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The Age of the Biopark
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11303 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1993 |
2,209 Words |
| Author
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Michael H. Robinson
Michael H. Robinson, currently director of the National Zoo in
Washington, D.C., was formerly deputy director of the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. |
Recently the New York Zoological Society abandoned the word zoo and substituted wildlife conservation park for the four bioexhibit institutions that it runs. William Safire attacked this with: "The Greens, language snobs, political-correctness prescriptivists have gone too far this time." We have lost forever some lovely words to the ideological fanatics. Others have been lost due to an inadequate educational system, which has tolerated or even encouraged sloppiness ("this plane will be landing momentarily at National Airport"). Still others have been lost to fashion (good-bye gay).
But was Safire right to try to "save our zoo from the language predators"? I think not; on the contrary, I applaud the action of the New York Zoological Society. For me the crucial question is simple: Are modern zoos so different from their progenitors--in appearance, mission and function--that they should cease to call themselves zoos? As a lifetime zoo enthusiast, now a zoo director, I think that the answer is a resounding yes.
The issue is much more than a semantic quibble. The problem is not that the word is now pejorative; it isn't except to a fanatic fringe. Rather the word is no longer an adequate description of what zoos have become. Because of the baggage of its past, the word has a narrow connotation, a meaning too restrictive to do justice to what zoos have become or are becoming. The recent expansion of the mission and role of zoos transcends their origins and their history. They need a new name, but more of that later.
Zoos through history
All cultural institutions change over time, and nearly all of them outgrow their origins. The ancient world, from China to Egypt, and then to the preColumbian world of Mexico, had imperial zoos. These were founded as symbols of power and ultimately disappeared along with that power. From Roman times to the world of medieval and Renaissance monarchies, menageries brought exotic animals to the Northern Hemisphere, occasionally displaying them for the crowds of plebians but overwhelmingly restricting them to visits by an elite. Having exotic animals at court was like having a captive Mozart or a golden throne.
As aristocratic power gave way to the brash pomp of industrialism, zoos changed again. Those founded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reflected the glories and transcendence of the bourgeois acquisitiveness that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. They reflected a spirit of collectionism,
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