After reading William Cronon's "Introduction: In Search of Nature," I suddenly understood what it might be like to walk around with a pair of x-ray vision glasses--I began to see the inner workings of places I thought I knew well.   One of Cronon's concepts, "nature as artifice..., as self-conscious cultural construction," was particularly useful in helping me to see a familiar scene in a different way. Cronon explains that people often remake their environment to fit their ideal of nature, even when that ideal is very different from the environment itself. Sometimes, what is considered "nature" and what is considered "artifice" end up being completely integrated, so that you don't think about how artificial the original environment has become. Instead, those who appreciate the newly remade place end up idealizing it as a morally pure example of "nature." (39-40)

I had a chance to focus my new "x-ray vision" on the Woodland Park Zoo when I went there with my children on a sunny Saturday afternoon. I had previously used the zoo to teach my sons lessens about "wild" animals and their existence in their "natural environment." The zoo's management goes to great lengths to recreate these "natural" spaces, bringing in plants and molding landscapes to fit our conception of what a mountain lion's, or a penguin's, or a toucan's home is really like. In some cases, the zoo even creates microclimates.While I wasn't ready to abandon my old lessons, I realized I also needed to talk to my kids about the ways humans had created these "natural" spaces, and what that meant to the animals involved--and to the way we thought about our relationship to them. It made for an interesting, if difficult, discussion, and left all of us with some new insights about our own place in nature.

299 words

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