Although I set my story in the twenty-first century, I only used the future as a screen for projecting enlarged images from our own time. I had no difficulty believing that we could poison the planet, but I never for a moment believed that we could save ourselves by building and inhabiting a global network of enclosed cities. Even if we knew how, we lack the will or the means to carry it out. All the resources of our nation have been required to sustain a handful of astronauts for a few weeks in cramped capsules, and even those resources have not always been sufficient to keep the astronauts alive.
Seven years after I began fashioning the Enclosure out of words in a rented room in Oregon, engineers began constructing Biosphere 2 out of glass and steel in the Arizona desert. This cluster of greenhouses, covering 3.5 acres and fitted with the best technology money could buy, was designed to be a self-contained system, within which humans could live and work indefinitely, growing all their own food and recycling their wastes, insulated from the outside. The developers believed that such bubble shelters might one day enable us to colonize other planets, or to survive in the degraded atmosphere of this one. Terrarium had been in print for more than five years when the first group of colonists moved inside Biosphere 2. The press followed this endeavor with much ballyhoo, at first announcing visionary hopes, and then, as problems emerged, confessing doubts. There were hints of illness, malnutrition, stress. There were reports of squabbles among the eight colonists. An injury forced one of them to sneak outside for medical treatment. The filtration system broke down, and technicians had to pipe in fresh supplies of air. Scientists who had neither money nor reputation invested in the project began to speak of it as a tourist attraction, a technological fantasy, a hoax. Whether hoax or bold experiment, Biosphere 2 has demonstrated that we are a long, long way from knowing enough to build a substitute for earth.
To gauge how much time has passed since I hammered out the opening lines of Terrarium, I need only look at Jesse, who is now seventeen years old, with his own downy beard. He is an inch taller than six feet, and he weighs 195 pounds, far too heavy for me to hoist in my arms or tote in a backpack. But he still tugs my thoughts into the future, and so does Eva, and so do the students who gather in my classes, the toddlers who chase dogs down our street, and the babies whose faces beam from the arms of my neighbors. I am still trying to imagine how we can insure that the earth will remain a home for them, and that it will not become, like Venus or Mars, a hostile planet.
For all my worries, I wrote Terrarium with a sense of hope, and on rereading the book I find that hope renewed. The earth remains fertile and resilient. No matter how far we have retreated indoors, we are inseparably bound to the earth through our senses, through our flesh, through the yearnings and pleasures of sex, through the cycles of birth and death. Like Phoenix, any of us may wake up to discover where we truly dwell. Like Zuni and Teeg, we may labor for what we love, no matter how many voices tell us to give up. Like the colonists gathered on the Oregon shore, we may use the wealth of human knowledge to build communities that are materially simple and spiritually complex, respectful of our places and of the creatures who share them with us. We may seek holy ground together. Even in dark times, we may keep telling stories, witnessing to a wild beauty that we do not invent, a power we do not own.
Bloomington, Indiana
Spring 1995
Terrarium Page 26
