Process November 24, 2009

I bought a package of white index cards, a package of yellow index cards, a package of pink index cards, and a package of blue index cards. Baby shower colors (minus baby shower green).

On the pink cards, I recorded notes, quotes and arresting details about Biosphere 2, past and present. These cards say things like: “planes, curves, spheres possible from multiple pyramidic geometry”; “lungs: ‘variable expansion chambers’”; “respiration/soil temp. relationship found to be a loop, not a line.” I’m interested in how and why the place was built, and what kind of research is happening (or has happened) there.

The blue cards contain scientific research and theory that have informed the work done at Biosphere 2. In particular, I researched Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere, the Gaia hypothesis, and studies involving feedback loops between biotic and abiotic elements of an ecosystem. These cards say things like: “multiplication = autonomous energy of life in the biosphere = transformation of chemical elements & creation of new matter from them = GEOCHEMICAL ENERGY OF LIFE IN THE BIOSPHERE”; “ecosystem engineering theory [...] avoids conflation of process and outcome”; “how is homeostasis of Earth possible given ‘faint young sun’?”

On the white cards I’ve written the things I need to look up. For example, what is stochastic variation? And what happened at the 1988 American Geophysical Union conference when J.W. Kirchner supposedly burned a text on the Gaia hypothesis? (I also needed a refresher on the chemistry of photosynthesis.)

And the yellow cards. These have to be the heart and core of the essay. These are my musings, my interpretations, my translations. Not my renderings of science, but the things the science leads me to see. I’ve been thinking a lot about the physiology of family. The feedback loops within a family. How principles of entropy and mass and biotic/abiotic interactions have to do with our own lives and personal environments. Family as ecosystem. My family.

The next challenge (once I’ve finished the six white cards left to research) is to start braiding the pink, blue and yellow cards. This is where the art will happen. This is the mysterious part.

Sources November 24, 2009

I have read and mined the following sources:

1. The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 by Jane Poynter

2. Biosphere 2: The Human Experiment by John Allen

3. The Biosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky

4. “World in a Bottle” by Reed Karaim

5. “Biospherics and Biosphere 2, mission one (1991-1993) by John Allen and Mark Nelson

6. “Gaia and evolutionary biology” by Connie Barlow and Tyler Volk

7. “Hands up fo the Gaia hypothesis” by James E. Lovelock

8. “A goddess of the Earth?: the debate on the Gaia hypothesis” by Stephen H. Schneider

9. “Ecosphere, biosphere, or Gaia? What to call the global ecosystem” by R.J. Huggett

10. “Vernadsky’s biosphere concept: an historical perspective” by Alexej M. Ghilarov

11. “The Concept of Organisms as Ecosystem Engineers Ten Years On: Progress, Limitations, and Challenges” by Justin P. Wright and Clive G. Jones

12. “Positive and negative effects of organisms as physical ecosystem engineers” by Clive G. Jones, John H. Lawton, and Moshe Shachak

13. “Alternative states and positive feedbacks in restoration ecology” by Katharine N. Suding, Katherine L. Gross and Gregory R. Houseman

14. “Can biological invasions induce desertification?” by Sujith Ravi, Paolo D’Odorico, Scott L. Collins and Travis E. Huxman

15. “A Frontier in Earth Surface Processes: Dynamic Interactions of Life and its Landscape,” a National Research Council Report submitted by Douglas J. Jerolmack on behalf of MYRES III

Icosahedron November 4, 2009

Eikosi, hedron.

Twenty, seat.

Twenty identical equilateral triangular faces.

Thirty edges.

Twelve vertices.

Dual dodecahedron.

One of five platonic solids.

A pattern of edges and vertices.

Formal Pressure November 4, 2009

Ander’s suggestion: triangulate.

 

The Biosphere is a geodesic dome. So the idea will be to use the form of the Biosphere to inform the form of my lyric essay. The dome is made of triangles. So I’ll employ triplets or triptychs and interloch these triangles. The number of triangles needed to form a dome could determine how many triplet sections I create.

