‘Bonsai Earth. Dialogues on revisiting Biosphere 2 and insights for the future now’

“Our experience of nature is a recreational one (…) a retro effect,” Koert Van Mensvoort wrote. “In our culture, nature is continually presented as a lost world.”  

Can a human-animal-nature-future be imagined? What kind of urban ecosystem is associated with it? What were the lessons learned from Biosphere 2, the audacious eco-optimistic experiment of 1991 imagined and realized by Ed Bass and John Polk Allen? What do the insights from the experiment mean for today’s global environmental challenges? And where does technology come in? 

PROGRAMME: 

10:00: Intro + film by Bas Smets (landscape architect)

10:30: Lecture by Kathelin Gray (Biosphere 2; co-founder of Ecotechnics)

11:15: Short reflections by Angelo Vermeulen (artist), Ivan Henriques (artist), Philippe Claeys (VUB geologist), Tom Lenaerts (Bio-informatics Institute BXL), Karine Van Doninck (LLN).

12:00 - 13:00: Living Library - an interactive format known as the Living Library in which participants can take place at round tables and each table will be hosted by one or two people. These people are researchers, artists, activists, authorities who all deal with dimensions of the earth to analyze and predict the possibility of the earth as an ecosystem in the next future.  The hosts remain seated, the participating discussants will rotate 2 times.

Host: Marleen Wynants (Crosstalks)

This event is part of the Project Casterman-Hamers Academic Chair History & Philosophy of Sciences  and is organised by VUB Crosstalks and STAL (a joint project by VUB, ULB and BOZAR) within the I Love Science Festival.