John Polk Allen (born May 6, 1929, Carnegie, Oklahoma)Who's Who in America (63rd ed.). Marquis Who's Who. 2008. is a systems ecologist, engineer, metallurgist, adventurer, and writer. Allen is a proponent of the science of biospherics and a pioneer in sustainable co-evolutionary development. He is the founder of Synergia Ranch, and is best known as the inventor and director of research of Biosphere 2, the world's largest vivarium and research facility to study global ecology.Bahr, Jeff. Amazing and Unusual USA. Publications International. Ltd. 2009. p. 238. Biosphere 2 set multiple records in closed ecological systems work, including degree of sealing tightness, 100% waste and water recycle, and duration of human residence within a closed system (eight people for two years). He is also involved with forestry and reforestation in Puerto Rico where he owns a 1000-acre Mahogany tree farm at Patillas.
Allen was co-producer and dramaturg of Theater of All Possibilities, an internationally touring theater company, and has over two dozen publications to his credit (many under his nom de plume, Johnny Dolphin): half scientific, the remainder in poetry, plays, essays, short stories, novels, and autobiographical fiction. He currently serves as chairman of the Institute of Ecotechnics, an international project development and management company.
A fellow of the Linnean Society, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Explorer's Club, Allen has led multiple ecological expeditions, with a focus on the ecology of early civilizations, in Nigeria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tibet, Turkey, India, and the Altiplano. He has been called a "swashbuckling frontiersman" and an "eccentric mix of scientist, artist, entrepreneur, and adventurer" by author David Jay Brown in the book Voices from the Edge (1995).Brown, David Jay; Novick, Rebecca McClean. Voices from the Edge. The Crossroads Press. 1995. p. 179.
Education Allen graduated from Pauls Valley High School in 1946, where he served as editor of the school newspaper and was named valedictorian of his class. From 1946 to 1952 he studied anthropology and history at Northwestern and Oklahoma universities, writing at Stanford University, and served as a machinist in the US Army Corps of Engineers. He earned a metallurgical-mining engineer degree with honors from the Colorado School of Mines in 1957, where he was president of the student body and received the American Gentleman Award; a master's degree with distinction in business administration from Harvard Business School in 1962, where he was a Baker Scholar; and a Certificate in Advanced Physiological Systems for Engineers from the University of Michigan in 1971.
Political activism In 1951, Allen worked as a factory worker in a meat-packing plant in Chicago, becoming involved in various efforts of community and political activism, serving as the secretary of the Anti-Discrimination Committee for the UPWA-CIO District 10 (which represented 20,000 workers), and helping to organize and lead a march to free Willie McGee, whose conviction and death sentence for rape became a cause célèbre in the burgeoning civil rights movement. While organizing for the Meat Packers Union on the South Side of Chicago, Allen worked alongside acclaimed bass-baritone and actor Paul Robeson and sociologist and leading civil rights activist W.E.B. DuBois.
Metallurgy After spending the summer of 1956 conducting research on nickel ores for the Battelle Institute, Allen became a senior metallurgist for the Allegheny Ludlum Steel Corporation, where he headed a metals team that developed over thirty alloys to product status. He then became assistant to the vice-president for David Lilienthal's Development and Resources Corporation, conducting regional projects in Iran, Liberia, and the Ivory Coast, where he became proficient in complex regional development.
Travels In 1963, Allen self-financed a two-year sojourn around the globe by land and sea to study the origins of indigenous cultures and their various approaches to living within their ecosystems. His journeys took him to Africa, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, India, Nepal, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Australia, Japan, and the Philippines. He mixed with Berbers and the avant-garde literary coterie in Tangiers; set up a painting studio in Fez, Morocco; hitch-hiked across North Africa from Tangiers to the Pyramids and Karnak; lived with tribal chiefs in Sudan; traveled with refugees to the Rann of Kutch in India and Pakistan, consulted for the international medical relief organization Project Concern International in Vietnam; lived on a junk with Tankas (Hong Kong boat people); and worked as a journalistic stringer to a foreign correspondent on the Ho Chi Minh trail in South East Asia (visiting twenty-three South Vietnamese provinces in a six-month period).Allen, John. Me and the Biospheres. Synergetic Press. 2009. p 15.
Allen's world travels led to his creating a synergistic approach to both science and art. Regarding the confluence of cultures he experienced in Tangiers, he said: "There was the avant-garde art culture with William Burroughs and the people around him, and then the Berber culture which is maybe 6,000 years old and has its roots in the ancient magical traditions, and also the imperial culture of the Spanish, French and British empires. So the combination of the Western imperial culture, the native Berber culture, and the Western avant-garde forced a personal transformation of all values, not just on a mental and emotional level, but on a physiological and social level as well."Brown, David Jay; Novick, Rebecca McClean. Voices from the Edge. The Crossroads Press. 1995. p. 181.
