Word: edens
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...late 1990s, Tim Smit--an archaeologist turned pop-music producer--decided to build a new Eden. The Dutch-born Englishman envisioned a grand environmental-education park in the depressed southwestern English county of Cornwall--with the world's biggest greenhouses as its centerpiece. All he needed was the money. Smit turned to private funders and gave them a professional pitch. "I told them, 'We are going to build the Eighth Wonder of the World in a clay pit west of Cornwall, it's going to be wonderful, and you'll want to be a part of it,'" he says. "'Also...
...rights, the Eden Project should have been a commercial disaster, as even its founder admits. "All environmental-science centers go bust because they're boring as s___," Smit says. But Eden wasn't boring, and it didn't go bust. The park has pulled in more than 9 million visitors since it opened, and it's still one of Britain's top attractions, more popular than the Tower of London. It helps that Eden is visually stunning. Visitors descend into the former clay hole, now landscaped and studded with native vegetation, to arrive at the main attraction: two honeycombed domes...
...Eden Project is simultaneously futuristic and organic, and it's not hard to see why Brits voted it their favorite new building of the past 20 years. Similar efforts in the U.S., however, have been received less rapturously. Attempts to build an American version of Eden called Earthpark stalled for years as Midwestern cities like Cedar Rapids, Iowa, doubting the project's profitability, said no. (Pella, a tiny town near Iowa City, finally said yes to Earthpark, scheduled to open...
...surprising success of Eden is also a sign of how green concerns have become a daily part of British life. London broadsheets follow global-warming news the way their tabloid counterparts cover soccer and missing British children. The country's growing environmental industries were worth more than $50 billion in 2005, a figure expected to grow to $94 billion by 2015. And politicians on both sides of the aisle compete to look greener - David Cameron, the young leader of the Conservative Party, even changed his party's traditional freedom-torch symbol to an oak tree to trumpet his environmental credentials...
...every Briton is ready to join the environmental monkhood. There would go the budget holiday flights to Ibiza, for one thing. But to Smit, it's the spirit that matters, a spirit embodied in his Eden. "It's a horrible cliche, but part of our goal is to remake the world," he says. "We're here to help people realize that if they each do a few things, then times 6 billion, that adds...