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In a new approach to environmental photography, Dana Fritz explores
the world's largest enclosed landscapes: Arizona's Biosphere 2,
Cornwall's Eden Project, and Nebraska's Lied Jungle and Desert Dome
at the Henry Doorly Zoo. In these vivaria, plants are grown amid
carefully constructed representations of the natural world to
entertain and educate tourists while also supporting scientific
research. Together, these architectural and engineering marvels
stand as working symbols of our complex relationship with the
environment. Giant terraria require human control of temperature,
humidity, irrigation, insects, weeds, and other conditions to
create otherwise impossible ecosystems. While technical demands
inform the design of these spaces, the juxtapositions of natural
and artificial elements generate striking visual paradoxes that can
go unnoticed. Here Fritz turns away from visitors' prepared sight
lines, revealing alternate views that dispel the illusion of
natural conditions. Inviting questions about what it means to
create and contain landscapes, Terraria Gigantica inspires
contemplation of our ecological future.
Biosphere rises from southern Arizona's high desert like a bizarre
hybrid spaceship and greenhouse. Packed with more than 3,800
carefully selected plant, animal, and insect species, this
mega-terrarium is one of the world's most biodiverse, lush, and
artificial wildernesses. Only recently transformed from an
abandoned ghost dome to a University of Arizona research center,
the site was the setting of a grand drama about humans and ecology
at the end of the twentieth century. The seeds of Biosphere 2
sprouted in the 1970s at Synergia, a desert ranch in New Mexico
where John Allen and a handful of dreamers united to create a
self-reliant utopia centered on ecological work, study, and their
traveling experimental theater troupe, "The Theater of All
Possibilities." At a time of growing tensions in the American
environmental consciousness, the Synergians took on varied projects
around the world that sought to mend the rift between humans and
nature. In 1984, they bought a piece of desert to build Biosphere
2. Eco-enthusiasts competed to become the eight biospherians who
would lock themselves inside the giant greenhouse world for two
years to live in harmony with their wilderness, grow their own
food, and recycle all their air, water, and wastes. Thin and short
on oxygen, the biospherians stoically completed their survival
mission, but the communal spirit surrounding Biosphere 2 eventually
dissolved into conflict - ultimately the facility would be seized
by armed U.S. Marshals. Yet for all the story's strangeness,
perhaps strangest of all was how normal Biosphere 2 actually was.
The story of this grand eco-utopian adventure (and misadventure)
becomes a parable about the relationship between humans and nature
in postmodern America.
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