Theatrical and literary career In 1967, Allen co-founded Theater of All Possibilities (TAP) in San Francisco with Kathelin Gray and Marie Harding, a theater company and artistic practice network that toured domestically and internationally from 1968 to 1989. The wandering troupe contributed to multiple agricultural, ecological, and cultural projects, including performances in the Australian Outback, Peruvian Amazon, and the sacred forest in Osogbo, Nigeria. Allen served as co-producer and dramaturge for TAP, founding ten studios while working with collaborators from the sciences, technology, history, and ecology. After the network was formally disbanded in 2010, Allen and Gray created the performance research initiative Theatre for the Reconstitution of Reality (THEATRRR).
Allen began writing poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and autobiographical fiction in earnest in the mid-60s, many of which appeared under the pen name Johnny Dolphin. Highly influenced by the Beat Generation poets and writers of the 1950s and 60s, Allen became a practitioner of the "Tangier School" writing style, a literary movement identified with the fiction of Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs, and the "cut-up" techniques of Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Allen's books include the science-fiction novel Far Out and Far Away: A Novel of Emergent Evolution; poetry collections The Dream and Drink of Freedom, Off the Road, and Wild: Poems, Aphorisms and Short Stories; the short-story collection My Many Kisses; and a trilogy of autobiographical novels: 39 Blows on a Gone Trumpet, Journey Around an Extraordinary Planet, and Liberated Space. His plays have been performed on seven continents, and he has read his work in Paris at George Whitman's Shakespeare and Company, in New York City accompanied by Ornette Coleman, in London with West African musicians at the October Gallery, and in Fort Worth, Texas with the Caravan of Dreams.
Allen's autobiography, Me and the Biospheres (Synergetic Press, 2009), which provides a detailed description of the inspiration and experience that informed Biosphere 2, won the Benjamin Franklin Award for best autobiography/memoir of 2010. Allen was called "Borges with a sense of humor!" by Maria Golia of the Cairo Times.Dolphin, Johnny. My Many Kisses and Other Short Stories. Synergetic Press. 2000
Synergia Ranch
In 1969, Allen co-founded and became general manager of Synergia Ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico. The ranch was home to the TAP network from 1969 to 1980, and again from 2000 to 2010. Situated on 130 acres of high altitude grassland, Synergia leased space to architectural enterprises, conducted anti-desertification work, developed special ecologically sustainable agricultural systems, and performed research in solar and wind energy. Over a thousand trees were planted, including 450 fruit trees and organic vegetable gardens. An extensive soil-building program was established, adobe buildings and a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster FullerAllen, John. Me and the Biospheres. Synergetic Press. 2009. p. 41. were constructed, and subsequent artisan enterprises included pottery, wood, iron, clothing, and leather work. In conjunction with a local construction firm, Synergia built over three dozen adobe buildings in Santa Fe, contributing to a local renaissance of traditional adobe architecture. In 2016, Synergia won the Good Earth award at the New Mexico Organic Agriculture conference in recognition of its land care.Alexis (February 23, 2017). "Synergia Ranch Good Earth Award". Santa Fe Farmers Market Institute. Retrieved 2 January 2018.
Institute of Ecotechnics
In 1973, Allen co-founded and became director of the Institute of Ecotechnics (IE), an educational, training, and research charity dedicated to the synergetic applications of technology and ecology, the environment, conservation, and heritage. With its U.S. base at Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe and U.K. headquarters at October Gallery in central London (an art gallery founded by IE in 1979 dedicated to the promotion of trans-cultural avant-garde art and artists), IE has organized international conferences focusing on emerging research in biospherics and space exploration. Guest speakers have included architect and systems theorist Buckminster Fuller and adventurer and ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl.
In the early 1970s, in collaboration with TAP, IE constructed the ecological research vessel Heraclitus in Oakland, California, using a Chinese junk model. In 1978 the ship signed a cooperative agreement with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to collect weather, wind, cloud, temperature, and rainfall data during its voyages. Heraclitus has since logged over 250,000 nautical miles and undertaken twelve expeditions, including a three-year round-the-world voyage and journey through the tropics exploring the origins of human culture. It has sailed up the Amazon conducting ethno-botanical collections, undertaken oral history documentation in the Mediterranean Sea, and circumnavigated South America with an expedition to Antarctica to study the humpback whale population.Allen, John. Me and the Biospheres. Synergetic Press. 2009. p. 54.Skidmore, Maisie. "How You Can Support the Greatest Artwork on the Oceans". Another Magazine. July 10, 2017. Archived from the original on 9 November 2017. Retrieved 9 November 2017.
In 1983, IE initiated Las Casas de la Selva (Houses of the Forest), a rainforest enrichment project in Puerto Rico, acquiring nearly 1000 acres of land adjacent to the Guavate-Carite Forest with the goal of establishing various methods of forest enrichment and to promote sustainable tropical forestry. With the cooperation of Puerto Rican departments of development and forestry, some 40,000 seedlings of valuable timber species were line-planted to minimize the impact on surrounding forest and conserve biodiversity. In 2017, Las Casas won the Energy Globe award for Puerto Rico. Allen is co-designer of Las Casas and serves as its ecological and business consultant.
Biosphere 2