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