 

The triplets will be made of three threads. I haven’t chosen the three yet, but I’ve narrowed it down: 1) my own experience, thinking, perception; 2) scientific concepts and bio/eco/geo/chemical processes (Gaia, group selection, soil respiration); 3) Biosphere history and structure; 4) questions; 5) research happening now; 6) found texts–things others have said about the Biosphere.

 

Ander also suggested some lyric essays to read that might further inspire my process or influence the formal pressure I bring to bear on the material: “The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss, and “The Answer That Increasingly Appeals” by Robin Black.

 

I’ve got my index cards of many colors. I’ve got my articles and books. I still don’t know where I’m going, but I know how to proceed.

Fear November 3, 2009

I have my idea, but I’m finding it very difficult to begin writing. I think I’m afraid. Afraid because I’ve never done this kind of project before. Afraid because I don’t know what I’m making, or what I’m writing toward. Afraid because I’m a beginner and a novice and I don’t want to make a mistake. Afraid because my audience (the one I imagine, filling the auditorium at Biosphere 2) knows more than me. Afraid that I might sound foolish.

 

I only acknowledged this fear earlier this morning, while I was running around Himmel Park. Oh, I realized. It’s not that I’m lazy or procrastinating. It’s that I’m afraid. I’m used to other things in life—grief, conflict—rendering me fearful. It took me a while to recognize what I’m experiencing now as fear. And now it’s strange to admit it. How could the charge to create something make me afraid? Shouldn’t it be empowering? Exciting? But I don’t feel giddy or propelled. I feel stuck.

 

So, what to do? I’ve been trying to read my way through fear, as though knowing more, packing more facts in, will give me more power. While the reading—about Gaia hypothesis and soil respiration and volatile organic compounds—is interesting and conceptually stimulating, it’s not sharpening my focus yet, or giving me the starting gun signal that will fire my legs around the track. I need a way of writing myself back into the material. I need to get back inside.

 

I’m going to visit Ander Monson’s office hour today. I hope he can give me some freewrite prompts or a received form to play with—something concrete to push off from. I’m also mulling over my notes from Fenton Johnson and Ander Monson’s workshop on The Inspirational Fact, which they conducted last night at the Poetry Center. I’m thinking about patterns; about what threads to braid; about distillation.

Feedback October 8, 2009

And here’s where this blog takes a turn. Up until now, I’ve been trying to capture my limited understanding (and unlimited appreciation) of some of the science happening at B2. I’ve been lucky enough to interview a number of passionate, bright thinkers, and even tag along in the field on occasion. And all this time I’ve been searching for a wink from my notebook, a raised eyebrow or a significant glance that says I’ve found the thing—the image, the concept, the starting point—for the creative piece I’ve agreed to make, having been inspired by science. And after a few months of learning about woody plant encroachment and desertification and interdisciplinary science and non-linearity and the water cycle and volatile organic compounds, I think I’ve found the thing that will launch the creative work ahead.

 

Sujith Ravi, who is now completing a post-doc at B2, is to thank. Following our conversation about global trends in the relationship between the fire cycle, biological invasions and accelerated soil erosion on the desert margins, he emailed me a PDF of a report submitted to the National Research Council in September, 2008. The report, titled “A Frontier in Earth Surface Processes: Dynamic Interactions of Life and its Landscape,” discusses “the consensus view of a select group of early-career researchers” arrived at during an NSF-sponsored Meeting of Young Researchers in Earth Science (MYRES). (Sujith also passed along a book recommendation—Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David Montgomery; I haven’t read it yet.)

 

I’ll quote from the abstract of the report: “A long-standing paradigm is that physical processes sculpt a landscape and set the template on which biological agents occur; these biological agents then interact with each other and with their environment within the constraints of this habitat template. However, it is increasingly recognized that biotic agents can actually shape the abiotic environment directly, leading to the important recognition that life and the landscape interact and feedback upon one another over a wide variety of temporal and spatial scales.”

 

And that’s what I want to write about: biotic/abiotic feedback. That’s my wink.

 

I don’t know how I’ll approach it yet. I might look at the research summarized in the MYRES report and create prose poems that evoke the various examples of feedback. I might stick with this paradigm as it relates to the research I witnessed at B2. I might do both.

