible for producing a lot of carbon dioxide, and that’s true. But it does also absorb a lot of carbon dioxide over the years, after it is manufactured, so the net effect is not clear over time. In the Biosphere 2, the absorption was nearly deadly since it took oxygen out of the recycling game in a way that hadn’t been anticipated.

The other thing the article mentioned very casually was that the author was hungry all the time, though he was never starving, and all the participants were healthy when they came out. Food production was absolutely the paramount duty. I suspect that this observation would need a lot more consideration in other environments, with children or old people or someone who got hurt and couldn’t do a share of the work.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about household clutter in my own biosphere, but the important thing to say about it is this. Some people have better ideas than others about how to avoid the plague. Decluttering at the Speed of Life: Winning Your Never-Ending Battle with Stuff Paperback – February 27, 2018 by Dana K. White is an excellent book for those who are challenged in this area. One very important point she makes is this. When your containers for a given kind of object overflow, do NOT go buy a new one. Get rid of some of what you have. For some of you that’s obvious; for some of us, on the other hand…