NASA’s Nature

Updated 13 October 2009

Outer space is apparently not public space; but is it ‘masculine’ space?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

NASA is set to crash two unmanned (and presumably also ‘unwomanned’) spacecraft into the moon today. According to NASA, the purpose of the crash is to reveal whether there is water on the moon’s surface:

‘Earth’s closest neighbor is holding a secret. In 1999, hints of that secret were revealed in the form of concentrated hydrogen signatures detected in permanently shadowed craters at the lunar poles by NASA’s Lunar Prospector. These readings may be an indication of lunar water and could have far-reaching implications as humans expand exploration past low-Earth orbit. The Lunar CRater Observing and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) mission is seeking a definitive answer.’

LCROSS was launched on an Atlas V rocket in June, and ‘the LCROSS shepherding spacecraft and the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage rocket executed a fly-by of the moon on June 23, 2009 and entered into an elongated Earth orbit to position LCROSS for impact on a lunar pole. On final approach, the shepherding spacecraft and Centaur will separate. The Centaur will act as a heavy impactor to create a debris plume that will rise above the lunar surface. Following four minutes behind, the shepherding spacecraft will fly through the debris plume, collecting and relaying data back to Earth before impacting the lunar surface and creating a second debris plume.’ ‘As the ejecta rises above the target crater’s rim and is exposed to sunlight, any water-ice, hydrocarbons or organics will vaporize and break down into their basic components. These components primarily will be monitored by the visible and infrared spectrometers. The near-infrared and mid-infrared cameras will determine the total amount and distribution of water in the debris plume. The spacecraft’s visible camera will track the impact location and the behavior of the debris plume while the visible radiometer will measure the flash created by the Centaur impact.’(1)

From an environmental perspective, the news raise at least two issues. The first involves two of the fundamental boundaries that have long been disputed by environmental activists: the boundaries that separate the private from the public, in both the economic and the ‘social’ senses of the term. On the one hand, environmental campaigners have long sought to stop private corporations (as well as state entities) from abusing public spaces and their resources. On the other hand, and as I explained in Mediating Nature, a significant task for environmental activists has been to reveal the mentioned abuses when they occurred away from the public eye, in the relative privacy of remote places, or areas in which the public were not allowed access.

Greenpeace’s inaugural campaign to stop the U.S. from testing nuclear weapons on one of the Aleutian Islands (Amchitka) is a case in point. But perhaps the best example of the politics in question was the battle over the Shell Corporation’s efforts to dump its Brent Spar oil storage and tanker loading bouy in the North Atlantic, some 250 kms off the west coast of Scotland. Greenpeace’s task in that campaign was firstly to bring the event to public attention, and then to dispute Shell’s right to sink, or as Greenpeace put it, dump the Bren Spar in the Atlantic. As Campaign Director Chris Rose explained in a press release in 1996, ‘The public knows it is wrong to dump old cars in the village pond – and it’s wrong for the Government to let the oil industry treat the sea as its rubbish dump. The UK Government must rule out dumping at sea and abandon the so-called case-by-case approach.’

This context sheds an interesting light on NASA’s plans to smash a part of a rocket, and then a satellite into the moon. It seems that outer space is truly ‘outer’ in the ethical sense: the kind of issues that might be raised about the dumping, let alone the deliberate crashing of vehicles into a public space—or what might be regarded as a public space—simply don’t seem to apply. On the contrary, the experiment is being celebrated for its capacity to reveal one of nature’s ‘secrets’, a revelation which even amateur astronomers are being invited to witness if they have telescopes 10 to 12 inches or wider. NASA, and of course other countries’ space agencies in effect treat outer space in much the way that the U.S., France and other countries treated several Pacific islands during the testing of nuclear devices in the 1950s, 60s and 70s (in fact, the French had another go as recently as the 90s). No one lives on the moon (yet), and presumably radioactive contamination is not an issue; but will anyone ever look back on the ethics of these and other experiments as an example of NASA using or abusing the moon as if it were the proverbial village pond?

The reference to the revelation of nature’s ‘secrets’, and indeed the fascinating use of the term ‘ejecta’ raises a second set of issues. I am reminded of the critiques offered by feminist environmental historians—especially, Carolyn Merchant, whose magisterial The Death of Nature (2) revealed a key discursive and ideological basis for the modern domination of nature. According to Merchant, during the scientific revolution,

‘The mechanists transformed the body of the world and its female soul, source of activity in the organic cosmos, into a mechanism of inert matter in motion, translated the world spirit into a corpuscular ether, purged individual spirits from nature, and transformed sympathies and antipathies into efficient causes. The resultant corpse was a mechanical system of dead corpuscles, set in motion by the Creator, so that each obeyed the law of inertia and moved only by external contact with another moving body’ (p.195).

The simultaneous birth and death of this nature marked the beginning of the end of the predominance of ancient circuits of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism, my term for the circular process by means of which a set of representations of nature come to be seem natural to a group, and thereafter are employed to confirm that the own values or beliefs correspond with the character of ‘nature itself’.  In effect, nature is represented in a manner that reflects the values of a particular cultural group, but when the representations become a matter of habit, they appear to become, to that group at least, ‘nature itself’. This ‘nature itself’ (in fact the nature represented by the particular cultural group) then becomes a cultural mirror that appears to confirm the natural nature of the group’s values.

This arguably what happened with the rise of a mechanist cosmogony in the Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries. Far from simply reflecting the workings of the universe ‘itself’, mechanism was strongly indebted to emergent bourgeois values, and to new forms of patriarchy. While Sir Francis Bacon protested that the new ways of knowing were to be for the benefit of ‘mankind’, this was clearly an instance of utopian reasoning with an explicitly ideological role.

First,  it is quite clear that the new mechanistic imaginary helped to pave the way for the individualism that was to be associated with societies dominated by bourgeois classes; it is no coincidence that in Leviathan, Hobbes described not just an atomistic society, but a society whose mechanism was meant to keep in check the individuality of subjects whom Hobbes regarded as being naturally greedy: while Nature ‘hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind’, ‘she has also made them competitive, diffident, and vainglorious’.‘Hereby it is manifest, that durng the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is every man, against every man’.

Second, and as Merchant has documented, the new discourse of nature was articulated in the language of an early modern form of patriarchy. During this period women became at once the object of a kind of instituted wrath, and the unwitting protagonists of the new circuits of anthropomorphism. Where earlier so-called ‘organic’ cosmogonies had long gendered nature with images of a benevolently maternal figure, the discourse of mechanism gendered nature with images of sexual violence and exploitation. Merchant reveals, for example, how the narratives of Bacon and other philosophers of the time mixed metaphors for the study and control of nature with those for the sexual domination of women. In one of the most extraordinary passages of her book, Merchant explains that Bacon, who was James I’s Lord Chancellor, suggested to the king that nature’s ‘secrets’ might be discovered by using the same methods employed by James I to reveal the secrets of witchcraft by inquisition: ‘For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. Neither am I of the opinion in this history of marvels that superstitious narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations, and the like (…) should be altogether excluded’ but ‘A useful light may be gained, not only for a true judgement of offences of persons charged with such practices, but likewise for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man to make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object—as your majesty has shown in your own example’(Bacon, quoted in Merchant p. 168).

Back to NASA: many centuries after Bacon, it is striking to note the continued relevance of the image of the revelation of nature’s secrets, as well as the use of terms such as ‘ejecta’, and the quest to penetrate ‘holes’, albeit, this time in the form of craters. Of course, ‘ejecta’ has a particular meaning in astronomy—it refers to the debris that is produced when an impact crater is formed. But the term also has a medical meaning, which refers to any material ejected from the human body. It might further be argued that one does not have to be a semiotician to note that the moon has traditionally been gendered as female, and that cylindrical objects are being crashed into it. Lest we forget, the centaurs are, in Greek mythology at least, the warrior progeny of Centaurus, who spent his adulthood mating with the mares of Thessaly.

Doubtless these kinds of meanings were far from the minds of the NASA scientists and engineers who conceived and described the LCROSS mission. But this does not contradict, in itself, the idea that centuries after the Holy Inquisition ended, we still employ aspects of the discourse of Bacon—the discourse that has arguably been so fundamental to the modern domination of nature.

When this issue is considered in relation to the first (regarding the use of ‘public’ space), it suggests that a critical environmental consciousness is light years, or at least, many ejecta away from the minds of the people who conceive and carry out experiments such as LCROSS.

Update 13 October 2009: anyone who wants to read about another example of the anthropomorphic nature of the work of astronomers and planetary scientists should read Felicity Mellor’s excellent article about asteroid collision mitigation technologies. See ‘Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space’ in Social Studies of Science 37/4 (August 2007) 499–531.

References

1) NASA – LCROSS: Mission Overview, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LCROSS/overview/index.html, accessed October 9, 2009.

2) Merchant, C. (1980) The Death of Nature, New York: Harper

© Copyright 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

The Vienna Zoo’s ‘Trouble in Paradise’

By Nils Lindahl Elliot

The Vienna Zoo, often described as the oldest zoo in the world, has introduced a remarkable set of artefacts in some of its displays. In a project titled ‘Trouble in Paradise’, the zoo has allowed sculptor Christoph Steinbrener and photographer Reiner Dempf to put a half sunken Mercedes-Benz in the Rhino enclosure, railroad tracks in the bison pen, an oil pumpjack in the penguin display, and a barrel of ‘toxic waste’ in the zoo’s aquarium (you can see images of the different displays, here). According to the artists, the idea is to ‘unexpectedly interfere’ with visitor notions of idyllic wildlife:

The viewer is forced to reconsider traditional modes of animal presentation and simultaneously to question the authenticity of concepts which are restaging ‘natural’ environments while they are increasingly endangered. [...] Present-day conceptions of zoological gardens aim at the presentation of animals in an idyllic and apparently natural environment, untouched by civilization. But this is a contemporary conception, since courtly menageries and kennels were adapted to the exposure of animals as decorative objects.  Until the early years of the 20th century, animals were part of a preferably spectacular and exotic staging, to the entertainment and amazement of the public. The artificial and the sensational were foregrounded, without creating a realistic setting of the natural environment of the animals.(1)

On one level, the Vienna Zoo is to be commended for its remarkable willingness to engage with what is arguably a somewhat taboo subject amongst many zoos that have embraced the latest wave of naturalistic exhibits. The Steinbrener/Dempf ‘intrusions’ may well encourage many visitors to engage in more reflexive, and perhaps even self-reflexive forms of observation. Faced with a pumpjack in the penguin enclosure, visitors might well stop and ask themselves what the artists are trying to say by putting this and other symbols of an industrial modernity in the zoo’s simulations of natural habitats.

In the report that I presented to the Bristol and the Paignton Zoos in 2005, and which summarised the findings of a three-year visitor research project funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council(2), I suggested that the zoos might wish to make more of an effort to help visitors to become more reflexive and self-reflexive vis-à-vis the process of wildlife observation itself. The logic behind this suggestion was that so long as visitors remain as little more than spectators of nature (or of what passes for nature), then they will, in effect, continue to be positioned as consumers of spectacles of nature.

The Steinbrener/Dempf ‘Trouble in Paradise’ offers one somewhat extreme example of how this issue might be engaged. It is not, however, without its own problems. First, there the risk that, far from promoting a more reflexive stance, the artefacts in the displays may promote a more sophisticated form of consumption, one in which visitors are encouraged to observe the displays in much the same way that TV news audiences might ‘enjoy’ a ‘good’ Greenpeace campaign. This is a conundrum that I’ve analysed in Mediating Nature (3), and which begins to reveal some of the ways in which the rise of modern environmentalism may be linked to the mass mediation of nature.

Second, if it was the artists’ intention to question the nature/culture divide that is implicit in naturalistic displays, they may have recreated this same divide on a deeper level. If it is true that many naturalistic displays try to create the illusion of an ‘undisturbed’ nature, then the simple juxtaposition of symbols of an industrial modernity in such settings may, paradoxically, underscore the opposition of nature and culture.

This poses a difficult, and rather slippery philosophical problem. I say ‘philosophical’ problem, but it is better conceived as a matter of discourse in the Foucaultian sense of the term, i.e. a way of thinking that is embedded in a certain modus operandi, and vice-versa. As Kate Soper (4) has noted, despite many critiques, the nature/culture, nature/humanity divide remains so ingrained in modern cultural practices that it is almost impossible to avoid the discursive reproduction of the fabled divide.

A good example of this tendency may be found in the statements of environmental non-government organisations (ENGO’s) such as the WWF: the WWF’s acronym once stood for the World Wildlife Fund. A few years ago it changed its name for ‘World Wide Fund for Nature’ (though it has maintained the old name in the US).  In its website, the WWF suggested that this change was meant to reflect its concern with conserving what it described as ‘the environment as a whole’. But aside from maintaining the word ‘nature’ in its name, by early 2009 the WWF’s U.S. ‘who we are’ web page still spoke of a mission ‘To stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature’(5)(for more on this problem, see the cmcee.org page titled ‘Nature‘). I suggest that pretty much the same tacit nature/culture divide occurs in the displays modified by Christoph Steinbrener and Reiner Dempf at the Vienna Zoo.

