Alfred Heller's first world's fair was the prewar Golden Gate International Exposition, on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay. In 1998 he visited Lisbon Expo 98, his fifteenth international expo. After graduating from Stanford in 1950 with a degree in English, he served as an army officer in Korea, taught high-school English and published a small-town weekly in the Mother Lode country of his native state. In the 1960s he founded the California Tomorrow organization, an early and influential voice in the state's environmental movement. His first book, The California Tomorrow Plan, was published in 1972 by William Kaufmann, Inc.
From 1981 to 1995, Heller was the publisher and editor of the quarterly magazine World's Fair. In the process of reporting on fairs for the magazine, he became closely acquainted with their managers and exhibitors, their workings and their complex purposes. The current volume combines his lifelong interest in the two pursuits-international expositions and the environment.
From Chapter 1 "So Vast, so Glorious, so Touching" World's fairs are maximum experiences. They are the ultimate travel destinations. They teach and inspire. They engage your heart, your mind, your soul and your feet. They provide food for thought. They arouse the critical faculties (because great fairs and the societies that produced them are worthy of improvement). They are challenging because they are unpredictable, with as many masters as there are participants.
Every world's fair is a history lesson, and some have made history. Expositions in this century have chronicled cataclysmic ebbs and flows of political and economic power among countries and regions, in particular the rise and crash of Nazism and the titanic battle between the communist bloc and the democracies. The New York World's Fair of 1939 provided the sustaining vision that resulted, after World War II, in our automobile culture. Beginning at Brussels in 1958, fairs were caught in the grip of cold-war rivalries, and they flourished. Even though the Soviet Union tended to avoid exhibiting at any but the biggest ones, expos benefited from the propaganda expenditures of the Eastern and Western blocs. They provided peaceful parade grounds for proud leaders with armies capable of destroying cities. That was important when contact between the contenders was limited and strained. I remember the excitement that China created when it emerged from its decades-long isolation to exhibit at the 1982 expo in Knoxville. When the cold war ended, six graffiti'd chunks of the Berlin wall went on display, like museum pieces, in the Germany Pavilion at Expo 92 in Seville. Was there ever a more eloquent epitaph for an era?
The distinction between expos and other forms of entertainment is becoming blurred. Expos are now being used to test simulators, three-dimensional films, and virtual-reality machines that threaten to turn all entertainment into one long series of explosions. Every major pavilion has to have a ride or a film as its attraction. The idea of an exposition as a locus for displaying the achievements of humankind in many fields of activity has been eroded. Expos want to be theme parks in order to attract the crowds. Theme parks want to begin as expos to gain recognition as being of international import. Casinos parade as world's fairs, while museums, planetariums, aquariums and zoos have adopted the latest "infotainment" techniques to boost attendance. And phenomena called urban entertainment centers, featuring the latest jostling rides and widescreen 3-D films, have entered the equation.
In these circumstances information, a staple of world's fairs, disappears. For a while, it's fun to wear a heavy black helmet filled with virtual images. But I don't think people want their minds, or their children's, to be put in cold storage. I suspect that expos of the future will find distinction in small, imaginative, relatively inexpensive exhibits that engage their customers and tell them something.
The expo organizing committees of the future are going to have to direct their fairs, without ambiguity, to the nurturing of the earth, not to its destructive exploitation. This theme above all others appears and reappears throughout the book, no doubt inspired by my experience as an environmental activist in the 1960s and 1970s. "Progress," the shibboleth of the industrial nations and of every exposition since the Crystal Palace, has lost its power to inspire. The word has Latin roots: pro, meaning "forward" and gradi, "to go." In the middle of the nineteenth century, "progress" came to refer to advancement in manufacturing and technology. That is what world's fairs celebrated, along with the conveniences and the comforts, the improved health and educational systems and the great cities that economic progress made possible. Amid continuing signs of progress, social protesters deplored the consequences of the industrial system-slave wages, for example, sweatshops, deplorable living conditions.
In the United States, the idea of progress was associated with the westward expansion, and by 1915 in San Francisco, progress referred to fulfillment of empire. The Column of Progress, modeled on Trajan's Column in Rome, dominated the bay side of the Panama-Pacific exposition. Here was a frieze of the Burden Bearers, human toilers beside a handsome band of trumpeters who presumably were assuring the laborers of the rewards and fulfillment that lay ahead. At the top, lovingly supported by a kneeling woman holding a laurel wreath, an Adventurous Bowman looked to the west, to discover where the arrow he had just launched would lodge. Watch out, China.
Today the evidence mounts that the mainstays of progress, the old patterns of production and consumption, coupled with a relentlessly growing world population, have brought in their wake environmental damage with untold consequences for life on earth. Weather patterns are crazy-quilt. A hole in the ozone layer at the south pole persists. Global warming is outstripping the most dire predictions. Tropical forests are disappearing. Species are dying in startling numbers. The heroic optimism of 1915, the boosterism of 1939, the happy embrace of atomic energy at Brussels in 1958 and of the automotive age at the New York World's Fair of 1964, have given way in the lexicon of expo planners to declarations that economic development must henceforth be in tune with the nicest of ecological considerations. Expos with environmental themes are competing for available dates, as if the environmental struggle has become the moral equivalent of the cold war. Times are changing.
Nevertheless, polluters continue to have a hand in underwriting-and shaping-world's fairs, even those with the best of intentions. It won't be easy to bring expos around to the realities of our time. But there are plenty of corporate, nonprofit and governmental good guys who are helping to turn the tide for expos and for the wider society.
