Sheltering in Place: A Survivor's Guide

While making this film, I never could have imagined that a pandemic would require the entire world to be quarantined. Like all of us today, the biospherians lived confined inside, and they managed day to day life with limited resources, often under great interpersonal stress. But when they re-entered the world, they were forever transformed—no longer would they take anything for granted—not even a breath. In light of Covid-19, we are all living like biospherians, and we too will reenter a new world. The question is how will we be transformed? Now with a visceral sense of the fragility of our world, it’s on us to protect it. – Filmmaker Matt Wolf

A Brief Commentary & Reflection on the film,
“Spaceship Earth”
by John Bennison, Mountain Shadow Director

In the beginning there were the heavens and the earth,
the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.
Paraphrase of Genesis 1:1

I was in boarding school when I read William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies. In this story, a band of British lads are the only survivors of a plane crash somewhere in the Pacific. They find themselves marooned on what is at first an idyllic island paradise. All they have to do is figure out how to survive by cooperatively working together in a new world with an abundance of possibilities. [Photo below right: 1963 film version]

Even if you never read the story you can guess what happens. By the time the smoke from their signal fire is spotted some months later by a passing naval ship, the island has become a wasteland, and – in the author’s view of the cruelty and stupidity of which humans are fully capable – three of the boys are dead.

Stepping ashore and surveying the human wreckage, the ship’s captain says to Ralph, the boy’s charismatic cult leader, “I should have thought a pack of British boys would have been able to put up a better show than that.” The author then concludes, “Ralph wept for the end of innocence, for the darkness of the human heart.”

It was from such a dark reminiscence of this old novel that I first viewed Matt Wolf’s new documentary film, “Spaceship Earth.” While I vaguely recall the real event the filmmaker recounts that occurred in the New Mexico desert in 1991, perhaps any similarity to the basic plotline between Golding’s novel and what was an exhaustive, sophisticated late 20th-century scientific experiment only lies in a sociological study of human behavior.

In Wolf’s documentary, so-called synergists first traipse around the world, gathering all sorts of plants and animals to accompany eight “biospherians” into a massive time capsule they call “Biosphere 2.” It’s their modern version of Noah’s Ark, where they strive to escape the flood of environmental destruction humans have wrought upon this old earth, and undertake a fresh start; armed with a vast amount of accumulated human knowledge, goodwill, and more than a little optimism. What could possibly go wrong?

On the outside, their counterparts, the synergists record, chronicle and archive everything going on inside the giant bubble. The bond of trust between these two worlds is strong. This band of misfit idealists have actually been living and dreaming together for decades; beginning in San Francisco in 1967. The fact one of them had the foresight to photograph and film all their adventures over the years helps this documentary come alive like a true life drama.

Matt Wolf’s film was due to be released this Spring, just as the Covid-19 pandemic – like everything else -- shuttered all the theaters and forced us to offer this documentary to viewers online. In a sense, we have all been unwitting participants in a social science experiment in an actual reality show; where terms like cabin fever and Survivor’s Island are hardly a theoretical term or harmless entertainment. Can we all get along and make the world a better place? That’s a common question, perhaps more relevant today than ever before.

William Golding’s novel was a fictional tale, of course. But a year or so after I read his story during my own adolescence, an article appeared in an Australian newspaper; about six boys who had just been found on a rocky islet south of Tonga, an island group in the Pacific Ocean. The boys had been rescued by an Australian sea captain after being marooned on the island of Ata for more than a year. That island was previously considered uninhabitable.

“But by the time we arrived,” Captain Warner later wrote in his memoirs, “the boys had set up a small commune with a food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination. They agreed to work in teams of two, drawing up a strict roster for garden, kitchen and guard duty. Sometimes they quarrelled, but whenever that happened they solved it by imposing a time-out. Their days began and ended with song. One of the boys fashioned a makeshift guitar from a piece of driftwood, half a coconut shell and six steel wires salvaged from their wrecked boat, and played it to help lift their spirits.”

In the compendium of ancient mythologies there are numerous variations of the story of creation. The Mesopotamia myth now known as “Gilgamesh and the Netherworld” opens with a prologue, where the gods and the universe already exist; and where once heaven and earth were one, only to be later split. Only afterwards is humankind created, and then tasked with the job of caring for the heavens, the earth and the Underworld.

In this sense, “Spaceship Earth” was more than a late-20th century science (or science fiction) experiment. It was a modern version of humankind exploring the possibility of re-uniting an idyllic heaven and earth; instead of letting everything go to Hell. jb