What might be an alternative approach? Together with a growing number of cultural geographers(6), I have become interested in what might be described as a hybrid geography, and a recombinant ecology. As I understand it, a hybrid geography is one in which the traditional distinction between natural space and (human) social space no longer holds, or at least, requires a fundamental reconceptualisation. Contrary to what some postmodern scholars seem to imply, what is required is not the elimination of any references to natural space—that would be absurd. Instead, we need to question the notion that the ancient and emphatically non-human character of natural processes necessarily transcends human interventions.

On one level, this might seem like a non-issue; of course humans can ‘modify’ nature. In fact, I suggest that many scientific accounts do take for granted the mentioned transcendence, if only implicitly. The question of human changes to the geography, the recombination of so-called ‘natural’ and ‘human’ ecologies is often either overlooked entirely, or treated as so many ‘parenthetical’ changes—changes which are known and acknowledged, but bracketed because they are regarded as not really affecting this or that form of natural behaviour, this or that form of scientific enquiry.

By way of a counter-example, in the research that I’ve conducted about ecotourism on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, I’ve been interested in considering the ways in which the trails made by scientists in the apparently undisturbed tropical forest may well have a remarkable set of knock-on consequences for this biological reserve’s ecology(7). (As I understand it, the problem of a ‘recombinant’ ecology is not one that simply applies to urban, or even exurban natures.)

Returning to zoos, one of the suggestions that I made to the Bristol and the Paignton Zoo was for displays that might explore more proximate natures, and natures that have been explicitly transformed by human intervention. As an example, I proposed recreating a small replica of the many British canals which were once used to transport coal and other materials across the country, but which have now been rehabilitated as urban and exurban ‘greenways’, veritable wildlife hotspots which illustrate what I described earlier as a ‘recombinant’ ecology.

This might sound like a rather peculiar display to put in a zoo, but my research suggests that many adults and children would enjoy climbing into a canal boat in a ‘mock lock’ at least as much as they would seeing the ‘Serengeti’ in North Bristol. The former display might describe the history of the canal system’s transformations, even as a series of modifications—perhaps views from within the ‘lock’, or even a glass bottom canal boat with a view of fish, diving waterfowl and a discarded supermarket trolley or two—would generate a context for discussions about just what it is that we regard as being, or not being, nature. Admittedly, there might need to be a sociologist or two on hand to explain such issues; I’d nonetheless argue that the matter goes to the heart of the modern environmental crisis. If we have travelled as far as we have down the path of environmental destruction, it is partly because we continue to think of nature as something that is only really found in ‘remote’ and ‘undisturbed’ places.

The example of the canal boat exhibit was only that—an example. To be sure, the Bristol Zoo has already produced innovative displays that explore the mentioned issues in its Twilight World, which includes a ‘Victorian’ house where rats are allowed to patrol through the house’s kitchen. It would be excellent if this and other zoos could design more displays that challenge visitors to question their own environments, their own assumptions about the nature of nature. Depending on how such exhibits are designed, they might also provide contemporary zoos with a way out of what is increasingly looking, to this observer at least, like a design dead end, i.e. an unsustainably ‘naturalistic’ approach to the semiotics of zoo displays, one which tends not only to be extraordinarily expensive and CO2 rich, but which frequently sacrifices local landscapes in favour of simulations of ‘remote’ habitats.

The point, I might add, is not to oppose the local and the global, the ‘banal’ and the ‘exotic’, but rather to revisit the tacit dualism, the geography of difference which remains most zoos’ representational staple.

References

1) http://www.steinbrener-dempf.com/, accessed July 21, 2009
2) An abridged version of this report is available here. I am currently completing a book on the subject titled The Nature of Zoos.
3) N. Lindahl Elliot (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge.
4) K. Soper (1995) What is Nature?, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
5) http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/who_we_are/index.cfm, accessed February 4, 2009.
6) See for example, S. Whatmore (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces, London: Sage Publications.
7) Observing Wildlife on Barro Colorado Island: Ecotourism, Environmental Education and Transmediation (forthcoming)

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

WildFilmHistory.org – A Review

The WildFilmHistory.org site offers a remarkable set of resources for anyone who wants to learn about the history of wildlife filmmaking. However, the nature media have developed a very particular way of representing nature which tends to be promoted as being the way of representing nature, ie., ‘nature itself’. With two partial exceptions, the archive takes almost no critical distance from this dynamic.

By Nils Lindahl Elliot

The WildFilmHistory.org website offers an archive of natural history filmmaking: in the website’s own words, the site offers an ‘online guide to the pioneering people and landmark productions behind one hundred years of wildlife filmmaking’ with ‘ground-breaking films, “behind the scenes” photographs, essential production information, and specially crafted learning resources, as well as a unique collection of personal memoirs from key industry players’(1).

The following review introduces the institutional context within which WildFilmHistory has been generated. It then describes the structuring of the site from a practical, user-oriented perspective. It concludes by offering a discursive analysis of WildFilmHistory.

1. About Wildscreen

Let us begin with a brief institutional contextualisation of the website. Wildfilmhistory.org is the result of an initiative of a British non-profit organisation called Wildscreen. Wildscreen’s official remit is to ‘promote an appreciation of biodiversity and nature through the power of wildlife imagery’(2). The organisation is at once an expression of, and a key agent for, the formalisation of a field of interaction (3) constituted by the practices of wildlife TV producers, and of the organisations that commission their work and/or support their filmmaking.

Wildscreen began as the organiser of Bristol’s Wildscreen Festival, a biennial trade show in which natural history filmmakers talk shop, award prizes for the best natural history documentaries, and engage in a variety of activities that promote the public image of the field. In time, Wildscreen has acquired additional functions; one of these involves the establishment of public archives of the nature media’s TV programmes, and WildFilmHistory.org is one such archive.

As noted earlier, the website makes available a variety of historic materials relating to the production of natural history documentaries. Like all archives, WildFilmHistory not only makes available certain resources, but organises and presents them in a particular way. The present review offers an analysis of the latter aspects.

2. A Tour of WildFilmHistory

The structuring of the archive is simple, but effective: WildFilmHistory allows its users to obtain textual, or multi-mediated materials in one of four basic categories:

• the historic film clips themselves, which can be accessed by name, or by date;
• brief biographies of filmmakers, whose names are archived in alphabetical order;
• ‘oral histories’, which are videotaped interviews with about 30 figures in the above mentioned films, and which can either be played onscreen, or read via a PDF-based transcription;
• and finally, a list of ‘key events’, which is essentially a timeline of selected events in the history of wildlife filmmaking.

The various entries are illustrated with a collection of still images. This collection is itself a valuable resource. The various aspects of the archive can be accessed in one of three ways: via a browsing list on the homepage; via the banner; or via a useful search function. The fact that the collection is web-based means that the omnipresent Google can also be used to search for entries.

Unfortunately, the four categories listed above do not offer the possibility of searching via subcategories; for example, one cannot ask for a listing of photographers or camerapersons, and one cannot request a listing of all films about, say, the Serengeti. The search function can of course be used for either request, but it will simply list every item in the website that includes the search term, however incidentally.

That said, the four categories listed above do include clickable cross-referencing, which means for example that if the entry on David Attenborough mentions, amongst other series, The Private Life of Plants, then users can click on the title to go that series. There is also a column on the right-hand side of each biographical entry which lists any available film clips, and oral histories produced by or with that person.

The quantity and quality of the entries varies considerably. This is arguably to be expected in so far as there may be more or less information available about one or another producer; and in so far as the archive may have procured varying numbers of clips for viewing. As the user goes through the various biographical entries, it is nevertheless apparent that WildFilmHistory is still very much a project in the making. Many of the biographical entries have no more than a photograph of the person in question—presumably such entries are still under construction. There are also some names which don’t appear on the list, but which have made their mark in the field: to name just two examples, the contemporary producer, Mike Linley; and Étienne-Jules Marey, who was arguably as important to early early filmmaking as was Edweard Muybridge.

Of course, anyone determined enough can always find one or another entry that ‘ought’ to have been included in an archive such as this. What is more interesting from the point of view of this review is the fact that the archive gives no account of its own logic of selection. It would be absurd to suppose that any archive is an entirely rational endeavour with an exact logic that can be traced via each and every document. But the opposite argument can and must be made: no archive is ever a purely arbitrary selection of materials, and so it would be good to have some kind of page that explains in some detail what the curating team was trying to achieve, what constraints they faced, some of the known limitations, and so forth.

3. On the discourse of WildFilmHistory

Let us give credit where credit is due: the WildFilmHistory.org site offers a remarkable set of resources for anyone who wants to learn about the history of wildlife filmmaking. It is clear that an enormous amount of work has gone into the project, and the result is a website that makes readily available a number of fascinating cinematographic/ televisual clips, as well as quite a lot of useful information about the filmmakers. The oral history project is innovative, and as noted earlier, the collection of stills is also significant. Given these strengths, it is to be hoped that the limitations mentioned in the previous section of this review reflect the newness of the project, and perhaps also the finite nature of the resources that can be devoted to what is potentially a very expensive venture. In time, and given further funding, WildFilmHistory will perhaps develop into an even more interesting and complete archive.

What will be more difficult to address unless there is a sea change at Wildscreen will be the conceptual or discursive limitations of the archive. As noted at the beginning of this review, any archive is, as archive, at once a matter of a collection of certain ‘contents’, but also, a matter of a certain logic of selection and combination, or what might be described as a social dynamic of classification and framing (4). Put differently, any archive reflects not just the personal perspectives of its curator(s), but also, the codes and discourses of the institutional contexts that they work in. In the case of WildFilmHistory, the context in question is the one associated with Wildscreen, but more generally, with the organisations and the field of interaction that I described earlier as the ‘nature media’.

This review is not the place for a detailed account of the nature media, their strengths and limitations (5). It suffices to note that the nature media have developed a very particular way of representing nature, one which is nonetheless promoted as being the way of representing nature, ie., ‘nature itself’ (6). With two partial exceptions, the archive takes almost no critical distance from this dynamic. The two exceptions are some of the comments made by some of the filmmakers interviewed in the oral histories; and a learning resource which is titled ‘Ethics in wildlife filmmaking’. In the former case, some of the filmmakers refer to the commercial pressures they face (see for example, the comments made during the oral history with Andrew Buchanan). In the latter case, a Powerpoint presentation lists a number of the technical ways in which the documentaries take what might be described as ‘poetic license’ in order to achieve certain audio-visual effects. These range from the somewhat dubious use of editing continuity effects, to the unacknowledged substitution of captive animals for wild animals.

While welcome, these exceptions are somewhat marginal thanks to their location in the archive. Anyone wanting to obtain a critical perspective would have to troll through reams of transcripts, and/or download the sizable Powerpoint file. But more importantly, anyone who does so would still not find a truly reflective, and ideologically critical take on the misleading notion that the documentaries merely ‘show what there is to save’; or on the direct and indirect ways in which commercial imperatives structure the filmmaking of a field which is nonetheless regarded as being a form of science communication, or an instance of public service broadcasting.

What the user will find instead is a celebration of the field, and its many notable achievements. Certainly there is much to celebrate; a significant part of the success of the nature media undoubtedly lies in the extraordinary skills of the filmmakers, and the resources which their organisations have managed to both attract, and deploy in the representation of wildlife. Given this selfsame success, it is a shame that WildFilmHistory has not been structured in a manner that is more critical of the above mentioned issues.

This could have been achieved in at least two ways: first, by using some of the existing research about the representation of nature in modern culture to develop narratives that offer deeper historical perspectives on the social, cultural and of course economic motivations of the existing forms of filmmaking. Such narratives might be developed in short clips, in standalone webpages, in Powerpoint presentations, or indeed, by asking more probing questions with the producers themselves. Another alternative might have been more interviews with scholars who can offer truly critical perspectives. While the references to Derek Bousé are welcome, several other scholars might also have been referenced; some of the names that come to mind are Jane Arthurs, Barbara Crowther, Gail Davies, Meryl Aldridge, or Simon Cottle. A much longer list might be suggested if one goes beyond natural history filmmaking sensu stricto to consider a variety of cultural issues pertaining to the social representation of animals.

Of course, some of the critical perspectives might raise hackles amongst some producers, and might also require additional funding in order to be obtained. If the latter problem is the more important one, then a second alternative would be to at least direct users to alternative perspectives via annotated bibliographies, via bibliographical comments in the biographical entries, or next to some of the cinematic entries. These (or other similar steps) would alert users about some of the deeper ethical issues raised by the filmmaking practice. They might also help to develop the site into an arena where the producers themselves might find a genuinely critical space in which to reflect on the past, and so innovate in the future.

