LB/ PB
Biosphere 2 was funded by Billionaire Ed Bass who met John Polk Allen at Synergia Ranch in New Mexico.
The Art of the Possible
The furniture-makers Ed Bass found lived among an eclectic group of writers, actors, engineers, and counterculture brainiacs at Synergia Ranch, fifteen miles south of Santa Fe. The ranch was named in honor of Buckminster Fuller’s concept of synergy, wherein the behavior of a whole cannot be predicted by the behavior of its parts. Besides making furniture, the various parts of this whole made pots, studied ecology, worked construction jobs, performed theatrical pieces under a geodesic dome covered with yellow canvas, and occasionally toured the country in a refurbished school bus, billing themselves as the Theater of All Possibilities.
Compared with the other communes around Santa Fe, like Morning Star and New Buffalo, the Synergia Ranch was downright corporate. The emphasis was on self-reliance. Everyone worked to pay his own way. Drugs were forbidden, new recruits were discouraged, and half the 25 or so residents were Ivy Leaguers. The person who attracted them was a charismatic poet, scholar, and metallurgist named John Polk Allen, whose third wife, Marie, owned the ranch. Allen encouraged activities ranging from experiments in “biodynamic gardening” to recitations of Sufi stories to perfecting the techniques of candle-selling as a means of self-sufficiency—all of which tied into the premise that unless they found some way to reconcile Earth’s ecology with man’s technical innovations, the planet was in trouble.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/long-strange-trip-ed-bass/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bass
Holy cow, they made a freaking movie about the psycho cult leader John Allen and his buddy Ed Bass, starring themselves.