Dreaming the Biosphere - book launch & talk/signing with the author

The gleaming Biosphere 2 rises from Arizona's high desert like a bizarre hybrid of spaceship and greenhouse. Featuring a lush miniature rainforest, ocean, desert and farm, this extravagant eco-utopia under glass housed eight die-hard human "biospherians" on a survival mission in the 1990s. Rebecca Reider's book Dreaming the Biosphere, out this November from University of New Mexico Press, tells this mini-world's story. And more than that, it's a probing look at the American relationship to nature. While unfolding the biospherians' saga of high-tech peasant farming, near-starvation, and quest for total ecological sustainability, the book grapples with American environmental history, exploring the perpetual dream of creating a better world -- what in the human mind stands in the way, and what signs still point to hope. The author's talk at the event will tell the wild tale of Biosphere 2 and also focus on what lessons this miniature biosphere holds for the future of our own world.

Booklist calls Dreaming the Biosphere "...impeccably researched...Reider sees Biosphere 2’s complicated success and failure as far more than a clash of science and myth or data and personality. She writes a fable of epic dreams burdened by superegos and drama that could not be contained. Riveting, surprising, and in the end devastatingly human, this is a saga for the ages."