 

The struggle for me has been that as a fiction writer, the things that move me to write are characters who take shape in my mind. I hear them and see them and witness them in some sort of situation or predicament, and the story begins to form. I haven’t heard any stories stuttering forth from my B2 experience. I’ve been fascinated by the passions and personalities of real people and their work, and intrigued by the evidence of the interconnectedness of life and systems on our planet. But a story hasn’t started in my mind. So I’m trying something new. I’m starting with a concept. I’ve got a purple Post-It note on my desk that says FEEDBACK and has arrows connecting to form a circle.

Epiphanies September 3, 2009

To provide an environment for epiphanies.

 

That is how Javier Espeleta describes his role as Associate Director of Science at Biosphere 2. Contrary to the cold lab-coat-and-beaker stereotypes that even scientists can hold about themselves, Javier sees science as self-expression. “You have to get the questions in your mind,” he says, “and find a new way to say them.”

 

A theme runs through Javier’s questions: integration and connectivity. Even as a medical school student (he quit before completing the program) he was interested in how the parts of the human body work together. This interest in systems relationships led him to work in agriculture and plant physiology. How do plants work, and how can we understand and describe their interactions with the environment? How do agricultural and wild plants adapt to their environments? What traits do they develop, and what’s the evolutionary importance of these changes over time?

 

Javier believes in question-driven—as opposed to problem-driven—science. The problem-solving paradigm leads too easily to dichotomous thinking, when really science is about exploring complex, non-linear, uncertain processes. While policy and politics might demand biased, or at least definitive, appraisals of a system so as to assert a clear recommendation or point to a probable outcome, Javier’s brand of science is about investigating a dynamic feedback loop of variables.

 

For example, the Hillslopes project under construction at Biosphere 2 will allow for examination of a system’s evolution in real time. How will the soil change with varied water flow and alterations in climate? How will the changes in soil in turn affect the water? And so on. An integrated study is less efficient than a traditional lab study where inquiry happens at a more microcosmic level. But interdisciplinary work is also less diluted. If we know plants regulate water, carbon and nutrient cycles, then it is important to know how plants are affected by climate change, and also how changes in plants affect global cycles. There isn’t one solution to discover, but rather a dynamic process to observe.

 

This sounds like storytelling. When we read a short story about a troubled relationship, it isn’t problem-solving (“How can they fix it?”) that drives the narrative. Instead, systems questions propel the story (“Why is this happening? What will they do about it? What will happen as a result of the actions they choose? Am I so different?”).

 

Javier’s eloquence made me curious about his own epiphanies. What breakthroughs came reaching for him, and what was it like?

 

He said he hasn’t had any. Yet.

ET Partitioning Meets Right Action August 28, 2009

“We only have one generation to act. But it has to be right action,” Javier Espeleta, Associate Director of Science at Biosphere 2, reminded a group of thirty-five 4^th-8^th grade STEM teachers from around the state. The teachers were part of B2’s Summer Institute which took place in July. Javier went on to commend the teachers for their commitment, reminding them that given the limited span of years we have to bring right action to bear on our planet, their work of educating the next generation is especially important. Kids need to be motivated to keep learning, to continue building on what we already know about the world and our place in it. Javier said that kids also need access to an alternative to the reductive paradigms that often prevail in our schools, paradigms that limit the scope of learning to narrow questions posed within isolated disciplines. The Earth is complex and integrated, and so must be our approaches to discovering more about it.

 

Javier makes interdisciplinary collaboration and communication sound like an ethical—not just a pedagogical—imperative. Doctoral candidate Juan Villegas, who addressed the group of teachers next, spoke about his eco-hydrology research, a project that epitomizes the ethics of integrated learning that Javier recommends. In a collaboration between B2, the University of Arizona’s Computer Science department and School of Natural Resources, and a 6^th grade classroom at Wilson K8 School, Juan engaged school-age kids in cutting-edge research and data collection. The project became a bridge between classroom science—which Javier says can often be faulted for its abstractions and its tendency to address only concepts that scientists already understand—and “real” science, which poses and acts on new critical questions. The 6^th grade students at Wilson K8 were able to ask questions about evapotranspiration to which we don’t already have answers, and to learn scientific concepts and methods in the field.

