Professor Greenspanner's Comment 2: Eaden

This week, Professor Greenspanner applies some torque to, The Eden Project.

The big E, what is it and where is it going? It’s a big shiny thing that has had people mezmerised for so long that they have stopped asking the fundamental question, what’s it for.

From the outside it seems to be going the way of Flambards/Helston aeropark/ i.e. it is drifting pell-mell into a vortex of ever more popularist entertainment in an attempt to make money. From the inside it is a different story. At a lecture recently I was told that society should act like the Eden project and recycle this and save that, if Eden can do it so can you, I was told by a wholesome looking chap in empassioned entreating and highly gesticulative tirade. I immediately put my hand up in my eagerness to point out that, in political terms, Eden is a benevolent dictatorship (maybe even a plutocracy but with less free will) and making people do the right thing is a little easier in those circumstances than in the wider democracy of the UK where people have free will and not a job description to decide their course in life.

As the lecturer sank into an ever deeper pit of horrifying smugness and self congratulatory demonstrations of how society should be like Eden, I realised what Eden now was. It is still a big shiny thing upon which the big-heads in charge can stand, like a do-decker soapbox and preach their ill informed, bourgeois opinions on everyone else’s failings. They have however overlooked the fact that the entity now supporting their lofty position is just a fun-park which actually is not much fun unless you go when the ice skating rink is set up. I am not anti-Eden by the way. It is a good local employer and has all sorts of potential but the high (but ill informed) ethics of its leaders no longer match the shape of the beast itself which has been shaped no longer by strategy and vision but by the need to make a profit. The words of the half crazed Duncan as scribed by the bard best summarise the current leadership, “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent except vaulting ambition…..” A change is needed in the leadership now before the Eden project becomes the Ego project and looses all credibility, which will damage the Westcountry irreversibly.