Notes

1) http://www.wildfilmhistory.org/index.php, accessed 13 March 2009.
2) see the Wildscreen website’s home page at http://www.wildscreen.org.uk/, accessed 13 March 2009.
3) Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, translated by R. Nice. Cambridge: Polity Press.
4) Bernstein, B. (1990) The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routledge.
5) See for example Lindahl Elliot, N. (2006) Mediating Nature. London: Routledge International Library of Sociology. See also, Lindahl Elliot, N. (2009) Observing Wildlife on Barro Colorado Island: Environmental Education and the Challenges of Transmediation, forthcoming
6) For an account of this dynamic in the natural history documentaries themselves, see the cmcee.org blog entry titled ‘Showing to Save? A Critique of Natural History Documentaries on Television’ at http://cmcee.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/showing-to-save-a-critique-of-natural-history-documentaries-part-1/

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved. The following is the bibliographical information for anyone wishing to cite this text:

Lindahl Elliot, N. (2009) ‘WildFilmHistory.org – A Review’. Bristol: Centre for Media, Culture & Environmental Education.

This review is part of a new section of the cmcee.org website.

cmcee.org v. 2

On February 16, 2009 the Centre for Media, Culture and Environmental Education (cmcee.org) rolled out a new website. While the graphics remain the same, we’ve added photographs and new contents. As part of the changes, this blog will have new features, including the publication of a greater variety of writings. There will still be essays about media, culture and the environment, or media, culture and environmental education. However, there will now also be shorter entries, and a new page that has links to the cmcee.org sign of the week page, which will explore a variety of semiotic, or as we spell the term, semeiotic phenomena involving the re/presentation of nature and the environment.

We hope that you will find these entries, and indeed the new cmcee.org website, useful. If you would like to provide feedback, please do contact cmcee.org.

On the Recombinant Ecology of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Imagine a lake that was once never a lake. Then imagine an island on that lake that was once never an island. Imagine, finally, a forested hilltop on the island that is no longer a hilltop, and you may begin to form a reasonably good image of the magnificently ‘unnatural’ history of Panama’s Barro Colorado Island.

As this description begins to suggest, Barro Colorado Island occupies a paradoxical space. The island is covered by a seasonal tropical forest, parts of which are likely to be similar to those encountered by the first Spanish conquistadores in the early 16th century. It is fortunate, in this sense, that the island was transformed into a biological reserve in 1923, and that it is now a part of the world-renowned Barro Colorado Nature Monument.

And yet, the island lies next to—indeed exists thanks to—one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes: the Panama Canal. Unsurprisingly, the Panama Canal Authority regards the Canal as Panama’s foremost industrial zone. A visit to the island indeed affords views of tropical forest, but also of the many container-laden behemoths that continually make their way past Barro Colorado. As one field agent for the Panama Pacific Line evocatively put it in a 1932 edition of the magazine Ocean Ferry,

‘An island where fierce black monkeys climb tall trees to shake their fists and howl defiance at passing airplanes; where animals nearly as big as bears pass their whole lives upside down, clinging to limbs, where there are 55 varieties of snakes, 33 of lizards and 47 of frogs and toads, where animals live on crab-meat—but why proceed? […] Such an island easily might be located in the land of fancy where men had but one eye, and that in the middle of the forehead. It might be, but it is not; for it is in the Panama Canal Zone, and every passenger who goes through the Canal on a Panama Pacific liner passes close enough to its shores to toss a penny from the ship’s deck to the land, if so inclined’(1).

* * *

The origin of this paradoxical space may be explained with reference to the design of the Panama Canal. Prior to the construction of the Canal, Barro Colorado was a forested hilltop along the Chagres River Valley. The Chagres River rises in the Cordillera de San Blas and flows west-southwest until it reaches the present-day town of Gamboa. Until 1910, the river turned at this point and flowed in a northerly direction before draining into the Caribbean Sea. Before the Canal’s construction began, anyone climbing the tallest tree on Barro Colorado’s highest point would have been afforded a view of mostly unbroken tropical forest extending as far as the eye could see.

All of this changed when U.S. engineers decided to abandon the original French plans for a canal ‘à niveau’. Instead, the engineers opted for a canal that used gigantic locks to raise ships coming in from the Caribbean (or the Pacific) to an inland waterway that crossed the Panamanian isthmus. A further set of locks then lowered each ship to the ocean (or sea) on the opposite end of the canal. The required waterway was constructed by damming the Chagres River at a point close to its mouth on the Caribbean side of present canal. The resulting Gatun Lake—then the largest man-made lake in the world—replaced the views of forest with views of emerald waters even as it solved three problems for the Panama Canal’s engineers: first, and as I have just noted, the new lake’s waters served as a major part of the waterway that linked the locks on either end of the Canal. Second, it allowed the engineers to control the Chagres’ extraordinary force, a force that, during the raining season, wreaked havoc first on the French, and then on American efforts to build the canal. And third, the Gatun provided the extraordinary volumes of water required to fill the locks for each ship’s transit—estimated at some 98,500,000 litres (or 26,000,000 US gallons) per ship.

So it was that, in 1907, a massive dam began to be built close to the Chagres’ mouth. In 1910, the diversion channel that was used to enable the construction of this dam was blocked, and the lower reaches of the Chagres River Valley began to flood. The Gatun Lake began to form, and as its waters rose, the surrounding hills became shores. By 1913, the highest hilltop in the Gatun had become the lake’s largest island: the 1500-hectare Barro Colorado Island.

Today the island is part of a biological reserve that is the site of a tropical research station administered by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, a bureau of the Smithsonian Institution. All that remains visible of the submerged forest is the odd tree stump that stands as a silent witness to the life that once surrounded the hilltop-turned-island. Actually, some of the stumps are rather noisy havens for colonies of chestnut-headed oropéndolas (Psarocolius wagleri). The birds have discovered that the stumps constitute the ultimate snake-proof nesting site: they are surrounded by water, but are located a stone’s throw from the island’s forested shores. The stumps may, in this sense, be regarded as a metaphor for the island as a whole; Barro Colorado’s circumscribed nature is part of what led the earliest naturalists to propose that it be set aside as a biological reserve, and to this day, that very nature is part of what protects it from the destruction that the mainland forests have suffered.

* * *

Many if not most contemporary accounts of Barro Colorado emphasize the continuity between the island’s contemporary forest and its ancient forebear. In fact, a strong case can be made that today’s forest is both very similar to, and very different from the one encountered by the Spanish conquistadores in the 16th century.

Very similar: paleobotanical research conducted by Dolores Piperno in a central area of the island known as the 50-Hectare Plot suggests that the forest in this part of the island is at least four to five hundred years old; that before the Spanish conquest, it was not subject to agricultural slash and burn techniques; and that even though some areas were cleared for human settlement between 400 and 1500 AD, an ancient forest continued to exist around such settlements. As Piperno puts it, a ‘mosaic-like image’ emerges from the paleobotanical register, with areas of forest and of clearing. The clearings corresponded to primary ‘residential zones’, while some of the forest around these clearings appears to have been left relatively undisturbed (2).

Very different: the Spanish conquistadores would not, of course, have reached today’s island-which-was-not-an-island by boat. Nor would they have walked along the trails that now crisscross the island. Even if the region’s aboriginal groups had some of their own trails, Balboa and the rest of the Spanish explorers that arrived in the region in the 1510s would not have seen the hundreds of artifacts associated with today’s research projects, and which are found along the contemporary trails. Indeed a walk along parts of the present trails can be something of a surreal experience; even as one appreciates the striking beauty of the forest, many of the trees and plants in the understory have fluorescently coloured ribbons that mark the places where scientists have conducted experiments. By the Smithsonian’s own account, Barro Colorado Island is probably the most intensively researched tropical forest on Earth. One doesn’t have to believe in the fabled ‘butterfly effect’ posited by chaos theorists to suggest that the hubbub of scientific activity is itself likely to have had significant effects on a number of aspects of the island’s ecology. For example, the trails made for the scientists are also used by some of the non-human mammals, and this may have directly or indirectly affected the distribution of these species, if not of those they feed on. The more intensive presence of scientists working in some areas of the island may well have led some species to either vacate those areas, or on the contrary, to seek food or shelter there. Last but not least, if parts of the island had already been modified by a modern human presence when the Canal was built, the very effort to erase such a presence would have had an effect, however benevolently conceived, on the surrounding forest. From this perspective, the question is not whether the scientists and modern culture more generally have had an effect, but the precise nature and extent of that effect.

* * *

In the report that I am currently writing about my research on Barro Colorado, I employ the notion of a recombinant ecology to refer to the interaction of any such transformations with what are likely to be the much longer durations of most evolutionary dynamics on the island. Readers familiar with the second part of ‘Showing to Save: A Critique of Natural History Documentaries’ may recall that I defined such an ecology as ‘the biological communities assembled through the dense comings and goings of urban life, rather than the discrete and undisturbed relations between particular species and habitats that are the staple of conservation biology’. This definition, which I borrowed from Sarah Whatmore and Steven Hinchcliffe(3), is hardly suitable for the ecology of Barro Colorado. In some respects, the island is almost as far removed from Panama’s urbanity as is the forest along the Colombian border. And yet, as noted by W.H. Allee, one of the island’s earlier naturalists, ‘One can commute from civilization at Ancon and spend from 9:15 to 3:30 on Barro Colorado’, and ‘Probably the greatest value of this new station for biological research lies in its ready accessability and its nearness to the highly civilized cities of the Canal Zone’(4).

It is not just the location of the island that begins to transform it into a rather modern setting. Anyone who visits the island’s impressive science laboratory, and finds out about its remarkable research projects may well come away with the sense that the island is the site, if not for a conurbation, then certainly for an utterly modern set of activities. Amongst other aspects, the use of sophisticated communications facilities and the wonders of radio telemetry mean that an ocelot (Leopardus pardalis), or indeed a bee traveling through the forest can be monitored from an office in Princeton University. In this sense if not in others, Barro Colorado seems every bit as wired up as a modern city, where any mobile phone user’s location can be precisely pinpointed by way of an analogous system. From this perspective, the island’s ecology is best regarded as a monument to a remarkable interaction between that most modern of projects—engaging in the scientific study of an object, from afar—and a habitat which has managed to survive, apparently relatively undisturbed, in the face of extraordinarily complex, powerful, and extraneous forces. The notion of a ‘recombinant’ or ‘hybrid’ ecology may and must be adapted to refer to such interactions away from urban spaces, sensu stricto.

When one begins to think about Barro Colorado in this way, it becomes apparent that the island’s history, as much as its present, is steeped in such hybridity. As will have been evident from my earlier account of the Canal’s construction, the island’s very existence as an island is the result of a modern project, par excellence. The construction of the Panama Canal was not only one of the great engineering feats of the early 20th century, but also one of several 19th century projects (the Canal began to be built by the French in the late 19th century) that signaled a quintessentially modern impatience, not to say intolerance with ancient physical barriers. In the first half of the 19th century, it was horses that were the victims of this impatience. As noted by Wolfgang Schivelbusch,

‘As long as the conquest of space was tied to animal power, it had to proceed within the limits of the animals’ physical capabilities. One way of gaining an immediate perception of the distance travelled was to observe the exhaustion of the draught animals … Steam power, inexhaustible and capable of infinite acceleration, reversed the relationship between recalcitrant nature (i.e. spatial distance) and locomotive engine. Nature (i.e., spatial distance) … now succumbed to the new mechanical locomotive engine of the railroad that, in a frequently used metaphor, “shoots right through like a bullet”. “Annihilation of time and space” was the topos which the early nineteenth century used to describe the new situation … Motion was no longer dependent on the conditions of natural space, but on a mechanical power that created its own new spatiality’(5).

The building first of the Suez Canal and then of the Panama Canal arguably signaled an even more ambitious determination to use mechanical power to confound the constraints posed by natural space. If steam locomotives in the first half of the 19th century displaced horse power, the building of the Panama Canal showed a willingness to displace an entire continent: at a stroke, the Canal obviated the need to sail around the treacherous Straight of Magellan.

I say ‘at a stroke’, but in this as in so many other contexts, the modern quest for speed took a terrible toll: tens of thousands of people died building first the French and then the American versions of the Canal. The homes and livelihoods of the inhabitants of dozens of villages along the flooded Chagres River Valley were destroyed, and beneath the Gatun Lake’s 425 square kilometres there lies the remnant of a vast forest, most of whose inhabitants were slowly transformed into lifeless bottom dwellers when the Chagres was stopped in 1910. From this perspective, Barro Colorado is something akin to the tip of a tropical iceberg of destruction, a tip, like so many other similar tips across the world, that serves as a reminder of a nature that once was.

* * *

It might be inferred from this account that the most significant transformations stopped when the building of the Canal ended. In fact, a case can be made that far-reaching changes were to continue long after the Gatun reached its present level. If in the first years the island became a veritable Noah’s Ark, with a possible superabundance of species of animals capable of climbing or flying onto the island, this would presumably have had short-, medium- and long-term effects on the distribution of many of the island’s plant species. By contrast, in time some of the species (plant or animal) would have found it difficult to survive in what might well be regarded as a forest fragment. There is evidence, for example, that the number of bird species on the island has declined since the island became an island (6). While some animal species have shown a surprising ability to establish their own migratory channels to and from the mainland, others are incapable of swimming or even flying across a comparatively short stretch of open water. To these transformations we must add, as I began to suggest earlier, those generated by the activities of the island’s contemporary human dwellers.