 

Juan and the students’ questions are about water. We know our planet consists mostly of water, and that there’s water under the earth’s surface, on the surface, in the atmosphere, and within the plants and animals that live here. We know that a finite amount of water continually cycles through our biosphere. We know that we won’t run out of water—not in the aggregate. But how does the water cycle of our planet affect us in specific locations? If the total amount of water in our planet’s system doesn’t change, then why are we experiencing desertification in some regions? Why do some plants grow in some locations, but not in others? What happens to the water cycle as vegetation in certain areas changes? We know that plants convert carbon dioxide into water, and we can predict that when there is more plant life, there is more release of water into the atmosphere—but what is the line that describes this increase? Or, is the relationship between vegetation and transpiration even a line? (Juan thinks the relationship is non-linear; “nature is rarely a line,” he said.)

 

Evapotranspiration (ET) is the process through which water leaves the surface of the planet and joins the atmosphere. In the semi-arid Southwest, where there isn’t much precipitation or surface water, ET accounts for the bulk of our water budget*. Actually, ET is a combination process: part evaporation (water moving to the air from the soil or water-bodies), and part transpiration (water moving to the air through plants). Juan says, “We don’t understand how water leaves the surface, just that it does.” He wants to know how much water leaves through plants and how much leaves directly from the ground. (Discerning this difference is called ET partitioning.) Juan also wants to know how other interactions, such as temperature, sunlight, wind, amount of foliage, and shape of plants, affect ET and partitioning. (This interest in the interactions between variables within a system describes the eco- part of Juan’s area of study: eco-hydrology.)

 

Because energy from the sun drives the ET process, helping plants to convert carbon dioxide into water, Juan began his research by sampling the amount of sunlight that penetrates areas with different vegetation densities. He measured six 50 m transects that ranged from 2% tree cover to 73% tree cover, and he measured the sunlight availability at four points in the year to account for seasonal changes in the vegetation (“Trees are not static things!” he said). Then, using the same 300 data locations, he dropped ice on the ground to measure the evaporation as the ice melted. (Please pause here in the discussion of science to appreciate the image of a long-haired, gregarious graduate student running through the Sonoran desert with scientific instruments and handfuls of ice.) Juan was able to see how the amount of sunlight reaching the ground influences evaporation. But how to measure the transpiration piece of ET?

 

Juan made a lot of wooden boxes and sealed them. He filled 100 boxes with soil. In some of these boxes he also planted a tree. By putting all of the boxes together, and shifting the arrangement of soil boxes and tree boxes, he could create different levels of canopy cover. Then, he could measure water loss for each isolated unit of box-land. By putting a known amount of water into a box, weighing the box, and then weighing the box two or three days later, he could measure the amount of water lost. For soil boxes, the water loss occurred entirely through evaporation. But for tree boxes, some of the water was lost through evaporation, and some through transpiration. How could he figure out the E and the T of the equation?

 

Here’s where I get a little lost. I can picture rows of soil boxes and tree boxes, and I can understand that (weight of Box + known water) – (weight of Box later on) = (weight lost through water loss). But when Juan began describing the insertion of heating cables into trees, I couldn’t form an image. I think I understand the premise, though. Wood doesn’t conduct heat so well. But water is an A+ heat conductor. So, if a pulse of heat is sent through a tree branch, and the temperature is measured at certain points along that branch, it is possible to figure out the presence—and even velocity—of water in that branch.

 

It was exciting to hear about the research questions coupled with the research process. The kids at Wilson K8 had that experience, and then some. They got to collect their own data. Juan implemented the same soil box vs. tree box experiment in their classroom. (He did adjust the scale. In his own experiment, the 100 heavy boxes he and his colleagues moved 2-3 times a week resulted in 230 tons of weight moved over the course of their research.) The kids used smaller containers, and they put the containers together to form container-lands that were 0% plants, 25% plants, 50% plants, 75% plants and 100% plants. Then they did what Juan had done with the boxes and trees—they added known amounts of water to their containers, and measured water loss over time. They plotted their results to see the differences in water loss for the container-lands with few plants vs. the water loss for the container-lands with many plants.

