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Re: Colorado's Ocean Journey




George Booth wrote:

> Denver's new public aquarium, "Colorado's Ocean Journey", is going to open
> Monday June 21, after deven years of planning and construction. The Sunday
> Rocky Mountain News has a 24 page feature section on it and it looks great!
>
> The theme is how water gets from mountain sources to the ocean ("ocean
> journey"). There are two sections: Colorado (source in rockies, trout
> streams, forest streams, desert ares, Sea of Cortez) and Sumatra (mountain,
> jungle, estuary, deep  ocean).

[snip]

This sounds much like the stated theme of Albuquerque's aquarium, which is
supposed to trace a drop of water from the mountains of northern New
Mexico, down the Rio Grande to the Gulf of Mexico.  I hope Denver's
execution is better.

Here, the "tracing" is all done in a little movie that starts the tour.
The movie happily neglects the fact that the Rio Grande goes dry below El
Paso, Texas and the little drop of water usually evaporates before it
reaches the gulf.  Then you leave the theater and the rest of the exhibits
center on the Texas gulf coast.  Complete with a shrimp boat, a pretty
cool jellyfish display and the obligatory shark tank.

This is all hideously stupid.  If you're keen on the Texas coast then
you're far better off bypassing New Mexico entirely and taking a trip down
to Galveston, Corpus Christi or Brownsville.

New Mexico's aquatic environments are tottering on the brink of extinction
because of human overuse and abuse and the general level of knowledge
about their natural states are abyssmal.  We seriously need the publicity
and the research that could be provided by a good public aquarium but
instead we get moray eels and fake jetties.

Map makers could improve their accuracy and save themselves some money if
in the area they would normally map New Mexico they simply placed a large
label reading "Here there be fools".


Roger Miller

In Albuquerque, where at least the botanical garden recognizes that we
live in a desert.