READING COMPREHENSION

The Eden ProjectWe are stardustWe are goldenAnd we've got to get ourselvesBack to the gardenJoni Mitchell (Woodstock)According to the Bible, the Garden of Eden was the home of the first two humans, Adam and Eve. In the story, the garden provided everything the couple needed, and they lived there in peace and happiness until they were banished for breaking the rules. In 1999, Tim Smit, an ex-rock musician and record producer, borrowed the name of the biblical garden for a collection of space-age domes in a corner of south-west England – the Eden Project.Rock and activismIt is not unusual for people involved in the music business to alert us to environmental andpolitical issues. Bob Geldof (the singer from British punk band The Boomtown Rats) raised ahuge amount of money to help feed millions of starving people in Africa in 1985, Bono fromU2 has been successful in campaigning for the reduction of debts which developing countriesowe to rich nations, and the music festival at Woodstock in 1969 is seen by many as theculmination of the civil rights marches and anti-war protests of the 1960s. Tim Smit’s EdenProject was created to highlight the relationship between humans and the environment, andthrough information, research and education lead the way to a brighter future.The problemThe modern world is a far cry from the balance and harmony of the Garden of Eden. Byproductsof a typical modern lifestyle such as overfishing, deforestation and intensive farmingare destroying natural habitats and creating a world with less biodiversity. These activities arenot sustainable, that is, the planet is unable to survive if we continue to take more from theearth than it can replace. Recent research by the World Wildlife Fund suggests that we willhave to colonise two planets the same size as the earth by 2050 unless people in richcountries change the way they live.The solutionThe Eden Project is on the site of an abandoned clay pit in Cornwall and consists of twoenormous domes, or biomes, and an outdoor area. The first biome houses a humid tropicalzone representing Malaysia, West Africa and South America, and is the biggest greenhouse inthe world. The second biome is a warm temperate zone which contains the type ofenvironment found in Mediterranean countries, California and South West Australia. Theoutdoor area displays a collection of plants and landscapes typical of temperate climates likethose in Britain, parts of North America, Russia and India.As visitors to the domes walk past lakes and waterfalls, through rainforests and over deserts,they discover how the ecosystems in each zone operate, learn how people have damagedeach environment, and find out how people native to the different areas can learn to live inharmony with their environment and have a positive and beneficial effect on it.Science, horticulture, creative, marketing, media and human resources researchers at the siteare constantly investigating ways of combining science, art, technology and communication innew ways to find solutions to the problem of living a modern lifestyle in harmony with thenatural world. The researchers form part of a new green movement, which is discovering newuses for plants, including plant plastics, medicines and oils.SuccessThe Eden Project has been enormously successful in the two years it has been open. Millionsof people have flocked to the site, and the biomes also attracted the attention of the directorof the James Bond film Die Another Day, in which the domes featured as the lair of the villain,Gustav Graves. In 2002 the biomes were also the venue for a music festival featuring Pulp,Spiritualized, Doves and other major acts who performed among the foliage. Works of art fromaround the world are also on display, and the following summer the events included a playbased on a story by Monty Python’s Terry Jones.The futureBut the Eden Project is no Disneyland. ‘If this place becomes no more than an upmarkettheme park, it will all have been a gigantic waste of money,’ Tim Smit writes in the visitors’guide (the domes cost 86 million pounds.) After a day spent walking around the biomes inCornwall, he hopes that visitors will be inspired to find out more about ecology, look at waysof changing their lifestyles and participate in trying to get the human race back into theGarden of Eden. Match the definitions (a–l) with the vocabulary (1–12). g i h e f c a j d l k b Write T for a true statement and F for a false one. T T F T F F T F