The landscape museum: conservation in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The research concludes that the nature we have slowly constructed is biased toward attractions, strengthens the perceived divide between human and nature, neuters the very qualities that make nature respected, and hinders our progress toward developing a new conceptual model of wilderness appropriate to our time. We have created a nature that is valuable only for as long as it continues to entertain us. It is a museum, an artifact whose primary value is its interest as a curiosity and not in its limitless diversity and immense power.

This project examines the history and practice of today's most prominent methods of ecological conservation -- ecotourism and designation of national parks -- and the subsequent design and management of the tour experience. It then critiques and extrapolates these strategies to anticipate a preservation project for a possible future in which the planet is more hostile and access to natural areas is non-existent.

Tourism has been a saving grace for natural scenery in the United States, and many other places throughout the world. The abject commodification of the environment's resources through consumption has been slowed in favor of the more sustainable commodification of landscape systems as a living whole. However, the constructions that enable us to access landscapes safely and economically distinctly color our relationships with nature. As we accept increasingly distanced and abstracted immersions as representative of `being-in-nature,' we are directed further from nature's more useful key realities. As individuals, we miss out on the exploratory opportunities that being in a novel environment ungoverned by human logic affords. More seriously, we lose sight of the gravity of the environment's current predicament (which is, by association, our own).