Even as the mentioned transformations have taken place, small and large ships have navigated almost continuously past the island. Anyone standing at the end of the Fairchild Trail on a trade wind-blown day will have wondered how if at all decades of diesel smoke (and before that the soot of steamers) might have affected this corner of the island. In 2007, scientists from the Smithsonian expressed their concern at the rather larger scale effects that the looming enlargement of the Canal might have not just on the Barro Colorado Nature Monument itself, but on the biological exchange that has long taken place in the Panamanian isthmus. For some 3 million years, the Panamanian isthmus has been a kind of biological bridge between North and South America. Might the growing Canal, or rather the adjacent Canal development zone, block that bridge?

* * *

I have emphasized the discontinuity between today’s Barro Colorado, and the ancient forest. But anyone who visits the forest and is willing to look past the fluorescent ribbons is likely to be awed by the permanence of a world that, however transformed by modernity, continues to provide evidence of dynamics that existed long before the first Spanish conquistadores made their way across the isthmus. Every morning, the ‘dawn chorus’ is sung as much by birds as it is by howler monkeys (Alouatta palliata). A walk along the Smithsonian’s immaculately kept campus is as likely to provide vistas of giant ships as it is of creatures that treat the concrete paths and buildings as yet another natural structure upon which to carry on with the battle for survival: here the leaf-cutter ants (Atta colombica or Atta cephalotes) file busily along the walkways, there a vested anteater (Tamandua mexicana) snuffles along the storm drains looking for other insects. A small group of Chestnut-Mandibled Toucans (Rhamphastos swainsonii) swoops by even as a boat’s horn announces the last ferry’s departure. In the evening the fishing bats (Noctilio leporinus) make their runs along the edge of the research station’s piers, and the male Tungara frogs (Physalaemus pustulosus) begin to call out for mates. The continued presence of such animals and their complex inter-relations, let alone the growth of the island’s magnificent trees, act as a warning to any cultural theorist inclined to dismiss the notion of nature as no more than an artifact of a Western imagination.

That said, I have begun to explain why the opposite tendency—to focus entirely on the ‘natural’ nature of nature, with little or no regard for the influence of humankind—is equally problematic and must also be avoided. The predominant popular representation of scientific inquiry continues to try to hold onto the myth of a science that has no influence whatsoever on the objects that it studies. In fact, in Barro Colorado as in other parts of the world, many if not most of the scientists intervene as enthusiastically in the lives of a variety of plants and animals as many of the plants and animals intervene in the epidermises of the scientists. The point is not to deny that aspects of the forest continue to be structured by relationships that have hardly been modified by the activities of Homo sapiens v. barro coloradensis. Rather, the point is to suggest that the overarching narrative that establishes a neat opposition between nature and culture, researched object and researching subject, urbanity and wilderness is perhaps even more difficult to sustain on Barro Colorado than it is in other biological reserves. From this perspective, the fascination of the island, at least for this (social) scientist, lies as much in everything that appears not to have changed, as in everything that has changed, and continues to change thanks to the extraordinary juxtaposition of the spaces and times of an ancient forest, and the spaces and times of modern culture.

References

(1) Winfield M. Thompson (1932), ‘Isle of Upside Down is Barro Colorado’ in Ocean Ferry, Dec. 1932, pp. 5-6, 13.
(2) Piperno, D. (1990) ‘Fitolitos, arqueología y cambios prehistóricos de la vegetación en un lote de cincuenta hectáreas de la isla de Barro Colorado’ in E. Leigh, A. Stanley Rand, D. Windsor (Eds) Ecología de un Bosque Tropical: Ciclos estacionales y cambios a largo plazo. Panama: Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, p. 156. Translation from the Spanish by the author of this post.
(3) Whatmore, S. & Hinchcliffe, S. (2002) ‘Living Cities: Making Space for Urban Nature’, in Soundings: Journal of Politics and Culture. No. 22.
(4) W.C. Allee (1924) ‘The Barro Colorado Laboratory’, Science, 59:1, pp. 521-522
(5) W. Schivelbusch (1986) The Railway Journey: the industrialization of time and space in the 19th century. Lemington Spa: Berg Publishers.
(6) See for example, W.D. Robinson (1999) ‘Long-term changes in the avifauna of a tropical forest isolate, Barro Colorado Island, Panama’, in Conservation Biology 13:85-97.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

Revisiting Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium

Has the National Marine Aquarium undermined its own conservation ideals?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium (NMA) opened in 1998. At the time, it was rightly acclaimed as the best facility of its kind in the UK. Anyone unfamiliar with the developments in the ‘new aquariums’—or indeed, the ‘new zoos’—would doubtless have been astonished by the innovations in the attraction’s displays. These ranged from the ‘Shallow Waters’ exhibit—in which visitors could almost touch rays, flounder, and other species found in the coastal waters of the North Atlantic—to a very large ‘Coral Seas’ display complete with a magnificent simulation of a coral reef.

In many of the exhibits, there was a shift from traditional forms of display that emphasized the distance of visitors from the fish, to forms of representation that sought to give the impression of ‘immersion’: visitors might be, if not ‘in’ the different tanks, then certainly much ‘closer’. The ‘Mediterranean Sea’ display was, and remains, a particularly good example of this trend: the sharply slanting acrylic glass enables visitors to stand and watch as sharks and other fish swim below, in front, and indeed directly above the visitors. As part of my research on zoos (1), I have suggested that such displays actually engage in what I describe as dynamics of transmediation: aspects of techniques of observation normally associated with media representations of nature—especially those in film and television—are transposed to the naturalistic displays. In effect, the exhibits become screen-like spaces that complexly emulate the ‘ways of seeing’ associated with the mass media.

In the NMA as in many other similar facilities, the official discourse was, and continues to be one that emphasizes the ideals of conservation. By showing what there is to save, visitors might somehow identify with the plight of endangered species, and support measures to protect them. For example, the accounts given by some of the signs in the NMA (and by this blog, see ‘Of Sharks and Blockbusters‘) about the plight of sharks alert visitors about the scale of the commercial exploitation of sharks. To be sure, the aquarium’s own experiences with sharks have not been exactly unproblematic: over the years, several of the aquarium’s specimens have died (2). After one spate of deaths, a director of a zoo mused that while zoos would be crucified for allowing such a mistake, in Plymouth the cry went up for the sharks to be replaced as quickly as possible. We have to hope that the current efforts towards an ‘extreme makeover’ of sharks’ reputation will have the desired effects on the popular imagination.

Whatever the aquarium’s role in conservation, anyone familiar with recent urban regeneration trends will know that the building of the NMA was as much about helping fish as it was about helping fellow humans: in particular, those who, like the good businesspeople of Plymouth, must have hoped that a major tourist attraction such as the NMA would help to revive the city’s economic fortunes. Plymouth was, in this sense, an early UK adopter of what has become a popular urban regeneration strategy across the world. Major aquariums have opened in cities like Atlanta, Beijing, and Hull in bids to draw in the much sought-after tourist dollar. The rationale is that if a major attraction can be built that can attract tourists from across the own country (if not from beyond), then the visitors might spend money on the rest of the city—in its shops, restaurants, and perhaps its hotels.

As part of my research on zoos, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting the NMA several times since it opened. Overseas engagements meant that I’d not returned for a few years, so I decided to go to Plymouth by train for a walk around the Hoe, and then a visit to the aquarium—in so doing, I engaged in precisely the practice that the aquarium was meant to promote. Alas, I was shocked by a major change in the aquarium—one that arguably undermines the aquarium’s overall design, and indeed, the NMA’s claim to being at the forefront of conservationist practices.

The change in question is a display that was completed in 2006, and is called the ‘Exploreocean’. This exhibit is basically a large tank with ROV’s (Remotely Operated Vehicles) which visitors can manipulate to go through a series of hoops. According to the NMA’s website, the idea is to bring ‘science, technology and engineering to life’ by allowing ‘lucky members of the audience’ to ‘test their skill and wit as they race a mini ROV through the underwater assault course.’ The rationale is that the exhibit, which displaced a ‘river’ display, should allow visitors to ‘explore the various ways that technology is being used to assist scientists in developing a better understanding of our oceans.’(3) I came away with the sense that display is actually little more (and no less) than a bid to pull in the fabled punters by way of what the industry might describe as an ‘interactive’ exhibit—in this case, a game involving the equivalent of remote-controlled submarines.

This perspective is not as cynical as it might seem at first glance. Attendance figures in visitor attractions such as the NMA tend to fall as more and more people in the own catchment area become so familiar with the attraction that they stop coming for additional visits. In such a context, something has to be done to generate extra visits. If the institution can afford it, it must build a new display, or at least upgrade an existing display, every two or three years. However, unlike a large exurban zoo that can simply build a new facility in an unused portion of its land, the NMA would only have been able to use its existing building to produce a new display. Whatever other objectives were proposed for the project, the interactive Exporeoceans exhibit must have seemed like the best way of reactivating the institution’s appeal, and this in a way that maintained interest over time.

My own research certainly attests to the popularity of the so-called ‘interactives’ in zoos. Young children tend to love to engage with exhibits that involve what I describe as relations of ‘secondness’—dynamics of action and reaction. The problem is that the NMA not only removed the naturalistically landscaped starting point for the overall site—the river exhibit was located at the very top of the building—but replaced it with a technological behemoth that arguably contradicts the naturalistic style of the overall facility, and also some aspects of the institution’s own conservation ideals.

A technological behemoth: Exploreocean is dominated by a massive glass-sided tank with a small theatre-like space at one end, and the control panels for the manipulation of the ROVs at the other. People are meant to sit and watch as the contestants attempt to guide the ROV’s through the tanks’ underwater ‘assault course’. On the day that my friends and I visited, a staff member was shouting down a PA system in a vain attempt to encourage a small crowd to cheer the action on. The original design for a start in a serenely landscaped space was replaced by the kind of attraction that one would expect to find in the Brighton, or perhaps the now defunct Weston-Super-Mare pier. I’m actually a great fan of such piers, and of their arcades; the point is not to be a snob about such attractions, but to point out the jarring nature of an arcade-like game in the light (and indeed calm shadows) of the original context.

A contradiction of conservation(ist) ideals: if the problem were simply one of ’style’ or of ‘taste’, then there would not be much point in critiquing Exploreocean. However, an expert in museums and interactivity gave a presentation about interactive exhibits at the 2004 International Zoo Design Symposium in Paignton, and her talk seems particularly pertinent to the NMA’s Exploreocean. During her seminar, Michelle Henning considered the popularity of interactives from the point of view of what might be described as the unconscious, or better yet, ‘un-selfconscious’ messages that might be produced by the use of such machines in zoos. As Henning put it, there are ‘possible conflicts between modes of attention appropriate to the zoo, and those produced by some computer-based interactives; filling the zoo with buttons, consoles, touchscreens and kiosks may help to pull in the visitors, but may invite or produce forms of attention and forms of behaviour that are at odds with the greater message of the zoo’(4). I would argue that very similar, if not identical issues could be raised with respect to an interactive such as Exploreocean in the NMA.

One might, for example, wish to consider the message that can be generated when visitors are encouraged to uncritically embrace simulacra of undersea technologies. Does Exploreocean not tacitly invite visitors to regard all undersea technologies as being beneficial for the marine environment? Then again, what is the evidence for suggesting that a game such as the Exploreocean’s is conducive to pursuing a career in ‘scientific exploration’, let alone to science education? Last but not least, is the kind of activity associated with an ROV race really congruent with, say, the pedagogy of observation that is arguably required for the successful promotion of a conservation(ist) ethos? The point is not to oppose science and technology, or technology and conservation, but rather, to warn of the dangers of conflating these different elements.

No doubt aquariums and zoos face significant challenges when it comes to designing displays that not only attract visitors, but are congruent with the ideals of a conservationist ethos. On occasion, the challenges may involve ‘do or die’ situations in which managers and designers have to take radical steps to save an institution from closure. I have no idea whether this is what led the NMA to introduce Exploreocean. It does, however, seem clear that the organisation has compromised the overall design of the attraction, and may have scored an own-goal from the point of view of what I described earlier as the pedagogy of conservation.

References

1) see http://www.cmcee.org/case_studies/new_zoos.html.

2) see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1626966.stm, accessed October 10, 2008.

3) http://www.national-aquarium.co.uk/explorocean.aspx?m=thingsToSee, accessed October 10, 2008.

4) “Making things happen: interactivity in zoos and museums”, in A.B. Ploughman and S.J. Tonge (eds.) Innovation or Replication: Proceedings of the Sixth International Symposium on Zoo Design. Whitley Wildlife Conservation Trust / Paignton Zoo Environmental Park, 2005, p. 86.

Copyright © 2009 Nils Lindahl Elliot. All Rights Reserved.