 

“Why do you think this happens?” Juan asked.

 

 

 

* To learn more about water budgets, see http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/guides/mtr/hyd/bdgt.rxml or http://www.brown.edu/Courses/GE0158/web2_revised/dennis/pages/budget.html

Education and Outreach July 5, 2009

Did biospherians have sex inside the Bubble?

 

According to Matt Adamson, Coordinator of Education and Outreach at Biosphere 2, this is one of the more predictable questions asked by visitors to B2. Tour groups move through the 3.15-acre enclosure every hour. If current outreach efforts continue, there will soon be 150,000 visitors to B2 each year. Most visitors are either middle-schoolers or middle-aged. In addition to questions in the reality TV vein, concerning matters of psychological and social intrigue, visitors also want to know if B2 research is funded by tax dollars (it isn’t; expenses are paid by visitor revenue and a 10-year, $30 million grant) or if B2 has a stance on global warming (um, is inquiry a stance?).

 

But what B2 visitors really want to learn about is science. Matt says it is often the interactions between guests and scientists that push our collective thinking ahead. For example, when Matt was talking to a tour group about decisions like how much acreage within a biosphere should be used for crops versus how much for biomes, a visitor asked, If biospheres were to be used to populate space, would agricultural and biome plants even grow in a micro-gravity environment? Good question.

 

These conversations about science are the whole point of Biosphere 2. Well, half the point. Of course, the major raison d’être is the research itself, especially since given B2’s unique size and features, it can support fieldwork that can’t be done anywhere else. But at B2, the research and the outreach go hand in hand. As a case in point, consider the fact that in addition to conducting cutting edge research, all B2 researchers are required to engage in some kind of engagement with the public. For some researchers this means public presentations or exhibits; for others it means chatting with tour groups about their work as the guests move through the biomes; for most, it means all of the above.

 

To enhance the frequency and depth of these informal interactions between visitors and scientists, one of the old apartments inhabited by biospherians is being remodeled into an interactive lab space. Guests will be able to watch scientists in the act of collecting or analyzing data; better yet, they will be able to ask questions about what they see. The Hill-slopes project—a central, large-scale, institution-wide, interdisciplinary water and soil experiment currently under construction in what used to be the agricultural zone where biospherians grew their food—will also encourage visitor participation. Guests will be able to interact with instruments, directing a robot, say, to measure rainfall in quadrant X. Data from the site will be shared as it is gathered.

 

Why the emphasis on education and outreach? Matt, who comes from a family of educators and began his own career as a kindergarten teacher, explains that there is a lot to be gained from widespread scientific literacy. When voters and policy-makers are better informed, they are better able to navigate complex decisions. Also—and here Matt, who is unfailingly enthusiastic, grows even more bright-eyed—what if B2 could be a model of a new kind of science? What if scientists didn’t work in isolation, communicating only with other scientists, but functioned at the center of public awareness, working visibly on common problems and concerns? What if communication about science between scientists and non-scientists could be more reciprocal and interdependent (like life within a biosphere)?

 

Matt wears about 17 hats in pursuit of this ideal. He makes sure the 11 tour guides—who don’t work from a script and are encouraged to model their presentations after their own expertise and the interests and questions of the guests—still present a consistent program. He runs Science Saturday, which is a monthly day-long science fair where guests can browse exhibits and try hands-on activities like operating a hover car. Matt also oversees Let’s Talk Science, a lecture series led by professors; this fall, the series will focus on topics related to weather and climate. Then there is the K-12 fieldtrip program that includes hands-on, standards-based activities, with a focus on water. Matt also oversees the undergraduate students, often science or math teachers-in-training, who facilitate field-trip activities and participate in other outreach activities, such as Science Saturday booths that demonstrate the use of scientific instruments. Matt is also a member of the B2 Management Committee, which makes operations-related decisions, updates exhibits and reviews visitor experiences. Then there’s grants committee work; there’s working with the B2 Institute Science and Society Fellows who will practice disseminating their research to the public through browse sessions, press releases, general public lectures and exhibits; there’s the web site that has to be updated.

