Cornish Social & Economic Research Group
» What CoSERG Thinks » General comment » The Eden Project: Great Modern Building or
Great Postmodern Hype?
It is certainly an impressive architectural project. But is the Eden project more postmodern than modern, in the sense that it’s all about image and not substance, rhetoric rather than reality? And is it basically just a very clever hype, trading on the gullibility of press and politicians and the shallowness of our consumer society? The word Eden suggest a self-sustaining natural eco-system untainted by the seedier demands of our economic system. But is it not just a series of giant greenhouses, a gigantic tourist attraction that feeds on Cornwall’s role as a tourist destination and its vaguely green(ish) credentials, rather than the innovative teaching medium persuading people to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle that it claims to be?
For sustainable is the last word that should be applied to Eden. A million visitors a year, the thousands of cars parked on acres of car parks in the summer, the £millions of public money from Objective One and elsewhere soaked up by the project all suggest that whatever it is, sustainable it isn’t in either environmental or financial senses of the word. The reader will look in vain in the pages of uncritical newsprint and on the Eden Project’s own website for any hard facts about its own carbon footprint. What was the carbon cost of building it and, more to the point, what is the recurrent carbon cost of its operations? This is a ‘frequently asked question’ that somehow never seems to be answered. The contradiction of pleading sustainability yet attracting millions of extra car-borne visitors appears to have entirely escaped most commentators, along with the local planning authorities.
The Guardian of October 12th carried a supplement extolling the Eden buildings. As an introduction they asked a well known Cornish resident for comment – the Padstow entrepreneur and cook Rik Stein. Stein’s own position on sustainability and the environment are of course a little hazy, jetting as he does across the globe with various film crews in pursuit of the edible. Unsurprisingly, for this frequent flyer the best view of Eden is obtained from the plane arriving at Newquay airport! For him Eden has a ‘playfulness which is infectious’ and a ‘childlike … lack of cynicism’. Stein has heard there are ‘some Cornish people who don’t like it’. However, these negative heads-in-the-sand old grumps just don’t like change. For Stein change is good. Any change apparently. Whatever it is. In particular he claims that exchanging a ‘dismal old industrial site’ for ‘beautiful buildings which celebrate the structure of nature’ is a no-brainer.
Underlying these comments we find the familiar old contemptuous attitude towards the Cornish and their heritage that pervades the new media luvvies and project class that claim to speak for Cornwall these days. Yes, the memory of our industrial past may be ‘dismal’ for those who have no empathy nor connection to it and are blessed with precious little imagination. But these memories – the old mine stack, the disused clay pit, the railway line long reverted to vegetation – are all we have left that speak to us of the blood and sweat of our forebears and the glory and heroism of Cornish industrial achievements. Dismissing them as mere derelict land or brownfield sites fit only for tourist attractions or new roads or banal suburban housing is tantamount to destroying our past, bit by bit, making the Cornish increasingly invisible in the process. No doubt we shall come in time to love the Eden biomes and see them too as a part of our heritage. But in the meantime can we please have some respect for the less media-friendly aspects of that heritage too?
Stein claims that the majority of the 400 employed at Eden are ‘from Cornwall’, something that it would be interesting to test further. In fact some critical research on Eden and its impact is well overdue, though unlikely to occur. Until it takes place we can only applaud the breath-taking and audacious way in which this latest tourist attraction has clothed itself in the impeccable garb of green political correctness, an emperor’s cloak that is sufficient to bewitch and bedazzle a whole generation of gullible media commentators and local ‘opinion-formers’.
BD, October 2007