‘Romantic Red’ and the Claims of Evolutionary Psychologists

Is it the ’science of attraction’, or is it the ‘attraction of science’?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Every so often the news media come up with a headline that suggests that scientists have proven that some social stereotype—or what might be described more generally as an ideological relation—is a matter of nature, that is to say, of our ‘natural’ biology. Sexism seems to be a particularly attractive ideology. In the BBC alone, the following are some of the headlines that have appeared over the last few years: ‘“Hormonal” women most attractive’; ‘Attraction “determined by walk”’; ‘Slim waist holds sway in history’; and ‘Hourglass figure fertility link’. It would appear, in this sense, that there is a ’symbiotic’ relationship between a group of psychologists engaged in what is often described ‘the science of attraction’, and some media editors who apparently are willing to publicise whatever ’science of attraction’ is sent their way. In such cases it would seem that ‘sex sells’, as combined with ‘science must be true’, is irresistibly attractive—I’m tempted to say, tongue in cheek, ‘biologically attractive’—to some journalists. The result is a dynamic that may well develop and sustain rather disturbing conceptions—ideological conceptions—of the nature of sexuality.

A week ago a number of different news media carried the latest installment of this kind of story, and in this essay I would like to offer an analysis that explains why we should treat most, if not all such stories with the deepest skepticism.

In the installment in question, the BBC news online claimed that ‘Wearing red boosts attraction’ and this was followed by a series of equally extraordinary statements:

‘Women who don a little red dress before going out with a man may find their date more attentive and generous, according to scientists.’ ‘Men said they would spend more money on a woman pictured in red, compared with the same woman wearing a blue shirt.’‘Experts say that red signals ovulation or attractiveness in other species.’And ‘The researchers say that their study is clear evidence that the colour red makes men feel more amorous – even if this is only on a subconscious level’(1).

Part of the power of such statements is that they combine tacit appeals to what seems like good common sense with the authority of science: ‘the researchers say’, ‘there is clear evidence’, ‘according to the scientists’,'experts say…’ and so forth. This would appear to be a win-win situation for everyone: the journalists can claim that they are reporting on scientific findings, a practice which is likely to be especially lauded by those who want to see more ‘educational contents’ or ‘high culture’ in the media; a real or imagined public can learn about research that might have a direct bearing on their everyday lives; and of course, the scientists might well get a career boost by being able to boast that their research has ‘made headlines’. In fact, such coverage is actually a ‘lose-lose’ situation for at least two groups: the members of the public that get conned into thinking that human sexuality is hard-wired to our ‘biological heritage’; and whatever social group ends up being objectified by any ‘ism’ that is allegedly ‘proven’ by the scientists: racism, ethnocentrism, or in this case, sexism.

After seeing all the media coverage, I decided to acquire the original essay from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Andrew J. Elliot & Daniela Niesta’s ‘Romantic red: red enhances men’s attraction to women’). What I read confirmed my fears: the research was sociobiological in its orientation, and engaged in the kind of quasi-scientific reasoning that is so often the hallmark of the type of psychology in question.

* * *

Let us begin this critique with the basics. Sociobiology refers to the members of a de facto movement that includes the scientists and social scientists who employ positivist research methods in an effort to demonstrate that one or another aspect of human social practice is biologically determined. The movement includes such household names as Desmond Morris (The Naked Ape), Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker) and more recently, Robert (Lord) Winston, the doctor and TV presenter who fronted The Human Instinct and several other BBC series. Perhaps its most widely admired advocate, and arguably the founder of the movement, is the renowned myrmecologist, E.O. Wilson (Sociobiology and On Human Nature), who summed up the movement’s discourse when he told another sociobiologist (Steven Pinker) that ‘everything that’s in the body, including the brain and the action of the mind, is obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry as we understand it[sic]’. According to Wilson, ‘there is a unity of the sciences’—a ‘consilience’ —‘through a network of cause and effect explanations in physics, biology and even the lower reaches of the social sciences.’ In the same interview, Wilson suggested that he is intent on conducting a re-examination of ‘the basic theory and contents of sociobiology, beginning with insects and eventually coming back to humans’(2).

If we adopt a sufficiently cosmic perspective, this must be a valid perspective. Think, for a moment, of the sheer vastness of the universe. Then think of the minute time and space that we humans occupy in that universe. Does it not make good sense to say that the differences between an ant and a human are insignificant when considered in the context of such an incomprehensibly vast space and time? And, given the verity of this observation, should we not also accept that we humans must be subject to the kinds of forces described by what Wilson refers to as a ‘network of cause and effect explanations’?

On one level of analysis—the level or perspective defined by the sociobiologists themselves—the answers to all of the above questions must be affirmative. Indeed, some would perhaps argue that it is dangerous to contradict the sociobiological logic at a time when religious fundamentalists the world over are arguably doing their best to return us to what might eventually become a form of theocracy. Not all sociobiologists oppose science and religion, but I hope I’m right when I say that sociobiologists sharply (and rightly) oppose the kind of literal interpretation of the Bible that would have our forebears munching on illicit apples in pretty gardens just a few thousand years ago.

The problem is that the level of analysis determined by many if not most sociobiologists is fundamentally biased when it comes to explaining humans—biased in favour of a biologically determinist world view, and a positivist conception of science. Move beyond either of these ‘isms’, and zoom in on the different species a bit, and you will suddenly find that, actually, we humans are quite different from ants, and that maybe we should use rather different forms of explanation to account for many, if not most aspects of each other’s behaviour.

* * *

Let us go back to ‘Romantic Red’. Those who have studied and critiqued sociobiology (as applied to humans) over the years will soon recognise a familiar modus operandi in the research of Elliot and Niesta. A detailed account of this pattern would transform this already long essay into a very long essay, so I will try to be brief. If the mentioned modus operandi can be summed up as a series of ’stages’, then the following is a sketch of the stages.

The first stage involves choosing some social practice to research. It could be any social practice, but many sociobiologists tend to choose practices that involve social stereotypes, and/or some form of social objectification–one infamous example involved trying to ‘prove’ that Blacks are indeed ‘less intelligent’ than Whites. In the case of Elliot and Niesta, the subject chosen for analysis is what they describe as the hypothesis that ‘red leads men to view women as more attractive and more sexually desirable. Red is hypothesized to serve as an aphrodisiac for men because it carries the meaning of sex and romance in the context of heterosexual interaction’(3). This choice means that, from the outset, the researchers have adopted the predominant, conventional, and homocentric stance regarding matters of sexual attraction: even if the focus is ostensively on men, the ultimate object of research is arguably the reception of the biology, or what is represented as the biology, of women.

I will return to the fateful character of this choice below. Here it is more important to note that the second stage in sociobiological research of this kind typically involves deciding, mainly if not entirely on the basis of circumstantial evidence, that the practice to be researched is ‘universal’. Doing so is a prerequisite for a biologically determinist discourse: if it’s ‘natural’, it must be ‘universal’ to humans (unless, of course, one subscribes to a racist view of humans, which some sociobiologists do).

In the case of Elliot and Niesta’s essay, the hypothesis is justified in a manner that reminded me of Jorge Luis Borges’ famous reference to a ‘Chinese’ [sic] encyclopaedia. I quote in its entirety the passage with the ‘evidence’ of the ‘universal’ nature of what the authors describe as ‘societal use of red’:

‘In some of the earliest rituals known to anthropologists, red ochre was used as face and body paint on females to symbolize the emergence of fertility (Knight, Powers, & Watts, 1995; Kohn, 1999; Lee, 2006). Red often appears as a symbol of passion, lust, and fertility in ancient mythology and folklore (Barua, 1962; Erdoes & Ortiz, 1984; Hupka, Zaleski, Otto, Reidl, & Tarabrina, 1997; Hutchings, 2004; Jobes, 1962). In literature, red has repeatedly been associated with female sexuality, especially illicit sexuality, most famously in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic work The Scarlet Letter. Likewise, in popular stage and film, there are many instances in which red clothing, especially a red dress, has been used to represent passion or sexuality (e.g., A Streetcar Named Desire, Dial M for Murder, and Jezebel; Greenfield, 2005). Red is paired with hearts on Valentine’s Day to symbolize romantic affection and is a highly popular color for women’s lingerie. Red has been used for centuries to signal sexual availability or “open for business” in red-light districts. Women commonly use red lipstick and rouge to heighten their attractiveness, a practice that has been in place at least since the time of the ancient Egyptians (10,000 BCE; Regas & Kozlowski, 1998)’(4).

Societal use of red, indeed. The above paragraph is an excellent illustration of the kind of poor common sense that sociobiologists frequently muster to defend what tends to be, from the start, little more than a universalising discourse. If this is the kind of ‘evidence’ that the research is based on, then every other aspect of the research must be suspect. The point is not to deny that a certain association between ‘red’—a huge and by no means unproblematic category or abstract singular(5)—and sexuality might be present in more than one cultural context. The point is that if one is going to make the kinds of universal claims that the authors make, it had better be based on much, much stronger evidence. And a key aspect of this must involve a far closer, and contextual analysis of the possible meanings of different uses of different reds in, and across, cultural contexts.

The third stage is to suggest that the practice in question is ultimately a function of nature, i.e. of a biology conceived in opposition to, or at least as transcending, contemporary social practice. This operation involves an exceedingly slippery politics. One the one hand, the research effectively seeks to reduce social practice to its ostensibly ‘natural’ causes; in effect, the ’social’ becomes no more than a kind of continuous ‘function’ of the biological. But at the same time, sociobiologists cannot help but oppose culture and nature on the level of their own discourse. I noted this contradiction in the work of E.O. Wilson himself in my book Mediating Nature (see pp. 19-20). Amongst other philosophers, Kate Soper has done an excellent job of revealing the extent to which the nature-culture opposition remains a tacit, if much reviled aspect of modern discourses about the nature of nature. As she puts it, ‘Whether… it is claimed that “nature” and “culture” are clearly differentiated realms or that no hard and fast delineation can be made between them, all such thinking is tacitly reliant on the humanity-nature antithesis itself and would have no purchase on our understanding without it’ (6). One of the philosophical problems of sociobiology is that many of its advocates try, discursively speaking, to have it both ways: in the interview mentioned earlier, Wilson, for example, makes the case that we humans are little different from ants, but in his very beautifully written book, The Diversity of Life, he himself speaks of ‘the nonhuman world’(7).

In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, the authors have no sooner made a common sense case for universal ‘societal uses of red’, than they engage in a similar form of argumentation to suggest that the ‘red-sex link’ is a matter of our ‘biological heritage’:

‘Although it is possible that the red–sex link is a product of societal conditioning alone, there is reason to believe that it may also have roots in our biological heritage. Many nonhuman female primates display red on their genitals, perineum, chest, or face when nearing ovulation (Dixson, 1983; Gerald, 2003; Hrdy & Whitten, 1987; Setchell, Wickings, & Knapp, 2006). This reddening of the skin is due to elevated estrogen (relative to progesterone) levels; increased estrogen enhances vascular blood flow under the skin surface that is manifested as red coloration (Dixson & Herbert, 1977). In some species, these displays are highly conspicuous, such as the exaggerated red swelling of the perineum in baboons, chimpanzees, and macaques, whereas in other species these displays are far less prominent, as in the slight reddening of the vulva in gibbons, gorillas, and strepsirhines (Barelli, Heistermann, Boesch, & Reichard, 2007; Sillen-Tullberg & Moller, 1993). The precise function of red coloration in female primates, both across species and across various manifestations, remains a matter of debate (Nunn, 1999; Setchell & Wickings, 2004; Stallman & Froehlich, 2000), but there is widespread consensus that it represents a sexual signal designed to attract mates (Deschner, Heistermann, Hodges, & Boesch, 2004). Research has shown that male primates are indeed particularly attracted to female conspecifics exhibiting red, as indicated by increased masturbation and copulation attempts (Bielert, Girolami, & Jowell, 1989; Waitt, Gerald, Little, & Krasielburd, 2006)’[8].

Several aspects of this argument are worth deconstructing. The authors accept that, as they put it, ‘the red–sex link’ may be ‘a product of societal conditioning alone’. But note that the expression arguably has the paradoxical function of normalizing what has by no means been proven, viz. that there is a universal ‘societal’ ‘red-sex link’. Note also that the authors acknowledge, albeit in passing, that not all nonhuman female primates display red on their genitals, perineum, chest, or face when nearing ovulation. They also acknowledge that ‘the precise function of red coloration in female primates, both across species and across various manifestations, remains a matter of debate’. Yet this counter-evidence is, in effect, swept under the carpet of the following suggestions: first, that there is in fact a ‘consensus’ in favour of a definite ‘red-sex link’ in primates; and second, that there is additional evidence that ‘male primates are indeed particularly attracted to female conspecifics exhibiting red (Witcher, Campbell, & Green, 1998)’.

