Nature - autonomous learning

150 de-naturalisationpenultimate nature story in Chapter 1).The Eden Project, located in thecounty of Cornwall in England, is, Bartram and Shobrook argue, symptomaticof this anxiety.The project was constructed at a cost of £74 millionas part of Britain’s millennium celebrations. At first sight, it is an attempt– one of many worldwide – to forestall the disappearance of the non-humanworld bequeathed by evolution.The project’s biblical name intentionallyinvokes the image of a pre-modern time in which people lived in harmonywith the environment – an image which, for the project’s creators (professionalconservationists), stands as a criticism of present-day environmentalabuse. Focused on plant life in particular, the project’s geodesic-domegreenhouses recreate biomes from around the world (humid-tropical,warm temperate etc.). With meticulous attention to detail, each biomecontains the species found in the equivalent real-world ecosystem. Usingthe latest technology the climate inside the domes is carefully controlled.Tourists are able to walk through each greenhouse, experiencing in microcosmthe biomes that, in the real world, are threatened by human activitieslike logging and road-building. In effect, the project aims to educate thepublic about the intricacy and value of the natural environment by givingthem direct access to that environment.The project’s many visitors wouldotherwise have to travel around the world in order to gain first-handacquaintance with the biomes recreated in the various greenhouses.Bartram and Shobrook refuse the obvious interpretation of the naturethat the Eden Project presents to the public. Instead of arguing that theproject’s biomes are capsule versions of real biomes – complete andauthentic in almost every detail – they argue that it is a simulated or virtualnature. Following Baudrillard, this means that the plant life assembled inthe geodesic domes do not ‘stand for’ or represent ‘real plant life’ in variousparts of the world. Instead, argue Bartram and Shobrook (2000: 371), itstands for ‘past events, images and ideas’ about the environment that reflectWesterners’ long-standing anxiety about the disappearance of non-humanspecies.‘Paradoxically’, Bartram and Shobrook write,‘the closer we get tothe real world [in the Eden Project], the more detached and remote webecome from it’ (2000: 372).Though tourists’ experience of nature in thedomes seems to be direct, visceral and first hand, it is arguably anythingbut that if one follows a Baudrillardian logic. As Bartram and Shobrookinsist, the project’s biomes are part of a scripted morality play into whichtourists are inserted. Symptomatically, the biomes are free of the pestsand diseases one finds in their natural equivalents. Bartram and Shobrook