By Jill Szoo Wilson
Writer | Theatre Artist | Educator

Conceived in the 1980s and constructed between 1987 and 1991, Biosphere 2 compressed several of Earth’s ecosystems beneath glass across 3.14 acres of the Arizona desert. Its creators wanted to know whether people could live inside a self-sustaining world, research that might eventually support colonies beyond Earth. In September 1991, eight people sealed themselves inside for two years.

Why anyone decided Earth needed a three-acre backup in Arizona is a fair question. People must have had more time on their hands in the 1980s.

Outside the glass, the United States was crossing from one era into another. Ronald Reagan was president when construction began; George H. W. Bush occupied the White House by the time the doors sealed. Americans watched the Berlin Wall come down on television. Less than two years later, the Gulf War began live on CNN. The AIDS Memorial Quilt was first unfolded across the National Mall in 1987, giving thousands of private losses a public face, and the Americans with Disabilities Act became law three years later. Taylor Swift was born in Pennsylvania while the structure was going up. Tim Berners-Lee announced the World Wide Web to the wider internet only weeks before the mission began. Dr. Seuss died two days before the eight residents entered Biosphere 2; Miles Davis died two days after. Through all of it, the country was being shaped by forces no one could fully control.

Inside Biosphere 2, the trees grew in perfect stillness. At first, they seemed to thrive, reaching upward faster than their counterparts in the open air. Then they began to fall. Not just a few, either. Several. Their collapse exposed what all that rapid growth had concealed: without wind pressing against their trunks, the trees had not developed the stronger wood needed to support their own height. Nearby, the miniature ocean moved beneath manufactured waves while the air among the trees remained still.

Botanists have a word for the way plants respond to this kind of physical pressure: thigmomorphogenesis. A tree exposed to wind does more than sway. Repeated bending changes how it grows, helping the trunk develop the structure needed to withstand forces it will encounter later. What looks like interference is, at least in part, construction.

There is an easy version of this story in which hardship makes us stronger. Life is considerably less tidy than that. Some storms leave damage. Some losses remain losses. Suffering carries no guarantee that wisdom or courage will appear on the other side.

Still, the trees inside Biosphere 2 suggest something more interesting. While we are getting through a difficult season, we rarely know what pressure is building in us. We may have to make decisions while afraid or continue through circumstances we would gladly escape. Months later, sometimes years later, we meet a difficulty that once would have stopped us and find that we can keep going.

Pain does not become good because something useful can grow under its pressure. A tree does not have to call the wind kind in order to grow stronger wood.

Prayer makes this harder to see. We ask God to stop what hurts because we want it to stop. Sometimes the answer is easy to recognize: the scan comes back clear, the phone finally rings, the door opens. Other times morning comes, and very little has changed. The same problem is waiting. The same decision still has to be made. Yet the person who once thought, I cannot do this, gets up and does the next thing anyway.

The wind has not stopped. The trunk is different.

Inside the glass in Arizona, the trees had warmth, water, sunlight, and room to grow. Beside them, the little ocean kept moving beneath its manufactured waves.

The trees, for all their height, had never learned what it was to sway.