Eco-friendly theme park comes to L.A.
Environmentaland in Hollywood is the first eco-friendly theme park. Admission is $5 for the public and $3 for students and anyone who takes the subway, bus or bike.
By Jennifer Bastien
Oct. 18, 2009 10:02 p.m.
When you think of Disneyland or Magic Mountain, the word “environmental” doesn’t exactly come to mind. The last thing you’re thinking about, as you meet Mickey and Minnie or ride the Matterhorn, is whether or not the costumes and rides were made of recycled materials. Environmentaland, which describes itself as “The World’s First Interactive Environmental Theme Park” is trying to change all that, as it opens its doors at the Hollywood & Highland Center until Oct. 21.
Global Inheritance, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, began in 2002 by setting up exhibits at big events and music festivals like Coachella, the X Games, Treasure Island and Outside Lands, before they decided to put together a whole theme park of their programs at Environmentaland.
“We basically design educational programs with a lot of interactive elements, a lot of art elements to them, to attract people from every walk of life, so they feel like they have a connection with the social and environmental issues,” said Eric Ritz, executive director of Global Inheritance.
In addition to drawing a varied crowd, the creators of Environmentaland are also trying to address environmental issues from a new, more artistic perspective.
“Our goal is to inspire and empower people to act creatively, and to fight the world’s problems,” said Maggie Navarlatz, Global Inheritance’s online coordinator.
With the mass of exhibits Global Inheritance had accumulated over the past seven years, it seemed only natural to bring all of these projects together into a forum of its own, which is open to the public for $5 admission and $3 for students and those who arrived by bike or subway/bus.
Jared Sopko, a former architect who started building stage structures for exhibits at the festivals, just recently started working with Global Inheritance full-time as the Environmentaland project began to take shape.
“A lot of our programming is designed for three-day festivals and events where people are available and looking for something to do between events and exhibits or musical acts,” Sopko said. “But we’ve never had the opportunity to bring these exhibits into Los Angeles and show people who never make it out to Coachella what we’ve been up to.”
The park’s location at the Hollywood & Highland Center has proved fortuitous, drawing both locals and an international crowd, and even a green conference which was meeting at the hotel across the street.
“We’ve had tourists come in, who just happen to be in Hollywood to see the sights, who are thrilled to see what’s going on,” Sopko said. “They seem to be very in tune with the ideas of sustainability, every much as Angelenos seem to be.”
There are certainly enough exhibits for everyone to find something of interest, between the Desert Mini Golf Course, where the green has been replaced with rock, sand and brush; or the Alternative Energy Golf Carts ““ each inspired by a Coachella 2009 artist and running on wind, solar energy and in the case of Amy Winehouse, powered by Jack Daniels.
There is also the Organic Challenge, in which contestants are blindfolded as their taste buds determine whether they’re eating a veggie dog or chicken beak surprise, an organic apple or a genetically modified “frankenapple.”
But one of the most popular exhibits at Environmentaland is the Energy FACTory, where contestants can power their phone, digital camera and more by the energy they create on a bike or seesaw.
“It’s really concrete because you get to experience it with your body,” said Navarlatz.
The point of experimenting with the potential of human energy is not to replace current uses of natural resources but to explore other possibilities and encourage alternative ways of thinking about the environment.
“A lot of the stuff you can see and understand, but when you actually jump on a bike or a seesaw and you’re able to power something, that’s a really cool feeling. The fact that its not just petroleum or coal, people can see that there are other options out there,” said Ritz.
Along these same lines is a program which involves harnessing the energy created in a bicycle spin class and using it to make smoothies for the participants while tracking the output of each bike.
What’s absent from Environmentaland and Global Inheritance is the typical green literature that tends to create labels and divide people.
“There are so many stereotypes as to who is an environmentalist or who is an activist, and we don’t get into that,” Ritz said.
“You don’t see the word green anywhere. We just want the individual to take in these ideas that we present and make them their own.”
