ABSTRACT
If the majority of our everyday consumption practices occur within urban settings, this should not obscure the fact that we consume nature in myriad ways. Whether in advertisements, posters, stores like The Body Shop or visiting a travel agent’s, even within the densest urban formations nature is offered and sold to us. We avidly consume presentations and representations of ‘nature’ and the ‘wild’, and consequently our desire to engage with it more directly is perpetually fuelled. Direct engagements with nature can occur through recreation and leisure pursuits, whether at the beach, a country walk, at a nature-based theme park, or on safari. This chapter is concerned with the consumption of nature, which entails the consumption of images, representations, fantasies and experiences of the nonhuman environment in all its forms. For the purposes of this chapter we consider two popular means of consuming nature: the managed, pre-packaged and heavily mediated form of nature-based theme
parks such as SeaWorld™ and Disney’s Animal Kingdom™; and naturebased tourism, exemplified by safari expeditions. These two forms of consumption involve an assumed difference between the passive, prepackaged or Disneyized encounter with nature on the one hand
(SeaWorld™), and the more active, ‘authentic’ or unmediated engagement with nature on the other (‘See the World’). Any such simplistic distinction is problematic, however. Very rarely is the nonhuman encountered in anything other than a mediated form, whether in zoos, theme parks or on safari, and so in considering encounters with commodified nature we will be advancing an argument concerning the consumption of nature as spectacle, that is, of spectacular consumption.
