Nature, Art, and the Appeal of Ecotourism

Over Hamilton’s Spring Break, my parents and I ventured out of this brutal winter, down to The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida.  Returning to Disney World as an adult was a particularly interesting experience for me, as I found myself appreciating the parks as more than just a ‘magical place,’ as it is designed for the younger visitors, but rather as a piece of art.  Walt Disney Imagineering, the engineering and design firm at Disney, is charged with creating everything at the parks and the remainder of the resort.  My trip to Disney taught me an interesting lesson on art inspired by the wilderness, and, although Disney might seem to be an unexpected place for such a revelation, I found my observations to provide clarity on the importance and meaning of art in nature.

All of the Disney parks designed by the Imagineers are quite fantastic, though on this family trip to Disney, I found myself particularly interested in the design and philosophy of the Animal Kingdom Park.  As the name might suggest, this park’s intention is to combine flawlessly the animals in their “natural habitat” with an amusement park.

As my dad and I went to ride the rollercoaster Expedition Everest, a $100,000,000 ride designed to be a scaled replica of Mount Everest, I overheard a number of vacationers making the same observation: Animal Kingdom does not look like a park, it looks like the wilderness.  Disney Imagineers are famous for making the fake look convincingly real, and many think that they accomplish this design ideology best when recreating nature, and it is their artistic representations of nature, which draws the masses to Animal Kingdom.

Throughout our course on the Adirondacks, I have come across countless accounts of visitors to the Adirondack Park commenting on how inherently special the wilderness is.  In William Murray’s Adventures in the Wilderness, he encourages people to come to the wilderness in order to escape their normal, city lives, because he feels there is something immensely powerful about being in the Adirondacks, and more broadly, in nature.

I was particularly interested to see that this natural, human tendency and yearning for the wilderness is still applicable in a situation where the ‘wilderness’ is not the wilderness at all, but rather a fabricated replication of nature.  In observing this phenomenon at Disney, I realized that this human response is no different than being drawn to an intricate painting of a beautiful flower, as opposed to the actual flower itself.  People are fascinated by the Animal Kingdom Park because it is the Disney Imagineer’s detailed, exquisite, artistic depiction of nature.

As we learned in class through the Murray and McKibben readings, people are drawn to the Adirondacks for their natural beauty.  I was fascinated to learn that there is such an inherent human love of nature, that even when it is merely an artistic representation, people feel an instant connection to the natural wonder of the wilderness, whether real or artificial.