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Project Eden
cwernli writes "Project Eden [had to] visually provide a spectacular theater high enough to house the towering trees of the rainforests, wide enough for the sun-baked escarpments of the Mediterranean and, oh yes, become the eighth wonder of the world. Easy!?""
Here is the Eden project page, lest we /. the wrong site...
Now it will be EASY to get funding for my giant tower to reach into heaven! I'll be starting IPO in a week. For now, i'll need about a thousand strong men with bricklaying experience that all speak the same language.
Project Eden opened a year ago, and won't be worth visiting for at least a year (when all the plants have grown and the ecology is sorted out).
So grass on the roof is the latest rage in architecture? There's a house in my neighborhood that has grass growing on the roof, but my roommate and I just figured it was because no one lived there for a a few years. We thought it was an abandoned dump, but apparently the grassy-knoll-on-the-roof feature has made it too expensive for prospective buyers.
In Milwaukee, WI there is a place known as "The Domes" (The actual name is the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory) They are 3 beehive (not geodesic) shaped domes that house 3 separate climates (arid, tropical, and something called "Floral Show") that are 85' tall. Construction on them was completed in 1967 for a measly 4.5 million.
Yeah, I realize it's not quite the same as PE but I thought everyone should know that we yanks have our own big plastic plant house thingies too.
I'm assuming no candy apple stands in there?
The relevance to computing is that the geodesic domes were actually designed and the parts built by CIM - all the way from the CAD files to setting up and cutting the metal. As they fit onto a non-level site against the side of a quarry, this is a great demonstration of what can be done with state of the art engineering.
One big function of Eden is education - to explain to kids reared on fast food and television why different habitats are important and why the preservation of rain forests thousands of miles away actually matters to them. At a cost of less than $150 million (not the ludicrous £86 billion one dumbskull suggested) that's less than Hollywood can spend on a film about an adolescent fantasy, and is a fraction of what Disney spends on a theme park intended to give a ludicrously false impression of, say, Europe or of US history.
But perhaps some correspondents are really incensed because the Eden project refers to the way in which some US drug companies have been allowed to patent medicines used by indigenous peoples for years.
Having said that, I was pretty incensed during my visit by a set of untrue statistics quoted above the entrance about world distribution of wealth. It's that kind of carelessness that provides ammunition to the Armalites-and-SUVS-are-in-the-Constitution brigade.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Kew Gardens, in the centre of London, is probably the Victorian version of this. It has glass houses for tropical, hothouse and desert landscapes, and even managed to get a titan arum flowering last month for the second time. (I went to see it, damn it was huge)
Not as big a scale of course, but the Millenium Seed Bank project gives it a well defined purpose other than a simple tourist attraction; to collect and conserve 10%, over 24,000 species, of the world's seed-bearing flora, principally from the drylands by 2010 and to collect and conserve seeds of the entire UK native seed-bearing flora by 2000.
It isn't quite the same concept or as big but has a lot of the same elements and is wonderful to behold (I think I probably enjoy the pyramid architecture by I.M. Pei at Moody Gardens better than I would like the domes of Eden--and I'm pretty sure Galveston has better weather outside of the buildings). When I was living in Houston I made it a regular summer trip. The butterflies are lovely, and they have very interesting tropical rainforest 'rooms'.
Well worth a trip, if the UK isn't in the travel plans anytime soon, and Texas isn't too far out of the way for you (Galveston is a nice destination for a lot of reasons). I've always enjoyed myself, and always find something new, even though I've been several times.
Read more about them here (and forgive them for hiding the pyramids deep into the site--they are the most striking thing as you approach from any direction): The Moody Gardens Website.
It was £86 million - not £86 billion. Just a tad over US$125 million.
And compared to the millenium dome or wembley mark 2....
