Here's a sorry tale from the Natural History Museum, where plans are afoot to bulldoze a superhighway through its beautiful Wildlife Garden to speed the punters towards Dippy the Diplodocus. You couldn't make it up...
I enjoyed strolling round that garden - carefully laid out and developed over 20-plus years - on my last visit to the museum. (Indeed, I enjoyed it more than anything else, except the butterflies.) As the scientists point out, it's a unique habitat in central London, and home to some rare species (though the Jersey Tiger certainly isn't rare in London these days). It is also very beautiful, in a very English way. And yet the marketing types who seem to run the museum (and many others) these days want to sacrifice it to a Jurassic theme park and Dippy the feckin' Diplodocus. Let's hope Kensington & Chelsea council puts a stop to this nonsense right away.
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Good luck to the garden, but my goodness, Nige, its supporters are hopeless at making their case. If you are going to take on Dippy the Diplodocus, surely you need poets, lovers, mystics, etc. to make the case we are dealing with something sacred here--hallowed ground. Instead we have "ecologists" mumbling about ecosystems, biodiversity and habitats. Will no one think of the micro moths? It never ceases to amaze me how many scientists fail to understand how boring the public finds what thrills and excites them.
ReplyDeleteGood point, Peter, though there's a sense in which 'the Environment' is the new religion and sufficient substitute for all things spiritual, mystical and poetic - perhaps that's what the scientists were counting on.However, being a woolly and vague feelgood affair, this popular environmentalism is quite uninterested in specifics, its adherents as bored as anyone else by micro moths - and, I suspect, more engaged by what is either (a) cuddly or (b) exotic than by the subtler wonders of an English wildlife garden.
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