'Spaceship Earth' - Movie Review

The short summary of this movie is "it's a documentary about Biosphere 2." But it's about so much more, most notably the rather impressive group of hippies who made it happen. Not that that word ("hippies") was ever mentioned during the film, but it's a very distinctive philosophy and they certainly match the time period. But whatever you think of hippies, these ones were atypical. Smart and ambitious, and one of their few rules was "no drugs." They ran a theatre. They read Rachel Carson and Buckminster Fuller, and they believed humanity was destroying the Earth (the hippies got that one right a couple decades ahead of the rest of us). Just running a theatre was too easy: they relocated and started a ranch while still running a theatre. They never knew what they were doing when they started, but they learned. The ranch got to be self-sustaining, so it was time to move on. They built a ship - the ocean-going variety - although none of them knew anything about that either. They went around the world in the ship. They built a hotel in Kathmandu: they had a guy with oil money who liked them, he would buy properties around the world, they would go there and "enhance the property's value." They did theatre everywhere. And eventually ... they decided to build Biosphere 2.

It was a huge and expensive project - again backed by oil money. And it only sort of went according to plan. But I'll leave the rest to you to watch the movie, which you should do: it's an intriguing story. But I'll add that one name that's big in American politics right now does come up near the end: Steve Bannon (this was around 1994).

These people were unquestionably weird and possibly a little bit crazy, but very smart and my god I envy them their pre-Biosphere travels and would have loved to go with them - although I don't think I could have fit in. <shrug>