Biosphere 2 Ownership and Board of Directors

1984 -1994

 


Corporate Players:

Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV), the owner of Biosphere 2 site and Biosphere 2 facilities, was a 50-50 partnership between Decisions Team Ltd. (DTL) and Decisions Investment Corporation (DIC) created in 1984. SBV located the site, and developed, designed, created, managed and researched the full operation of the $ 200,000,000 Biosphere 2 facility from 1984 to April 1, 1994.

Individual Players:

1. John Allen: Executive Chairman 1984-1986 and Director and Vice President Biosphere 2 Research, Development, and Engineering 1986-1994 who was a Director of DTL and invented Biosphere 2, and consulted the formation of the enterprise and co-founded Biospheric Design.

2. Margret Augustine: President and Chief Executive Officer of Space Biospheres Ventures who was a 20% owner of DTL plus 1% owner of DIC through Synergetic Architecture and Biospheric Design (SARBID) the architecture company and prime contracting corporation for Biosphere 2. Margret, an architect, was also CEO for SARBID.
3. Edward Bass: Chairman, 80% owner of DIC, and Financial Director of Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV).
4. Marie Harding: Chief Financial Officer, 20% owner of DTL, Vice President and 1% owner of DIC through Biospheric Design and the Institute of Ecotechnics.
5. Mark Nelson: Director of Earth and Space Applications, Chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, (UK), and 20 % owner of DTL. Institute of Ecotechnics (IE) owned 5% of DIC and had a 1% royalty agreement with SBV 1984-94 for its intellectual capital contribution.

6. Kathelin Gray: Director and 20% owner.

From April 1 to June 1994, John Allen, Margret Augustine, Marie Harding and all on the board of Space Biospheres Ventures (SBV), negotiated an agreement "satisfactory to all;" which dissolved the SBV partnership and transformed the joint venture into a corporation with Ed Bass the majority owner and the Institute of Ecotechnics, DTL, and SARBID as minority equity owners.

Allen and the team that created Biosphere 2 then formed two new companies, Biospheres, LLC, to design and build the next generation of artificial biospheres, and EcoFrontiers LLC, to carry out projects in rainforest, savannah, sustainable agriculture, and urban biomes related to Earth biosphere problems. These two companies then merged in 1999 as Global Ecotechnics Corporation (fifteen million dollars in assets), which carries on several biospheric research and development programs. The Institute of Ecotechnics also continues its association with biospheric work, holding an annual conference at EcoFrontier's Les Marronniers project in Southern France.

From April 1,1994 to December 31, 1995, Ed Bass operated Biosphere 2 through his appointed President, Steve Bannon and Scientific Committee, led by Wallace Broecker and Michael Crow of Columbia University. This management team shut down Mission Two, eliminated humans from the apparatus and the sustainable agriculture system, and turned the project over to Columbia University for five years to operate as a world class educational center with smaller scale ecosystems studies with emphasis on CO2 levels. Columbia University has been given a new ten year lease, 2000 - 2010, to continue with Biosphere 2 on a long term basis.

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