Biosphere 2 and the illusion of escape

I’ve always been fascinated by the story of Biosphere 2. In the late 1980s, an avant-garde group of actors and scientists erected a gigantic geodesic dome in the Arizona desert, to see if humans could live in ‘space colonies’ that generate their own food, water and oxygen.

I knew that the experiment had gone wrong, but that was all. I was surprised no one had made a film or book about such an…