Ok, where the hell is the monorail. I'm sure there's some kind of global zoning ordinance that requires geodesic domes to have a monorail...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
As for the biomes themselves, I much preferred the Tropical (left-side) one. Not only was it significantly more mature, but it was also better landscaped and had more interesting (to me) and exotic plants in it, along with a huge waterfall and stream down the middle of it. You could see lillies that looked like frying pans, manilla trees (and you thought manilla envelopes were made of normal paper), and little mini-pinapples growing. And aside from a design-your-own-banana exhibit that didn't really work, they didn't chintz it up like you'd expect. The climate inside was also amazing; it was cold outside, and within ten minutes inside and starting to walk up to the top of the waterfall I was down to a t-shirt and had rolled up my pants.
The Mediteranien (smaller right-hand) biome was kinda weak and undeveloped, but as guess that's to be as expected, especially comparing it against the tropical one. For it's benefit, it did accurately reproduce a Med feeling (even down to the hordes of loud Brits), but things just don't grow as fast there as they do in the other biome. Give it a few years and it'll rock though.
Is this place cool? Hells yeah. Is this the eighth wonder of the world? No. Will it be in five years? No doubt.
Cue The Sun...
Those stupid glass balls cost £86 million. In the first 12 months they generated approx £120million of increased spending in the region. Check here if you don't believe me (sorry couldn't find a geocities link).
The project was aiming to bring in tourists from all over the globe (and has) so a simple name that easily translates was probably the best way to go. Not particularly origonal but it doesn't seem to be putting people off visiting.
Having lived in the area of the Eden project for a long time I can tell you it wasn't totally done for enviromental reasons. I seem to remember it origonally being represented as more of a large experiment which would attract lots of tourists. It has however generated huge amounts of revenue for the area, £120mil being quoted for the first 12 months. It may not save much of the enviroment but it saves hundreds of businesses and jobs around here, and has paid for itself already. And it's not like we know everything there is to know about biology yet so more research isn't a bad thing.
:) Probably 95% of the land is countryside, we have 2 huge national parks that are protected. We're not in any great danger of running out of natural habitats here yet.
I totally agree with your arguments, I've not been to visit despite it only being 20 minutes away, but it's impossible to ignore the good it has done. Also don't forget the average slashdot reader probably isn't particularly interested in horticulture but this doesn't represent the population as a whole. I've met many people here who go up there regularly.
What is sad, is that within the next century, cheap imitations like this may be all we have left of nature.
You don't know much about the South West of England eh
" Eden's Origins: The Eden Project was the brainchild of Tim Smit, now the chief executive of Eden."
No, Project Eden's origins were here with Biosphere 2. Great. Just what the world needs; Another Disney Land with trees instead of mice and rides.
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Tourism killing world's eighth wonder!
Kinda what we do when we Slashdot a site to death?
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"The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 53,000 square miles of tropical forests (rain forest and other) were destroyed each year during the 1980s"
Ok, given the amount of current rainforest coverage from this page (totalling up to approx. 733594 Square miles; converted from kilometers), we should actually run out of rainforest in 50 years ^__^ Of course, everybody I talk to seems to have a different number and it's always changing and or highly exaggerated. Speaking of which, weren't we supposed to have run out of forest already? And finally, to the ire of all the tree hugging weenies out there, the rainforests as we know them are pretty young geologically. What entitles you to one? Hell, it probably the only source of income a lot of these families have over there. It's that whole trees/animals over people that just rubs me the wrong way. the same mentality that says it's OK to abort a child but you'll get slapped with a lawsuit and jail time for poaching a condor egg. Yeah, you go there Eco-warrior boy.
I know I'm ranting now and I would like to see the rainforest conserved, but there's more than just trees and frogs to consider here, Ok? It's not as cut and dry as everybody would make it out to be.
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"The biomes were erected with a combination of cranes (static and mobile) and scaffolding. The scaffolding made the Guinness Book of Records. At 192 feet (58.5 meters), it was the highest freestanding structure in the world.
Is really, really, wrong. Maybe he means that it was the highest scaffolding in the world. But whatever he meant by it, you would think that an architecture magazine would deliver more accurate information.
Bibo Ergo Sum.