As far as I can tell, the authors’ own arguments suggest that, in the best of cases, the evidence for a ‘red-sex link’ amongst nonhuman primates is ambiguous. The implication, as we are invited to read on about humans’ biology, is nonetheless that we humans ‘also’ have such a link, albeit a less conspicuous one:

‘For human females, ovulation is not advertised in a conspicuous manner, but researchers are beginning to document the presence of subtle physiological, psychological, and behavioral markers of reproductive status. As with other female primates, women’s estrogen–progesterone ratio is elevated near ovulation, which enhances blood flow (Fortney et al., 1988; Lynn, McCord, & Halliwell, 2007). In addition, women’s general skin tone lightens mid-cycle (Van den Berghe & Frost, 1986), and women near ovulation tend to wear clothing that leaves more skin visible (Grammer, Renninger, & Fischer, 2005; Haselton, Mortezaie, Pillsworth, Bleske-Rechek, & Fredrick, 2007). Furthermore, women at mid-cycle report more sexual interest and are more easily sexually aroused (Bullivant et al., 2004; Slob, Bax, Hop, Rowland, & van der Werflen Bosch, 1996), meaning the red blush of flirtation (on the face, neck, and upper chest; Eibl-Eiblsfeldt, 1989; Keltner & Buswell, 1997) and the red flush of sexual excitation (which begins on the lower chest and spreads to the upper chest, neck, and face as excitation increases; Katchadourian, 1984) are more prevalent at this time. As such, it is likely that women, like other female primates, display red more often and more prominently when nearing ovulation. We also think it reasonable to posit that men, like their more primitive male relatives, are predisposed to interpret a display of red by a female conspecific as a sexual signal and to respond accordingly’(9).

Here again, the paragraph begins by admitting that in humans, female ovulation is not advertised in a conspicuous manner. Pursued to its logical conclusion, this point alone might bring the scaffolding for any biologically determinist interpretation of the ‘red-sex link’ crashing down. Instead, the authors pursue the evidence, if it can be called that, of ‘subtle’ changes associated with human ovulation. Several of the changes seem to be based on unhelpful generalisations in their own right: for example, what is the relevance to the argument that there is ‘a lightening of skin tone’? To be sure, does such a lightening happen to all women, and would it be perceptible in all women? Is it really the case that all women near ovulation (‘near ovulation’?) ‘wear clothing that leaves more skin visible’ in all contexts? Does ‘sexual interest’ or even ‘sexual arousal’ automatically lead to a ‘red blush of flirtation’ (or to reverse the order, does flirtation always involve a red blush)? And is any such blush really ’subtle’? If one is going to use such terms in the context of a positivist epistemology, one had better develop pretty discrete and measurable categories (to be clear, I’m not arguing in favour of such categories; I am simply picking up where the authors’ own use of positivism has significant problems.)

To return to the researchers’ argument: even after the authors admit that women don’t have the kind of conspicuous changes associated with some primates, they seem to suggest that women do, in effect, become red, or at any rate, redder during ovulation: ‘As such, it is likely that women, like other female primates, display red more often and more prominently when nearing ovulation(emphasis added)’. Eh? As far as I can tell, either there is a contradiction here—are humans like other primates, or aren’t they?— or the authors need to develop a theory of tacit, unconscious, or unselfconscious ‘displays’.

Towards the end of the section that justifies the hypothesis, Elliot and Niesta bring together the two theoretical houses of cards in one sweeping statement, the italicized aspect of which establishes a typically sociobiological hierarchy, and order of priority:

‘In sum, red is clearly linked to sex in the context of heterosexual interaction, and this link is viewed as emerging from both societal use of red and a biologically engrained predisposition to red. These two sources may contribute to the red–sex link in joint fashion. That is, we posit that the societal use of red is not random, but actually derives from the biologically based predisposition to perceive red as a sexual signal. For example, the aforementioned use of red lipstick and rouge may represent, at least in some instances, an attempt to mimic the vascularization present during ovulation and sexual excitation (Low, 1979). Likewise, red may be used in red-light districts because it is the color that appears on the sexually aroused female body (not only in the publicly visible sexual flush, but, more intimately, in the engorgement of the labia minora; Luria, Friedman, & Rose, 1987). As these examples illustrate, the societal use of red can be seen as not only reinforcing the inherent meaning of red, but also as extending the application of this meaning beyond the tether of natural bodily processes’(italics added, 10).

The next stage in the sociobiological modus operandi is usually to ‘prove’ the hypothesis by way of the hypothetico-deductive method, i.e. employing one or more experiments designed to enable the experimenter to deduce whether some universal ‘law’ is valid or not.

In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, there is clearly nothing like a ‘law’ to be proven. But the manner in which the ‘proof’ itself is conducted is revealing. In this post I will merely mention one particularly glaring deficiency: it might be assumed that a research project involving a huge claim regarding the universality of the ‘red-sex link’ would involve thousands, if not tens of thousands of research subjects spanning cultures across the globe. Instead, the researchers use 27 ‘male undergraduates in the United States’ for the first experiment; 63 male and female undergraduates for the second experiment; 37 male undergraduates for the third experiment; and 31 male undergraduates for the fourth experiment. More than the tiny numbers—given the universality of the claims—what is striking is the sociological, to not say statistical naiveté of the researchers, and presumably of those who conducted any peer review of the essay. Do they really believe that 181 members of a relatively homogeneous social group—young people, all of them presumably studying in the same university—can be used to make such huge claims about the ‘red-sex link’? (I say 181, but the number might actually have been a lot lower if some of the respondents were allowed to participate in more than one experiment; to be sure, the claims of the research are arguably as good as any one of the experiments, in which a maximum of 37 male respondents participated.)

* * *

I think I’ve said enough about the logic of the research to show just how seriously flawed it is. Let us now move on to consider to what happened to the research after it was published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. This is typically the next, and ‘final’ stage in this kind of research: as noted earlier, many sociobiologists seem to be very good at getting the news media to publicise their research; or at least, many seem to be very good at producing research that appeals to some of the news media. This step is crucial because it ensures that the research acquires a salience that it wouldn’t attain otherwise. And with that salience there arguably comes power—potentially, academic promotion, but also, a certain cultural authority that goes with wide social recognition. The point is not to criticise Elliot and Niesta for seeking a wider audience for their research, if indeed they were at all involved in the publicity (PR departments in universities frequently take over this process, and academics don’t necessarily control how their research is promoted or recontextualized). In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, it is nevertheless possible to see how the two dimensions (the research, and its representation) came together in a way that might well facilitate sexual objectification, i.e. what is commonly known as sexism.

On the one hand, the research sets out to prove, in effect, that what matters most in sexual attraction is the biology of women, as perceived by men. There is arguably a double whammy at work here: not only is the explanatory focus on women’s biology, but men are tacitly portrayed as the ones that do the perceiving of, or gazing upon, that biology.

On the other hand, the BBC article not only echoes this standpoint, but amplifies and extends it: red becomes a ‘booster’ for sexual attraction—full stop—and somehow, a ‘little red dress’ becomes a part of the equation. For good measure—and this is an aspect that the authors themselves have put into their research methodology—it is claimed that wearing red will also get the men to spend more money on the women. All other mediating aspects are eliminated, in favour of just one ‘factor’: wearing red, or rather, women wearing red. In a seemingly effortless recombination, sexual objectification and capitalism are made mixed, matched, and legitimised. What matters, or so the article suggests, as ‘backed up’ by the research, is for the woman to make herself sexually attractive by way of red, and this will ensure that the money and the ‘amorous feelings’ get going. Thank god (and/or complex evolutionary processes) that life is not so simple.

* * *

I can well imagine what the sociobiologists’ rejoinder might be: are you suggesting that our biology is not an important aspect of sexual attraction? No; of course it is important. The problem emerges when certain social and cultural aspects are ignored; or when the social aspects are reduced to little more than a natural function of an ‘underlying’ biology, a ‘biological heritage’. This is what is known as methodological functionalism at its worst. If the power of the social aspects is ignored, or if false claims are made about the power of ‘nature’, and such claims are then taken to be an ‘objective truth’, then someone is likely to end up being misled, if not disempowered. After all, it is widely assumed that what is ‘natural’ cannot be changed. In the case of ‘Romantic Red’, what is, by the authors’ own admission, potentially ‘a product of societal conditioning [sic] alone’, is in the end reduced to a matter of biology: ‘we posit that the societal use of red is not random, but actually derives from the biologically based predisposition to perceive red as a sexual signal.’ In the paper’s conclusion the authors further state that

‘The practical implications of our findings are striking in the extent of their reach. That red is an aphrodisiac for men is not only valuable information for both men and women in the mating game, but should also prove of considerable interest to fashion and image consultants, product designers, and marketers and advertisers, among (many) others. Given the subtlety of the effect (men show little awareness of it) and the ease with which the effect may be evoked (via a 5-s glimpse of red), it is easy to imagine red having a widespread influence in daily life’(emphasis added, 11).

Easy to imagine, but not so easy to prove: the authors belatedly recognise towards the end of their essay that further research might need to consider the social context. With some effort, a case might be made that the journalists should have noted this in the recontextualisation of the research. This, however, is somewhat disingenuous. On the one hand, the entire research methodology and epistemology is biased in favour of biological determinism. On the other hand, it is not exactly a secret that many journalists tend to accentuate and caricature much of the science that they popularise. In the context of a society that arguably remains deeply if subtly sexist, it is hardly surprising that the BBC reporter(s) have not only reproduced the biologically determinist and universalizing orientation of the research, but have actually extended its claims: as noted earlier, it is not only that ‘Wearing red boosts attraction’—a headline that might lead men to start wearing red shirts!—but also that ‘Women who don a little red dress before going out with a man may find their date more attentive and generous, according to scientists’ (BBC, as per the earlier quote).

Earlier, I mentioned that sociobiology, as applied to humans, is premised on a positivist epistemology. This is perhaps the most grievous aspect of the research design. Despite the authors’ early suggestions to the contrary, the research continues to be haunted by its reliance on what one scholar has described as the ‘rule of phenomenalism’(12)—simplifying somewhat, the notion that essences are no different from phenomena, or, put even more simply, that any given practice is more or less unidimensional in the sense that its meaning is fixed. ‘Romantic Red’ arguably constitutes a de facto return to the rule of phenomenalism in so far as it effectively tries to affix the meaning of ‘red’ to an allegedly biological function—a function which either transcends, or is itself expressed by, any social practice. Such a fixing—in every sense of the word—is potentially dynamite from the point of view of sexual politics. I have noted elsewhere the way in which modern institutions have silently humanized ‘nature’ only to project the humanized nature back onto cultural groups via procedures of cosmomorphism (see Mediating Nature, p. 42ff). Such a circuit of anthropomorphism and cosmomorphism might well be one of the consequences of ‘Romantic Red’. What chance, one might ask, does a more liberated, and progressive sexual politics have if many men and women believe, on the back of this kind of research, that when it comes to sex—or at least ’sex’ as it relates to ‘red’—we are no more (and no less) than gibbons, macaques or chimpanzees? The problem is not to twist science in favour of a certain sexual politics, but rather to make sure that a certain science does not end up twisting our sexual politics.

References

(1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7693708.stm, accessed November 5, 2008. The research attracted the attention of several other news media. See for example, the Los Angeles Times coverage at http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/booster_shots/2008/10/color-red-is-an.html.
(2) in http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wilson03/wilson_print.html, accessed November 5, 2008.
(3) Elliot, A.J. & Niesta, D. (2008] ‘Romantic red: red enhances men’s attraction to women’ in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95(5): 1150-1164, p. 1150.
(4) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(5) Williams, R. (1983) Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revised edition. London: Fontana.
(6) Soper, K. (1995) What is Nature? Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 15.
(7) Wilson, E.O. (1992) The Diversity of Life. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, p. 9.
[8] Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(9) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(10) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1151.
(11) Elliot & Niesta Op. Cit., p. 1161.
(12) Kolokowski, L. (1972) Positivist philosophy : from Hume to the Vienna Circle / Leszek Kolakowski translated [from the Polish] by Norbert Guterman.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

The Peter Scott Debate: is it really ‘animals vs. people’?

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

On Tuesday 21st October, the Great Hall in Bristol University’s Wills Memorial Building hosted the 2008 Peter Scott Debate. Organised by the Wildscreen Festival and Bristol’s Festival of Ideas, the debate considered the motion that ‘People must be kept away from endangered animals’. Those arguing the case for the motion were Valmik Thapar, an author and tiger conservationist, and Will Travers, CEO of the Born Free Foundation. Those against the motion were Mary Mavanza, of the Goodall Institute, and Professor Bill Adams, of Cambridge University. Each of the participants had the opportunity to make the case for or against, and then the large audience was able to ask questions. A ‘verbal vote’ was taken on entry to the hall, and members of the audience were given a chance to vote with slips at the end of the debate.

The motion was so flawed that it should have been easy for Adams and Mavanza to win over the audience. Indeed, a majority of those who gave their ‘verbal vote’ at the beginning of the debate were reportedly against the motion. But alas, Thapar and Travers won the debate. Thapar made the plausible argument that tigers had to be kept separate not just for their own safety, but for the safety of local inhabitants. He also suggested that in India, business entrepreneurs would exploit any weakening of the boundary to colonise the remaining wildlife sanctuaries. By contrast, Will Travers adopted a more hegemonic stance when he argued that endangered animals could be kept separate so long as, in effect, local communities were paid (via jobs and public services) to support the wildlife havens.

