During last Tuesday’s student convocation at the Bradley Building, Jane Poynter revealed herself to be a person of many and varied talents–an explorer, adventurer, scientist, author, businesswoman, and a philanthropist who uses her influence to enlist well known athletes in the cause of promoting environmental awareness.

As one of the original crew members of Biosphere 2, Poynter lived for two years with seven others in a completely sealed environment built during the 1980s and 90s in the Arizona desert. During the building of Biosphere 2, she traveled the globe to gather natural materials for the structure’s biomes (unique closed environments). The biomes included a tropical rainforest, an ocean beach with a coral reef, a savannah grassland, a fog desert, a mangrove wetland, and a human habitat coexisting with the others. Poynter’s primary duty was to manage the farm where the facility’s food was grown.

Following the adventure of Biosphere 2, she teamed up with several engineers and fellow biospherian, Taber MacCallum, to create Paragon Space Development Corporation, an aerospace corporation focusing on sealed ecological systems for use in hostile conditions like outer space or deep sea environments.

But perhaps Poynter’s greatest contribution may be as an educator, drawing upon her own extensive experiences—especially her intimate relationship with the environment in the microcosm of Biosphere 2—to provide the very real perspective needed to understand our own connection to the greater biosphere of Earth itself.

“One of the most extraordinary experiences that I had personally living inside Biosphere 2,” said Poynter during her presentation, “was the literal and visceral experience of being a part of my biosphere.

“I knew at every moment that oxygen was being supplied to me by the plants and algae that were inside of Biosphere 2,” she continued, “and my breath, as I exhaled, was providing the vital nutrient carbon-dioxide for these plants to grow.”

That kind of insight just isn’t available to those of us on the outside. So instead, we must visualize the connection.

“People who haven’t had that experience have to get at it through a leap of imagination.” Poynter went on to say, “The planet we live on isn’t human scale. It’s so big that as humans it’s hard for us to imagine that the oxygen [we] breathe could have been produced by a plant a thousand years ago.

“The CO2 that [we] breathe out could become part of a plant in a hundred years,” she continued, “so, what I find is that some people get it, but there’ll be some who don’t want to.”

Poynter hopes to increase public awareness of environmental issues by continuing to speak at events such as Lakeland’s convocation.

According to Nate Lowe, assistant professor of writing and an instructor of a Core III course concerned with the environment, that’s something we need.

“We get stuck in the mindset that problems are a long way off, and we’ve got a lot of time to deal with them,” he said after attending the convocation. “But her example suggested that problems are constantly swirling around us, and we need to be addressing those at all times. If we don’t, we could reach a point where we have to react abruptly, expensively and in a knee-jerk fashion.”

Lowe went on to say, “Her example showed the real implications of [the biospherians’] actions within that closed system.”

Those implications to life in what Poynter calls “Biosphere 1” (Earth) are exactly the things that are being actively discussed in forums like Lowe’s Core III class on the environment and North American consumption—and are the lessons we need to learn if we are to keep our own great biosphere a viable place for future life.