12/24/08The Ìuseum of Nature
 In 1990 the Vladimir and Suzdal Museum-Reserve opened the first constantly working “natural” exhibition called “In the World of Animals” in the city of Vladimir. After the reconstruction of the exhibition in 1997 it was renamed “The Nature of the Moherland”. At the end of the year 2008, a new stage in the history of this exhibition began: the new Museum of Nature was opened after a great amount of repair was over. The creation of the Museum has a special significance for our region.
The Vladimir region is a densely populated area, with the developed industry and the transportation network. Anthropogenic pressure on local nature is enormous. Therefore it is not by chance that the program of the comprehensive development of the Museum-Reserve runs as follows: “In recent years in connection with the aggravation of the ecological situation the problem of biological and ecological education acquired special importance in the entire world. It is high time to educate children and adult population in the spirit of harmonious co-existence with nature, in the readiness to protect our common natural values everywhere and always”. Thus, the new Museum is aimed at the providing ecological education and teaching children to love and take care of nature.
  
At present people spend the largest part of their lives in the cities and become more torn from nature. Urban civilization forms a distorted idea of its own superiority over living nature. On creating this exhibition, the Museum-Reserve solves an important task of returning people to the bosom of nature.
Here not the traditional “naturalistic” or “collection” method of constructing the exhibition is used, where museum items serve as illustration to one natural law or another, but the visitors feel as if they are “plunging into nature”. This is a sort of a journey, which lasts for four seasons, but is over in one hour.
 The journey begins from “the passage” through the sawn chunks of limestone, which symbolize the enormous layers of time, the pressed organic life for the latter 300 million years. Then a guide meets us. While penetrating through the layers of water and ice sediments, revealed on the bank of the Oka river, and the vertical wall of limestone quarry, a visitor realizes a planetary scale and influence of past geological epochs on the present.
A great importance of solar energy for the life on the Earth personifies the museum composition of “the Tree of Life” in the center of the show-room. This is a model of the tree with the branches outstretched to the Sun with roots embracing the Earth.
The museum journey continues in the dense spring forest. The traveler sees the scene of the fight of bears. Charmed by the songs of the forest birds he approaches the spring of water with a beaver weir. Later he finds himself in the dark wolf lair at the edge of the marsh… Then the journey continues at the south of the region in the Meshchera area full of lakes and at the north in the Opolye woodless zone. The twisting route is laid past the bent window-cases. You can notice that their form is absolutely natural, in the exhibition’s design there are no mechanically geometric constructions whatever.
 Big objects – like trees and animals – are located side by side with the enlarged images of micro-flora and fauna. Technical equipment makes it possible to combine panoramic views with admiring the details. The exhibits, voices of animals, texts, videos, information of a guide, a radio-guide, a computer kiosk must reveal to the visitors an amazingly complex system of the biological laws, which exist in nature.
During the journey the seasons and natural landscapes of the Vladimir region are changed. Reproduced by means of the museum, “corners” of local nature awake the feeling of love for the fatherland.
At the end of the visit to the exhibition, the travelers do not leave the museum, they are invited to the museum laboratory – “the forest school”, where they can make small discoveries of their own. The major principle is as follows: “This is a hands-on exhibition!”
 The Museum will provide the visitors (the little ones – through the game) with the possibility to touch, to try, to feel “the joy of their own discovery”. As Leo Tolstoy once said “Knowledge becomes the real knowledge in case it was acquired by the efforts of one’s own thought”.
After the journey, the visitor of the Museum comes to the conclusion, that the man is responsible for the preservation of nature and himself as a biological form.
The Museum of Nature will be interesting first of all for schoolchildren and students of the city and the region.
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