Given these arguments, Mary Mavanza and Bill Adams should have had a field day deconstructing the politics of each of their oponents’ arguments. The ‘people vs. animals’ frame given by the organizers of Wildscreen—and promoted quite explicitly by Thapar— set up an opposition that, as Adams noted, was patently false, if not absurd. People are, of course animals—a point that sociobiologists quoted by natural history documentaries are always particularly keen to make. But even the most policed game reservations do not really segregate ‘people and endangered animals’: they segregate some people from the animals. It is seldom if ever really a question, in this sense, of creating a true ‘no go zone’ for people—the problem is often to exclude people whose forebears have inhabited newly formed parklands for hundreds, if not thousands of years. In many such cases, people who have been ‘local inhabitants’ have suddenly found themselves reclassified as ‘poachers’. As Adams and Mavanza noted, successful conservation requires local inhabitants not just to be ‘included’ in conservationist enterprises, but to be the architects, managers, and protectors of biological reserves. To do otherwise is to return to the colonial or post-colonial institutions that have long haunted Africa. It is also to reproduce, however tacitly, the kind of nature/culture opposition that is arguably at the heart of the environmental crisis.

How, and why then did Thapar and Travers win the day? I suggest that at least four aspects played a role in the victory.

First, Wildscreen (and presumably the co-organisers, Bristol Festival of Ideas) succeeded in framing the event in such a manner that Adams and Mavanza had to argue against what was a negative proposition, but which was transformed linguistically into a kind of ‘false positive’: people should be kept away from endangered animals (the proposition might alternatively have been formulated as ‘endangered animals cannot be segregated from people’). I am reminded, in this sense, of the insightful analyses offered by Gunther Kress and Robert Hodge (see for example, the second edition of their Language as Ideology, Routledge 1993) and other critical discourse analysts.

If the formulation of the motion began to set a certain discursive train in motion, other aspects of the debate gave the train further momentum. Thapar proved to be a formidable orator. His arguments rang out like pistol shots, and he did a superb job of combining a sense of moral outrage—how could anybody suggest anything but the separation of people and endangered animals—with bona fide arguments in favour of keeping tiger sanctuaries. Most convincing was his argument that to do otherwise would be to give carte blanche to rapacious developers, who would be only too happy to take over the existing sanctuaries in India. The combination of moral outrage and pragmatism probably helped to mobilize a powerful ‘structure of feeling’ (I use the term coined by Raymond Williams); and this in turn may have led members of the audience to overlook the issues which I noted earlier—for example, no one seems to have really dwelled on the issue of generalisation. Such is, of course, the nature of the peculiar genre of the debate, for which often what matters most is not the quality of the argument, but the manner in which it is performed.

If Thapar’s performance was strong, Adams’ and Mavanza’s was, by contrast, rather weak. In fairness, both faced an uphill task for the reasons mentioned earlier. But they also faced the difficult task of critiquing a politics that has only recently begun to be questioned beyond academic, or near-academic contexts. It is, nonetheless, a shame that Mavanza and Adams did not mobilize equally powerful rhetorical devices to undermine the arguments in favour of separation. Either participant might, for example, have begun by referring to the incredibly problematic history of virtually any of the major parks or game lodges in Southern Africa.

I would speculate, finally, that a fourth factor may have involved at least a part of the audience’s ideological affiliation. I am assuming that a significant proportion of the attendees were delegates to the Wildscreen Festival, a biennial natural history filmmaking jamboree in which the producers of wildlife documentaries come together to talk shop. Since the 1960s, the documentaries’ aesthetic has depended on creating the illusion of a wilderness without humans; would the filmmakers really have voted against their own aesthetic? In this field as in others, an aesthetic is never ‘just’ an aesthetic; a case might well be made that the entire industry effectively both reproduces, and relies on the ideological opposition of human and non-human animals. It is, in this sense, no coincidence that Thapar himself is a producer and presenter of documentaries for the BBC and other nature media, and that his specialism lies in the conservation of what is arguably the most charismatic of the endangered predators.

For all of the above reasons, the debate was an opportunity created—credit goes to the organizers—but also missed.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved

Building a New Nature Trail

Some problems with the PUS model of science communication

by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Let us imagine the following scenario: a not-for-profit organisation that manages a biological reserve wants to develop a new trail. The reserve could be in a temperate or a tropical forest, on the edge of a desert or in a wetland, in the Arctic or in an Andean páramo; in this post we will deliberately ignore these and other equally important contextual elements in order to focus on some problems regarding what arguably remains the predominant model of science communication, or what I describe below as the PUS model of science communication (PUS stands for ‘Public Understanding of Science’).

I will return to this model in a moment. First let us add gravel, so to speak, to the fictional trail. In building the new trail, the organisation has several aims: on the one hand, the reserve must be visited by more ecotourists in order to raise much needed revenue. On the other hand, its managers are keen to avoid putting additional pressure on the more fragile parts of the reserve, which are already being visited by many thousands of people each year. The new trail should thus work to ameliorate the pressure of tourism on the rest of the reserve.

In keeping with this environmentally responsible approach, the managers have decided that the new trail should act as a space for informal science education. In contrast with the older trails, which rely entirely on the mediation of guides, or on the knowledge of the visitors themselves, the new trail is to provide an opportunity for scientists and visitors to communicate about science—especially about the science produced by internationally-renowned researchers working in the biological reserve.

An area for the new trail is designated in a part of the biological reserve that is less sensitive to the pressures of tourism. Plans are drawn up for a trail that combines walking through the designated area, and stopping at a succession of information stands. Each of the stands is to be devoted to a single science topic which will be represented with interpretation boards and panels; the texts for these will be written by scientists working on the biological reserve. Where possible, each stand will be located next to one of the phenomena that the scientists have studied. At the end of the trail, visitors will find a shop and café.

At first glance, this may sound like an eminently sensible way of building a new trail. Hundreds, if not thousands of nature reserves face similar challenges across the world, and many might well seek to develop a trail of the kind just outlined. The question to be explored in this post is, would such a trail engage in a successful form of science education?

It might well do so. The success of trails depends on many factors, not least their location, and a host of other proximal and distal elements of context. The following paragraphs focus on a series of problems that are likely to be pertinent to anyone who conceives a nature trail on the basis of what I described earlier as the PUS model of science communication. This model has a long, and not very distinguished history in the UK and other parts of the world. The following essay describes aspect of the model by deconstructing some of its key assumptions, or ‘ways of doing’ as they might pertain to a nature trail such as has just been described.

Problem 1: ‘Science communication = scientists communicating about science’

In the fictional trail scenario that I’ve just sketched, it is the scientists that are to produce the ‘contents’ of interpretation boards. This is in keeping with what is perhaps the fundamental assumption of the PUS approach, an assumption that shapes its entire discourse: the notion that if science is something that is done by scientists, then scientists must be centrally involved in the communication of science.

At first glance, this premise appears to be so obviously commonsensical as to not require any further consideration. Science communication is communication about science, ergo, the people who know the science best will also be its best communicators.

The first problem with this premise is that no scientist—no professional in any field—is necessarily adept at communicating about his/her own work, even within the context of her/his own field. Many people have difficulty expressing their own ideas even to those who are very familiar with that work. This does not automatically disqualify someone from being a good scientist, but it does mean that no scientist is necessarily a good ‘science communicator’, howsoever one defines this practice.

The second problem, and the problem that is more pertinent to the context being considered, is that those who are good at communicating their ideas to people in their own field(s) of interaction are not necessarily good at communicating with people who don’t share their own everyday understandings of that field. It is worth spelling out how and why this might be the case.

A scientist who communicates with other scientists in her/his own field can usually build on a chain of spoken and unspoken understandings. In such a context, certain theories, certain ways of doing, and indeed certain ways of communicating about the theories and the ways of doing can be taken for granted. Unless some aspect of the field is being critiqued, chances are that most of the contextual elements will remain tacit, and will be evoked, if they are evoked at all, by way of a kind of shorthand: for example the use of certain concepts, references to certain names, theories, procedures, and so forth.

When a scientific discourse is taken out of such a context, and relocated in a different context, a host of transformations are likely to take place. Depending on the new context, some or all of the fundamental assumptions that guide practice in the original context may no longer be taken for granted by all of those involved in the communications process. While a particularly clear exposition or a degree of simplification may help to bridge some of the gaps, this is not always the case. For example, some of the recipients of the information may not be familiar with even ‘basic’ aspects of the hypothetico-deductive method. Even if some or all of the recipients are familiar with this method, there may be concepts, theories, or even structures of scientific feeling—I use the last term quite deliberately—which are wholly unknown to a majority of the addressees of interpretation panels and other media.

Equally if not more importantly, some visitors may expect to be offered information that is guided by a logic that contradicts the spirit with which much research in the biological sciences is conducted: for example, they may wish to obtain information that is quite explicitly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric, or information in which spectacular fact displaces any focus on subtle or complex relationships.

Engaging with this process may be described as a form of translation, but the metaphor of translation is not a good one if by this one assumes that all or most of the own meanings can be replaced by equivalent terms. ‘Translation’ in the context of a trail such as the one described above involves not just individual terms, but entire chains and interconnections of discourse. If we are to stick to the metaphor of translation, science communication in a nature trail is probably best compared to the translation of an essay into a poem, or vice-versa. A set of statements must be translated into an entirely different form, an entirely different genre.

Of course, some scientists can engage in this kind of translation, or in time they may learn how to do so. There are many examples of superb science communication produced by former or practicing scientists. But this should not lead to the fallacious conclusion that all scientists can engage in the practice of popular science communication, or indeed, should be able to do so, simply because they themselves are scientists. A more critical approach suggests that the people best able to communicate about science are the people that can engage effectively with whatever genre of science communication is being deployed. Doing so is bound to require an understanding of the science being communicated; but that is different from saying that the communicators themselves must be scientists.

Problem 2: ‘The public needs to know more about science’

I have deliberately postponed the specification of the kind of visitors that the organisation in our fictional park managers want to engage with. One reason for doing so is that many scientists tend to conceive publics according to one of two equally problematic models. One model is that of the ‘ignorant’ public that knows nothing. The opposite model is one of a public that is very much like the scientist her/himself. Whatever the case, the public in question tends to be regarded as ‘the public’, and as a public that is, or should be, interested in science.

Each of these assumptions is inherently problematic. On the one hand, strictly speaking there is no such thing as ‘the public’. Anyone who gives serious consideration to the term quickly realises that it constitutes an unhelpful instance of what Raymond Williams once described as an abstract singular, that is to say, a term that accords a single, universal, essential quality or character to an otherwise diverse group of elements. It can, and perhaps should be argued that language cannot do without such terms, and my own writing doubtless provides evidence of the verity of this point. However, some abstract singulars are less helpful, and indeed more problematic, than others. Furthermore, some efforts to reduce the abstract singularity of terms are less successful than others. For example, efforts to reduce the category of ‘the public’ to more manageable subcategories such as ‘ABC1s’ are likely to involve only slightly less sweeping generalizations, and may be premised on what continue to be uncritical classifications of people.

On the other hand, for a scientist to say, as a matter of general principle, that ‘the public wants to know more science’, or worse, that ‘the public needs to know more science’ is as contentious as a priest saying that ‘the public wants to know more about God’, or ‘the public needs to know more about God’. In both cases, a convenient entity (‘the public’) is fashioned in accordance with the interests of the speaker, and this probably on the basis little more than a moralising sense that a) what one has to say is important; and b) that ‘the public’ understands, or can be made to understand, that it is indeed important. We might all agree, for example, the more people should know more about global warming. But if this stance determines a priori a certain tone for one’s efforts to communicate about global warming, and if this tone is more or less condescending, then the scene is likely to be set for the kind of top-down mode of communication that has long characterised the PUS approach.

Problem 3: ‘The best way to communicate about science in a biological reserve is via clearly written, and informative interpretation boards or panels’

Important scientific findings tend to be communicated via the written word. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that many scientists are particularly keen on using interpretation panels to communicate about their own work. In the trail scenario described above, the proposal was to set up some stands with lots of written text.

My own research suggests that panels with a lot of written text frequently stand ignored in national parks, or indeed in zoos, botanic gardens or even museums. More often than not, only a relatively small minority of fairly highly educated, or highly motivated visitors really tend to read at least the longer texts. To be sure, anyone who engages in a close study of the way in which even the shorter texts are used may be in for some big surprises.

Faced with these challenges, some informal science educators have devoted their lives to finding the ‘ideal sign’ that does everything for everyone. Others have become part of a veritable movement ‘against interpretation’, i.e. doing away with the signage in order to ‘let the visitor interpret nature as s/he pleases’. The first stance is a species of logocentrism, viz., an irrational faith in the power of the written word. The second stance is a species of populism, that is to say an effort, however un-self-conscious, to dissimulate the own interests by deferring to an allegedly popular will.

My own concern with the matter is that any prospective sign user should recognise the strengths and weaknesses of different media and genres of communication, but this vis-à-vis different visiting groups, and their practices in situ, that is to say, in context. For example, a panel with a detailed account of research about, say, a species of leaf-cutter ant might be fascinating to certain visitors, e.g. visitors unfamiliar with the ecology of such ants, and who like to read field guides or encyclopaedic entries. But if such a panel is shown to children aged between three and seven, the only interesting bits are likely to be the pictures, and not necessarily the pictures that seem most realistic or appropriate to many adults. Then again, if any of the above visitors have to stop in a tropical forest to read about the ants for more than about 30 seconds, it is quite likely that they themselves will start to be ‘read’ by flying insects, if not by the ants themselves. Under such circumstances, it will be very tempting to run away after swatting the first mosquito, or finishing the second or the third sentence (whichever comes first). I mention a tropical context, but analogous problems would doubtless be faced in the blistering heat of the Sonoran Desert, or in the freezing wind of the Magellanic moorland. Context is, if not all, then certainly a hugely important dimension of the interpretive process.

