(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Distant and dreamy proclaims a female voice: “We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the wide inheritance of earth. We must all die! The species of man must perish… »The lines are from Mary Shelley's apocalyptic science fiction fable The Last Man (1826). From the fog of the canvas, a picture of a strange and enormous greenhouse emerges in the desert. Soon, the film cuts between different surveillance cameras, and we see various growths climbing around each other in an inner, closed world. As the voice tells, the premise falls into place: The voice belongs to a researcher, perhaps the last person of all. She is trapped in the greenhouse that was once constructed as a closed biosphere, but has now become the only viable place on earth after the climate has run away and the planet's atmosphere has changed to a toxic gas cloud, which on planet Venus . The image that is being raised is extreme, because soon the greenhouse appears as a small cabin on Earth's spaceship, the only cabin with level conditions on a globe that, like a giant version of the Titanic, drives death and depopulates into the cosmic night.
Through the eyes of this perhaps the only surviving person on earth, the images from the greenhouse transform: The trees turn into the last trees, the fish to the last fish – or animals at all – and the grass into a biological souvenir. At the same time, we soon realize that what we are seeing is a log – perhaps a leftover document from this almost sweetly resigned naturalist who tries to stay alive day by day. When she records the imbalance between oxygen and carbon dioxide, we understand that the soaring emergency in the greenhouse repeats the global climate disaster in a microscopic and insignificant aftermath. Everything is already too late, and the story appears at first glance as a poetic meditation on the transience of all things.
The real story. Ben River's art film may be science fiction, but it has a documentary feel and is also filmed on location. The Biosphere 2 research unit is located in Arizona and is the largest closed biological system ever constructed. When the project was launched in the 1980s, the ambition was to build a stable and self-driven biological system that also has a stable atmosphere. In this way, the residents were not only to be provided with usable air, but also with self-produced food for longer periods of time. Thus, the experiment could lay the foundation for future colonies on Mars, a dream that today seems more widespread than ever. Not only does Elon Musk and SpaceX facilitate a colonization of the "red planet". Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – the vice president of the United Arab Emirates – has just stated that he intends to found a city the size of Chicago on Mars during our century. The possibility of human societies and "terraforming" of other planets seems to make the environmental movement's warning "We have only one planet" a truth with modifications. For those who dream of an interplanetary exodus, however, the true story of the giant greenhouse Biosphere 2 can provide a sobering realityorientering.
The greenhouse appears as a small cabin on Earth's spaceship, the only cabin with level conditions.
Firstly, it proved far more difficult than expected to get the carefully selected flora and fauna under control. The stock of ants and cockroaches exploded, while many of the trees grew so excruciatingly thin and tall that they cracked under their own weight. Secondly, it was difficult to get a chemical balance in the atmosphere, so you kept running out of oxygen, which is also a theme in the film Urth. Third, the social environment, popularly known as the "anthroposphere," was a continuing problem. The group of scientists who were to live together in this semi-synthetic Eden soon found themselves in tearing conflicts and struggling to keep their mental balance. As a result of the system's many-fold imbalance, closed-circuit experiments were abandoned for the time being.
Illusion or delirium. The idea of really surviving in the greenhouse is thus quite daunting. We could think of Robinson Crusoe or stories of people who have been in the wilderness waiting to be picked up or discovered. Waiting to be saved is basically a need to be connected back to civilization's safety net. The real scientists in Biosphere 2 were secretly smuggled in food, and the greenhouse atmosphere was supplemented with oxygen. The scientist in the fictional greenhouse Urth is, on the other hand, totally exposed and delivered to fate. There are no outside supplies to save her. She lives in a bad copy of a world whose original is gone.
Still, there is something that doesn't quite fit in this story. Why is the young scientist alone? What happened to the others? Is she herself in balance, purely mental? Can we trust what she tells us? It's hard not to notice that there are still trees on the outside. And the planes pass in the sky. With this, another scenario arises: Maybe it's all a game, a daydream or a delirium. The suspicion is apparently confirmed when the woman finally says that she wants to step out into the real world, where everything is as normal – with streets, cities, people and shopping malls. But who knows – maybe this is just a confident fantasy, a final confused wish-dream.
Despite the documentary feel, the film is playful and ambiguous, and it is not crucial whether the story is believable. The point is rather the message behind the construction – and our own suspense or disbelief. In the theory of drama, putting skepticism and mistrust aside is a prerequisite to really getting into a fiction. In the climate problem, there is a certain opposite: Here is the skepticism and mistrust that climate change is due to people a fiction in which we seek refuge – to avoid taking reality seriously. Thus, we can see the scientist's prophetic sci-fi scenario as an attempt to immerse himself in the realities. The story becomes a therapeutic exercise, a staging of the distant future of the biosphere and the uncertain fate of the Earth.
The civilization experiment has gone overboard, and nature has really disappeared forever.
The dream of the absolute island. The greenhouse experiment is, in all its ambiguity, a perfect picture of today's society. In the third volume of his main work spheres philosopher Peter Sloterdijk commemorates long passages for the experiment in the Arizona desert. He sees the dream of constructing "the absolute island" as an extreme and outrageous manifestation of man's general tendency to isolate himself from nature and modify his own living environment. Biosphere 2 thus becomes an attempt at an existential reshaping of the human condition, a kind of "being in the world 2". The greenhouse in Arizona stands as a half-way ruined monument to the will to artificiality – and a dubious tribute to the "post-natural".
In the film's thought experiment, the dream of a complete mastery of nature and a humanized environment is exposed through an apocalypse full of irony. Even in the small greenhouse, man's imagined control over nature is reduced to a neurotic mapping of running processes. The protagonist's attempt to save the last greenhouse plants becomes only a soothing but meaningless gesture after the actual battle is lost – a bit like the zoo keeping alive the latest specimens of soon-extinct species. In the film's dreamlike narrative, the post-natural turns out to be eerily concrete: The experiment of civilization has gone beyond control, and nature has really disappeared forever. By simple means, the narrative thus entails a quiet reverence for the flora, fauna and environment – as something unfathomable, unmanageable and indestructible.