 

If it already sounds like Matt works several full-time jobs, consider that roughly 80% of his time is devoted to the Arizona Center for STEM Teachers (ACST) which was created through a three-year, $1.5 million grant by Science Foundation Arizona, and is devoted to the professional development and retention of science, technology, engineering and mathematics teachers. ACST offers three short courses every year (last academic weekend courses were offered in evolution, environmental science and optics and astronomy; about 50 teachers from around the state attended each weekend course) and a 17-day, residential Summer Institute. This year’s Summer Institute kicks off on July 8. Each of the 35 teachers enrolled will receive a $2500 stipend, a Mac Notebook, standards- and inquiry-based curriculum that is ready for immediate classroom implementation, and a year of coaching and mentoring by a lead teacher. The teachers, selected from a pool of well over 100 applicants, participate at no cost other than what they give in time. The teacher-driven program is meant to motivate and inspire teachers, while making them feel valued as professionals. (Stay tuned for more on the Summer Institute, as I’ll be spending at least a day in the coming weeks with these dedicated teachers.)

 

My conversation with Matt has me thinking about the ways in which communication can further and deepen our understanding. I realize that I wouldn’t be a writer if I didn’t already believe that to be true.

First Impressions June 9, 2009

This is my first visit to Biosphere 2—my first time heading this far north on Oracle, my first time passing Saddlebrooke Resort Active Adult Community. Ecologist Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman, who is driving, nods at the Saddlebrooke entrance gate as we pass and asks, “What do you notice about the saguaros here?” I am spending the day with scientists and don’t want to fail this first test in observation. I stare at the small stand of saguaros, but I can’t discern anything special about them other than that they appear somewhat scraggly and kind of small (as saguaros go). I tell Mitch I give up, and he explains: they are the only saguaro here. They aren’t prone to survival at this altitude (about 3,500 feet), and so he’s heard that the Saddlebrooke saguaro are replaced when their flesh freezes during especially cool winters.

 

This seems an appropriate introduction to my first visit to the largest closed ecological system on our planet. In minutes I will walk into a very large building and see Caribbean ocean water, tropical rainforest plants, and grasses native to Asia and Africa, all housed in an Arizona desert under glass. I am struck by the things we do, we humans. We are capable of great feats, and sometimes the things we do are very strange.

 

Biosphere 2 is a model of the first biosphere—Earth—and was built with several purposes in mind. First, scientists wanted a laboratory in which to achieve better understanding of the regularities and laws that control life within and between ecosystems. The idea is that by recreating five ecosystems (ocean with coral reef; mangrove wetland; fog desert; tropical rainforest; and savannah grassland) and bringing them into proximity, scientists can better see how ecosystems interact, and learn how each biome contributes to the interactions that drive natural adaptation to change. When the climate of a planet—in this case, our planet—changes, how does this environmental shift affect each different ecosystem, and how does what happens with the mangroves affect what happens in the desert, and so on? All life on our planet is interdependent and connected, and Biosphere 2 is the most advanced lab setting in which to study these relationships.

 

Another reason Biosphere 2 was built was to study the design and creation of human life support systems that could help humans survive on our own turf, or on distant planets. The first and second Biosphere missions, in the early 1990s, tested the survivability of human populations living under glass. The agricultural crops and flora growing within the Biosphere had to provide the residents with all the food and oxygen they needed for survival. The problematic gas dynamics of a closed system had to be resolved so that the glass wouldn’t explode when the temperature increased each day and the gases inside the biosphere expanded. In addition, systems for recycling waste and water had to be developed. The goal was to create a self-regulating and life-sustaining system.

 

A third reason for the creation of Biosphere 2 was to develop technologies to reduce pollution and produce higher-yielding, sustainable agricultural crops. This goal is still manifest in the colorful water- and energy-sustainable casitas of the B2 Institute where scientists are working on ways to green up urban living, and in the demonstration solar panels clustered on the ground outside the Biosphere. Upon arrival at Biosphere 2, it is clear to me that, just as the motto states, this is a place Where Science Lives. While humans no longer live here under the glass, human questions about climate change, human concerns about water and energy sustainability, and human experiments to study the strength and fragility of our planet, do. I am about to step inside.

