Day 94 - Spirit of Eden

One of our main reasons for going to Cornwall was to visit the biodiversity educational undertaking at The Eden Project. Now, I have to confess, I'm not really into plants (unless you're talking Percy), but both of these attractions were fascinating. The Eden Project is situated in a reclaimed china clay pit just outside of St Austell. We passed a few un-reclaimed ones and it's only when you see what a giant open wound on the landscape these things can be that you can really appreciate how incredible the bowl in which Eden sits really is.

It houses three 'Biomes'.

All pics are by K___, by the way.

The first is the Outside Biome and is plants from across the temperate world - parts of Asia, America and the upper slopes of tropical mountains and of course Europe. The plant displays are grouped into themed areas such as 'beer and brewing' (Hurray!), 'Plants and Pollinators', 'Hemp' (already a personal bugbear of mine - when will we grow the fuck up, get over our ridiculous drug paranoia and start farming hemp again and reaping the many benefits? We're such small-minded morons sometimes), 'Plants for industrial uses' (they display the medicines derived from each plant at the bottom of the row) and so on. Everything is presented in such a way that it engages the attention, such as the medicines by the plants from which their active ingredients are taken. Or this:

The tropical biome is a high temperature, high humidity environment contained within what appears to be the world's largest bubble wrap, as seen in the background of the picture above. Just imagine how good it would be to pop!

The paths take you on a structured journey through a tropical world, (thought it's not a real environment - it's pan-continental for a start). Every few metres there are small notices stuck into the earth telling about the plants you're looking at; their rarity, their growing conditions, their wider uses etc. Occasionally, there are larger clearings housing larger exhibits. One example was a Malaysian-style house. Informative boards detailed the extensive ways in which Bamboo is used, from the frames based on the large poles to the weaved wall panels constructed from leaves and even the bowls from which they ate that are tightly wound spirals of bamboo.

I was struck by the way the presentation of these items forced you to engage with them. It's not like I haven't seen bowls made of bamboo in John Lewis or wherever. I know people who have them. I didn't know that bamboo is a crop that responds to harvesting by... being even more productive the next year. What a fantastic plant! Whilst the first world's companies are desperate to engineer a situation in which every farmer's seeds are sterile and copyright, bamboo grows in nothing more than mud, sunlight and water and can be used in a multitude of ways (c.f. hemp).

The final dome is the warm temperate biome - the Mediterranean, South Africa and California.

I have to confess that this is the least interesting to me, probably because, having been to various countries around the Med, and having done a degree that at least touched on agriculture in such climates, these types of plants are not especially exotic to me. And I eat half of them on a regular basis, which is a point I'll touch on again in due course.

One of the great things about the Eden Project is that everywhere you look there are recycling points. Waste is separated into five colour-coded sections; Cans, plastic bottles, glass, paper and 'general'. The park is 'waste neutral' which means that it aims to ensure that the recycled material they buy in to the Project is of the same weight as the material they send out for recycling. They're not there yet, but they're doing well. Groundwater is captured and used to flush the toilets and irrigate the site. All organic food leftovers, some 2.5 tonnes a week is composted and used on the site and the whole site runs on Green Electricity (i.e. energy from renewal sources).

All of this got me thinking about energy and the environment and all of that kind of stuff. Eden's obviously a fantastic taste of what we should all be aspiring to. That's on the one hand...

The British government currently stands accused of trying to rush through a new generation of nuclear reactors. We've exceeded the 'Peak Oil' point (where the volume of oil coming out of the ground is lower than the previous year. In the US this point was reached in the mid-1970s). Many political commentators have made the point that far from being a one off, wars like the Iraq war will become more frequent as the largest powers seek to secure strategic supplies of black gold. It's not just oil that is a problem. The remaining coal is running out. Gas is running out. In case you haven't noticed, humankind's impact on the environment may already have taken us passed a tipping point where environmental catastrophe is inevitable. We're certainly not going to have a world where it makes sense to fly out of season vegetables thousands of miles just so we can get our fix. We aren't going to have a world where we can continue to pump noxious chemicals into the air and into the rivers supplies. It simply isn't sustainable.

This is certainly the contention of the less cheery scientists and all scientists (bar a few fuckwits) recognise that the tipping point is not a theory but an impending reality if nothing changes, regardless of how rosy their spectacles are.

It's a hell of a world to bring a child into, isn't it?

God, this is a fucking happy entry, isn't it? Anyone for a Prozac?

Do I have a point to this other than just revealing some of 'wot I did on my holidays by Dad_to_Be, aged 35' and a being a bit maudlin? Well I hope so, but at the same time, it does strike me that I'm about to be a little melodramatic, if I haven't already. And possibly have another of those Orko moments?

Nana says that her mother told her they didn't think civilisation could possibly survive World War One (in the early days of which my Nana was born). She in turn conceived my mother during World War Two, as did Granny with my father. For my dad, it must have been early 1944 when he was conceived, certainly a long time prior to D-Day. Hiroshima through to the Cuban Missile Crisis/ the October Crisis (delete according to prejudice) gave rise to another generation that thought their clock was permanently at two minutes to midnight, then there was the AIDS generation (which, I suppose is mine, really), now it's global terrorism v unchecked US imperialism or it's SARS or it's bird flu or the environment...

Sometimes I don't know which side of the fence I sit on. Hopefully, necessity really is the mother of invention and we're going to end up in a post-oil world that hasn't become a cliché from Mad Max II and it'll be okay, like my Nana said. But sometimes I can't help but feel the other way. At the very least we really do know that if we do nothing, we're fucked, and how.

Is this a typical father-to-be's anxiety? I certainly hope so.

Would you want
To have kids
Growing up
Into what's left of this?

She shook her head,
She said "Can't you see?
The world is you
The world is me."

(This is the 21st Century - Marillion)