Tusk and Talon and Cedar Pundit have already pointed out Professor Johnson's article on the fake rainforest in Coralville for the Des Moines Register, and Gerald Holton's pro-fake rainforest response.



Given they've fully fisked it, I would only like to address one minor subpoint:



". . . environmentalism is one of the fast-growing popular movements of our time, analogous in many ways to the civil-rights movement of the last century. I look at the Iowa Environmental/Education Project as a brilliant statement, an opportunity that taps into this popular consciousness, gives it an iconic place and informs and tames it."



There is a problem with this concept: only fake rainforests are tame. As it's been pointed out elsewhere, if they actually managed to recreate a real rainforest in this dome, visitors would be attacked by malarial mosquitos as they sweated and hacked their way through an underbrush teeming with poisonous insects and other less-than-pleasant surprises. I've not been to the Omaha rainforest, but Brookfield Zoo in Chicago has one exhibit. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's not real.



In Iowa, nature is the fox I heard attack and kill one of the neighbor's cats in the timber near our house. That's why I don't let our cat out. Nature is those d*mn asian beetles crawling everywhere, the incredibly huge spider that was on the wall by the garage door opener, the snakes in my garden, and the occasional bat that gets into the attic. How on earth do you think that you can capture a rainforest in a dome?



If you haven't read Michael Crichton's speech about environmentalism, you really should. Whether you agree or disagree with his opinion that the best solution to the malaria problem in Africa is to reinstate the use of DDT, his remarks on the environmental extremists are very provocative:



"Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it's a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.



There's an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there's a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.



. . . .



There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?



And what about indigenous peoples, living in a state of harmony with the Eden-like environment? Well, they never did. On this continent, the newly arrived people who crossed the land bridge almost immediately set about wiping out hundreds of species of large animals, and they did this several thousand years before the white man showed up, to accelerate the process. And what was the condition of life? Loving, peaceful, harmonious? Hardly: the early peoples of the New World lived in a state of constant warfare. Generations of hatred, tribal hatreds, constant battles. The warlike tribes of this continent are famous: the Comanche, Sioux, Apache, Mohawk, Aztecs, Toltec, Incas. Some of them practiced infanticide, and human sacrifice. And those tribes that were not fiercely warlike were exterminated, or learned to build their villages high in the cliffs to attain some measure of safety.



. . .



In short, the romantic view of the natural world as a blissful Eden is only held by people who have no actual experience of nature. People who live in nature are not romantic about it at all. They may hold spiritual beliefs about the world around them, they may have a sense of the unity of nature or the aliveness of all things, but they still kill the animals and uproot the plants in order to eat, to live. If they don't, they will die.



And if you, even now, put yourself in nature even for a matter of days, you will quickly be disabused of all your romantic fantasies. Take a trek through the jungles of Borneo, and in short order you will have festering sores on your skin, you'll have bugs all over your body, biting in your hair, crawling up your nose and into your ears, you'll have infections and sickness and if you're not with somebody who knows what they're doing, you'll quickly starve to death. But chances are that even in the jungles of Borneo you won't experience nature so directly, because you will have covered your entire body with DEET and you will be doing everything you can to keep those bugs off you."