All summer we have been exploring European zoos, which are so different and fascinating. Never before have I visited a natural history museum, and I didn't want to leave Germany without going.
The experience compared to the zoo was dead, old, and flat. Although nature has similarly been placed in to an institution as spectacle, it serves a different function. It's presented as something that once existed, in another place or time. We are to educate our selves, as if reading a textbook about a foreign subject that we never participated in and never will. This perspective could be more realistic, maybe nature came and went already.
