In the late 1990s, Tim Smit — an archaeologist turned pop-music producer — decided to build a new Eden. The Dutch-born Englishman envisioned a grand environmental-education park in the depressed southwestern English county of Cornwall — with the world's biggest greenhouses as its centerpiece. All he needed was the money. Smit turned to private funders and gave them a professional pitch. "I told them, 'We are going to build the Eighth Wonder of the World in a clay pit west of Cornwall, it's going to be wonderful, and you'll want to be a part of it,'" Smit says. "'Also, we have no business plan.'" Amazingly, the line worked. Smit scraped together more than $100 million, and after a final construction season pummeled by 134 straight days of rain — soggy even for Britain — the park opened on time in the spring of 2001. By all rights, Eden should have been a commercial disaster, as even its founder admits. "All environmental...
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