 

I thought it would be like walking into a really big greenhouse. I figured there would be a lot of impressive plants, and plenty of sunlight, and the close touch of humid air. I thought it might smell a little bit like mulch. And I figured that even though the plants would be real, I would sense the synthetic premise of the place—the fact that it is human-made. What I didn’t know is that I would be moved.

 

In large part I am moved by smell. I am transported. There is unspeakable olfactory intensity at the intersection of so many different kinds of life. I smell jungle. I smell sand. I smell dirt and dense green. I smell heat. I smell sticky sea air. The smells are so big and overwhelming that I feel like the air is inhaling me, instead of the other way around. The changes in smell as we move through the Biosphere are swift and extreme. When we cross over the seams between biomes there is a sudden shift in sensory experience that makes me pulse from one set of memories or associations to another. All the plants I see—the Asian and African grasses, the mangroves, the ocotillo, the ginger, the coffee, the piñon—were collected here for a purpose. Like the scraggly saguaro at the entrance gate of Saddlebrooke, they were brought. And yet, my earlier fixation on the division between synthetic and natural occurrence seems less important. I grab the rope railing to ascend the slippery fake rocks in the rainforest; I climb the hot metal ladder to the fake mountaintop; I grin and grin. I am enthralled.

 

Walking the boardwalk between biomes, mind and body buzzing and cycling through sensory input, I also feel something I struggle to name. I think I’ll call it love. Love for human endeavor. Love for the mysteries we probe. Love for how things work. Love for the things we do and don’t and might come to know.

 

I haven’t even told you yet about the giant lung.

 

Before we leave for the day, Mitch invites me to join in on an experiment he has just begun in the desert biome (which is a few degrees warmer than the actual desert outside). Working with us is Emily, a high school researcher whose science fair project, a comparison of urban and rural soil response to metal contaminants, placed first at regional and state fairs, and then won third place at the International Science Fair in Reno. (Throughout the day I have had to ask for a translation of every science-y acronym, but Emily is in the know!) We will be pulsing soil microcosms with a water treatment to simulate a rain event. In other words, we will put droppers full of water into plastic bottles filled with dirt.

 

The experiment doesn’t look like much. But it asks big questions. For example: What if evolution didn’t occur for individuals, but for communities? The idea of “group selection” has been greeted far from warmly by many scientists. In fact, even to consider the possibility that traits could be hereditable by groups rather than by individuals has been called heresy in some science communities. People say that discussion of group selection extends a mechanism beyond what science can demonstrate. Mitch plans to use science to demonstrate it. He doesn’t seem daunted.

 

He explains that he and his collaborating researcher will use 240 soil microcosms (the plastic bottles filled with dirt) and expose them to stress treatments, including drought and heavy rain events. They will observe how the soil microbes respond to stresses in the environment. Because microbes have a short span between generations, because many kinds of microbes coexist in the same patch of dirt, and because the dirt communities are clearly defined and segregated, it will be possible to see and measure group adaptations in response to changes in the environment. If it is discovered, for example, that a certain response to rain events is hereditable, and if it is discovered that the trait is hereditable on a group as opposed to individual level, Mitch and his colleague could show that preservation of systems is as important as preservation of species. (Plus, he could say, “Ha, ha,” to the people shouting heresy.)

 

The experiment hasn’t been running long, and the goal is to keep it going for about nine months. Already, there has been a glitch. The soil microcosms were supposed to be on a drought cycle, but someone in the control room sent a rainstorm through the desert. To fix the problem, a technician cranked the temperature in the desert to dry out the dirt samples. Mitch doesn’t think it will be a problem in the long-run, but he does eye the dirt splatters inside the bottles with a degree of concern. He shows me how to use the syringe, filling it to a little over 4 ml with “de-i” (de-iodized) water, and flicking it to get rid of air bubbles before slowly saturating the dirt. Emily and Mitch each finish treating two trays before I have finished one. Mitch looks at how little ground 4 ml of water covers, and decides to add one more ml to each sample. Then it is time to go. On the drive back to Tucson my head is full and I am very tired.