Problems on the level of what I describe as the pragmatics of science communication are likely to be compounded if visitors come away with a sense that the information is boring, or a convenient way of ‘dealing’ with visitors. The reader will recall that, in the sample trail, the information stands (and indeed the entire new trail) were to ameliorate the pressure of tourism on the more sensitive parts of the biological reserve. If, however, the visitors in a new trail are first shown the ‘real’ biological reserve and then get taken to a less interesting area that is full of signs, then the new trail may well generate sharp complaints. ‘I didn’t travel half-way around the world to be shown a bunch of panels with information that I could have read in a book’ or ‘I paid a hefty entrance fee to see nature, not to read about it’.

If, furthermore, that information comes across as being overly didactic, and if there is even a whiff of a sense that visitors are being ‘talked down to’, then we have a recipe for the kind of scenario that I witnessed unfolding once at a zoo. One family was so sensitive to didacticism that they even objected to seeing a building that had the label ‘Education Department’ on it. ‘We didn’t come to the zoo in order to go back to school’, one visitor growled.

Problem 4: ‘If in doubt, conduct some in-house visitor research’

One way of addressing the aforementioned problems is to conduct visitor research. But some forms of visitor research may compound the problems. For example, some years ago, some British zoos asked a biologist to conduct a survey of visitor awareness of the zoos’ efforts to communicate about endangered species. The biologist designed what was arguably a kind of pop-quiz that tested whether visitors at the zoos had ‘got the message’. In so doing, the survey effectively transformed visitors into students who hadn’t studied for a test. Even those managers whose zoos got relatively good results were left uncertain as to whether the targeted visitors already knew the answers before arriving at the zoo, or if they learned the answers to the survey questions in the course of their visits.

Unfortunately—some might say fortunately—we live in a time when it is no longer enough to create trails or generate displays that look attractive, or seem informative. If any aspect of the trail has been produced thanks to public funding, chances are that the park will be required to specify ‘deliverables’, and to then prove that the deliverables are just that.

While aspects of this trend may be welcome, others are not. Few things are likely to be riskier than a display or trail that is entirely the result of the subjective whim of one or a couple of uninformed individuals. But it is easy to fall for the trap of thinking that it is possible to quantify outcomes of nature trails in the same way that one can count, say, the number of Ford motor cars sold in one year. I would make the case that many aspects of a visit to a nature park not only can’t be quantified, but shouldn’t be quantified. There should always be room for an imaginative process both on the level of the production, and the reception of the trail.

It is also tempting to think that all that’s involved in social scientific research is the production of surveys. Positivism has its advantages, and surveys can of course address some issues. But if the resulting approach subjects visitors to the equivalent of a pop quiz, and if complex issues are framed by simplistic questions with multiple-choice answers, then it is probably best to avoid such research in its entirety.

This post is not the place in which to explain how one should do visitor research. It suffices to note that visitor research (or its analogon, audience research) can provide useful insights especially when it is conducted in a manner that is not driven by an instrumental logic, i.e. if the research does not simply set out to test whether or not a trail has achieved this or that quantifiable objective, or ‘hit’ this or that visiting group. And while it is always possible to conduct visitor research ‘a posteriori’, i.e. after a trail has been completed, it is usually far better to involve researchers in the earliest stages of a new trail’s planning process.

There are three reasons for this. First, and most generally, if public money is employed, and the trail has to be evaluated, then the evaluation process should be an integral aspect of the design, and not just something that is tacked on. A visitor researcher that fully understands both the explicit and more tacit aspects of a particular design is more likely to do a better job of assessing its outcomes once the trail is built.

Second, an experienced visitor researcher is likely to be able to provide significant insights to the design team from the start. For example, any designer that claims that a new trail will transform visitors’ understandings of this or that species is likely to be asked, ‘what exactly do you mean by “transform”?’ This is not as facetious a question as it might seem: if the trail is to be successful, and successfully evaluated, then it must start out with, or at least arrive at, very clear and precise objectives. If the designer further claims that the trail will transform the ‘behaviour’ of visitors (what anthropologists now describe as people’s practices), the visitor researcher should be able to alert the designer about the pitfalls of such an ambitious proposal. If some 20 years of environmental activism haven’t succeeded in changing most people’s practices, why should a trail manage to do this?

A third reason for involving a visitor researcher from the start is that the actual construction of a trail nearly always results in significant changes to the original plans. It may be difficult for someone completely subsumed by this process to stand back, and critically assess the extent to which a seemingly minor design change might lead to significant changes in the visiting experience, or in the dynamic of assessment.

What I have described as the Public Understanding of Science approach to science communication (and science education) has its roots in a desire by some scientific institutions to manage public relations to their own advantage. In the UK, much of this movement’s history was a response to Margaret Thatcher’s decision to cut the funding of scientific institutions. Little wonder that in a report published in 1985, the Royal Society thundered that ‘…our most direct and urgent message must be to the scientists themselves: Learn to communicate with the public [sic], be willing to do so and consider it your duty to do so’. Anyone wishing to learn about a more up-to-date way of conceiving science communication may wish to visit the website of the ESRC’s Science in Society programme (www.sci-soc.net). The projects which this programme funded were premised on a far more complex conception of science communication, and indeed, of science itself.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot. All Rights Reserved

The Demise of Bristol’s Wildwalk

By Nils Lindahl Elliot

Bristol’s Wildwalk visitor attraction, formerly known as Wildscreen, opened in 2000. A part of the Millenium Project-funded at-Bristol complex, the facility was originally described as a ‘showcase for the wonders of the planet’, a place where ‘live exhibits [would] be combined with state of the art technology to help visitors get the most from their visit’, where ‘a stunning botanical house and giant IMAX cinema [would] further bring the experience to life’(1). Unfortunately, the attraction failed to attract sufficient visitors to cover its running costs, and the site was closed in 2007. The building will now house a 6000 square-metre aquarium, to be run by Blue Reef Leisure. In this post, I’d like to offer an analysis of what may have gone wrong with Wildwalk. I’d also like to consider the kind of venue that might have replaced it, and that might still be set up in Bristol, or perhaps in a larger city.

* * *

Bristol is widely regarded as the ‘Mecca’ of wildlife documentary producers. It is the home of the BBC’s Natural History Unit (NHU), and also of a number of independent production companies specialising in wildlife filmmaking. Every two years, the industry holds Wildscreen, arguably the most important natural history film festival in the world, and an opportunity for wildlife filmmakers to meet and talk shop.

Many years ago, Christopher Parsons, a former producer, head of the NHU, and founder of the Wildscreen Trust, had the idea that Bristol ought to have a visitor attraction that might be something akin to a ‘walk through’ natural history documentary. This idea was arguably as novel as it was unworkable. A key feature of natural history documentaries—and indeed of all the documentaries that adhere to the codes of what Noel Burch once described as the Institutional Mode of Representation (2)—is the semiotic figure of a ‘ubiquitous observer’, i.e. a virtual observer that is apparently able to represent anything from any angle, and at any point in time. I will say more about this observer below; here I suggest that a strong case can be made that, on this point alone, a visitor attraction that effectively turned back the clock of audio-visual corporeality was condemned to fail.

Or was it? We may never know, for the visitor attraction that was eventually built with some of the £90 million invested in the at-Bristol complex (by the National Lottery, the Millenium Commission, the South West Regional Development Agency, the Bristol City Council and ‘commercial partners’ such as Nestlé) was reportedly not what Parsons had in mind. After a series of re-interpretations of his proposals first by the project designers and then by the people who actually built the facility, the attraction went from being a walk-in natural history documentary, described initially as an ‘electronic zoo’, to a hybrid that combined the features of a variety of popular genres. As visitors walked into the attraction, the first part of the exhibit was very much a contemporary natural history museum tracing the evolution of life on Earth. Towards the end of this section, there were some aquariums with live specimens; whenever I visited Wildscreen (and then ‘Wildwalk’), it was interesting to note that it was these displays that had the most people milling about them.

After seeing the aquariums, the visitors went out into the first of two walks through state-of-the-art greenhouses. The first was a greenhouse that was meant to trace the development of plants from mosses to complex flowering plants. One of the attractions of this part of Wildwalk was that it was possible to see the urban landscape just beyond the glass walls; unlike some visitor attractions that attempt to immerse visitors in a ‘total’ simulation, this space did not attempt to hide its urban location.

At the end of the first greenhouse, visitors went back into the natural history museum-like space, this time with interactive video consoles placed side-by-side with several glass cases containing live specimens. The different species on real or virtual display were grouped in broad classes such as ‘insects’, ‘amphibians’ etc. In one of the displays, visitors could use remote controls to point a small video camera at an insect. Towards the end of this part of the exhibit there was a science-education-cum-children’s-play-area. Then it was out into a second greenhouse, this time a representation of a tropical forest with several live birds and butterflies, as well as an aquarium with fish from Amazonia.

The last section included a ‘news room’ with computer consoles where visitors could find out about a variety of environmental issues, and an interactive display that explained the ins and outs of different forms of recycling.

This brief account begins to give a sense of the hybridity of the attraction, a hybridity that was at one and the same time what made Wildwalk an innovative, but also a somewhat difficult attraction to visit. What was problematic was not the hybridity per se, but the attraction designers’ failure to engage in a systematic analysis of the inter-relation between very different techniques of observation. Put simply, each of the genres which Wildwalk recontextualised—natural history museum, botanic garden, aquarium, zoo, and TV documentary—is associated with its own ‘way of seeing’. For example, it is not the same thing to attend to an image of a scorpion in a natural history documentary, and an actual scorpion in a jewel-box display in natural history museum, let alone a zoo. As I began to note earlier, one of the characteristics of realist forms of cinematic representation is the production of a ubiquitous observer that apparently enables spectators to travel anywhere at any time to see any thing. The mobility of such an observer stands in stark contrast with that of, say, a visitor standing in front of a zoo display. The problem is not that the former mode of observation is ‘better’ than the latter, though many visitors might think so. It is that each mode is associated, amongst other things, with a particular corporeality, one which cannot simply be transposed into a new space with little or no thought for the implications of the changed space. For example, one does not normally stand and watch a whole natural history documentary; but if one is just shown short clips bereft of the documentary’s characteristic narrative form (arguably a key part of this genre’s pleasure), then the experience is not likely to be a particularly good one unless something else replaces the original pleasure. Make this category mistake enough times, with enough different genres, and you have a recipe for a confusing, and perhaps even boring visitor attraction.

From this perspective, one problem, if not the problem with Wildwalk was that it neglected to pull together the various modes of observation in relation to a coherent project on the level of the subject of enunciation. That is to say, on the level of the symbolic process that guides the spectator’s gaze ‘from within’ a representation. The attraction’s appeal to an over-arching narrative about evolution and complexity—a narrative that was not actually noticed qua narrative by many visitors—was a thematic, and not an ‘enunciative’ strategy. In the absence of a serious consideration of this problem, it is not surprising that a couple of visitors reportedly paid to go in, and walked through the entire attraction thinking that they were on their way to the adjacent IMAX theatre. While this is no doubt an extreme example, it speaks volumes of Wildscreen’s inability to arrive at a form that was not only different, but recognisably different.

* * *

It may seem somewhat perverse to propose an alternative now that the attraction has closed. In fact, CMCEE was going to conduct visitor research at Wildwalk in the autumn of 2007, with a view to proposing practical alternatives for the site. Alas, I received news of the proposed closure while I was conducting research in the Panamanian rainforest, and so it was not possible to take part in the discussions that immediately preceded the closure.

The following is one of the possibilities that might have been explored: Wildwalk could have become a museum of natural history photography. This option would have required a significant refurbishment, but would have provided a platform on which to begin to solve the issues identified in this post. The change to the genre of a museum would also have helped to deal with the long-term funding problems. Wildwalk could have applied for the UK’s state subsidy for museums—a subsidy which, bizarrely, is not available to science centres. The new attraction would have exchanged its live animal exhibits for a series of displays describing the history of modern visual and audio-visual representations of wildlife. Many of the building’s wonderful design features would have fit with this proposal; not least, the presence of an IMAX theatre, which could have been used to screen a really good documentary about the history of the genre.

Unfortunately, this or any other similarly innovative project will have to find a different venue. It now looks like Bristol will simply get another aquarium—one that is unlikely to be as innovative as those in Plymouth or Hull, but which will almost certainly compete with the Bristol Zoo, which already has a good aquarium. Perhaps some far-sighted philanthropist can be talked into providing the funds for an all-new attraction that does justice to Bristol’s role as the ‘Mecca’ of natural history filmmaking?

References

(1) Wildscreen-at-Bristol Press Pack, 1999.
(2) Noel Burch (1990) Life to Those Shadows. London: BFI.

Copyright © 2008 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved