Not a very personal person on this account, and maybe a bit too personal on my private. However, this week I lost my Aunt Sally Silverstone and to commemorate her life I feel compelled to share the wonderful work she got up to on this Earth

A few tweets aren't gonna cut it but Sally is the most incredible person I've ever met. Sally helped countless people from the moment she left university and even while she studied. Sal helped manage a children's village in Kenya...

...assisting with employment and training of house mothers who looked after ~150 orphaned kids. Documented and implemented drought relief in Bihar, India. Was responsible for staff and program development for a hostel aiming to reintegrate handicapped adults into their community.

This aptitude for the management of people based conservation projects led to her work in the BioSphere 2. In 1991, Sally, along with her university friend John Druitt and 6 others found themselves in the Arizona Desert in a totally self-sufficient bio-dome...

... full of plants, crops, animals and different internal biomes that all supported each other. Here they survived,
with no outside help, for 2 years. This work has laid the foundations for the Mars mission, enabling life to be possible there.

As well as inspiring the wonderful Eden Project in Bodelva, Cornwall. It was only after years of research, planning and sample gathering that Sally did so much work for that she was invited to be part of the team, for which she managed the agricultural systems for the 8 of them.

This work has been so influential and referenced everywhere in media, there's even a character from the anime Planetes, about life in space, directly inspired and named after Sally! You can read more about the BioSphere 2 in the books "Life Under Glass" (pic of Sal and fam 1993)

There's plenty of articles from the 90s about it, as well as a very good documentary, Spaceship Earth, that I totally recommend watching. The work put into the project is astonishing. After leaving the BioShpere Sally helped set up the next crew for the 2nd mission

Sally went on to help further research for space-y living with the production of dryland crops, as well as maintaining her position as CFO of the Biosphere Foundation. Sally was a director for the Eye on the Rainforest in Puerto Rico for 10 years ( https://eyeontherainforest.org/ )

Sal continued her reforestation efforts for monsoon forests in Bali and her research work for Biosphere until the day she died. I hope you find interest in Sally's work and look into it for yourself as I've glossed over a lot here.

Sally has been a huge influence in my life (even if we did only get so see each other for hanukkah most of the time) and has given me a lot to live up to. Our skype calls will be sorely missed and if it weren't for this bloody virus I would have been in Bali helping right now

I dunno how to end this thread so I'll end this with a worryingly poignant quote from Sal "Whether or not we, as humans, can learn to live in our planet's biosphere with care and respect will govern whether or not we will survive as a species."