Writing
I also write words that don't rhyme! I'm a journalist, editor and book author focusing on ecological and human health. If you have a project that might benefit from my word-massaging skills, get in touch.
Dreaming the Biosphere
The book. The product of 50 interviews, archival research and a question:
What it would take for us and all creatures to live in harmony?
Winner, Arizona Book Awards (best nonfiction) and ForeWord Book of the Year Award (Gold Medal, best environmental book of the year from an independent publisher)
Biosphere 2 rises from southern Arizona's high desert like an immense greenhouse spaceship. Originally packed with 3,800 carefully selected plant, animal and insect species, this sealed terrarium holds one of the world’s most biodiverse—and artificial—wildernesses. In 1991, a team of eight scientists and experimental theater performers locked themselves inside this miniature world. They vowed not to come out for two years. Their survival would depend entirely on whether they could learn to cooperate, with each other and with their created Edenic paradise.
Things did not go quite as planned. (That's an understatement).
Yet for all its strangeness, the book argues, perhaps strangest of all was how typical Biosphere 2 actually was. Traversing history, the book unfolds this ecotopian adventure as a parable. Dreaming the Biosphere explores the intersections of ecology, community, inspiration and madness, to unravel the story of Biosphere 2—and through it, the story of the human quest for a more harmonious world.
“Impeccably researched . . . Riveting, surprising, and in the end devastatingly human, this is a saga for the ages.”
— Booklist, starred review
“Reider guides the reader to the conclusion that the problems we faced in designing and managing a self-organizing, human-inhabited biosphere are essentially those that confront globalizing humanity. Dreaming the Biosphere offers timely lessons.
This book makes my irrational devotion to that crazy project worth everything it cost.”
— Dr. Tony Burgess, Biosphere 2 ecosystem designer
Available in the U.S. from your bookseller. Available in NZ directly from the author.
What it would take for us and all creatures to live in harmony?
Winner, Arizona Book Awards (best nonfiction) and ForeWord Book of the Year Award (Gold Medal, best environmental book of the year from an independent publisher)
Biosphere 2 rises from southern Arizona's high desert like an immense greenhouse spaceship. Originally packed with 3,800 carefully selected plant, animal and insect species, this sealed terrarium holds one of the world’s most biodiverse—and artificial—wildernesses. In 1991, a team of eight scientists and experimental theater performers locked themselves inside this miniature world. They vowed not to come out for two years. Their survival would depend entirely on whether they could learn to cooperate, with each other and with their created Edenic paradise.
Things did not go quite as planned. (That's an understatement).
Yet for all its strangeness, the book argues, perhaps strangest of all was how typical Biosphere 2 actually was. Traversing history, the book unfolds this ecotopian adventure as a parable. Dreaming the Biosphere explores the intersections of ecology, community, inspiration and madness, to unravel the story of Biosphere 2—and through it, the story of the human quest for a more harmonious world.
“Impeccably researched . . . Riveting, surprising, and in the end devastatingly human, this is a saga for the ages.”
— Booklist, starred review
“Reider guides the reader to the conclusion that the problems we faced in designing and managing a self-organizing, human-inhabited biosphere are essentially those that confront globalizing humanity. Dreaming the Biosphere offers timely lessons.
This book makes my irrational devotion to that crazy project worth everything it cost.”
— Dr. Tony Burgess, Biosphere 2 ecosystem designer
Available in the U.S. from your bookseller. Available in NZ directly from the author.
