As a piece of industrial magic, Sea World represents an enormous contradiction. Using living animals, captive seas, and flourishing, landscapes, the theme park has organized the subtle and contradictory cultural meanings of nature into a machine for mass consumption. At the same time and despite its best efforts, Sea World makes nature -one of the ideas most taken for granted in Western culture -into a problem that leads to questions. Why should nature in general and ocean life in particular be so central to the workings of this hypercommercial space? How does nature work as a commodity in the late twentieth century? In what way is what we see at Sea World "natural" or unnatural? Who wants to see it and buy it, and why?

Producing this environment is a complicated series of interconnected tasks, and Sea World's management will admit that it doesn't always work so well. They get letters complaining about lines, high prices, bad food, predatory sea gulls, scheduling, impolite employees, the hot sunshine, animals that will not perform, and, again, high prices and long lines. Nevertheless, the park as a machine for moving people, showing them things, and selling them things has worked reasonable well for decades, well enough to return excellent rates of profit in most years. Although Sea World continues to refine and expand its exhibits, most of the changes in the park are at this point just that - refinements of a system that works rather well for an audience familiar with the nature theme park as a well known commodity. Failing some severe crisis-- unionization of the employees, an earthquake damaging the phvsical plant, or a sharp change in consumer attitudes toward animal performances - the turnstile game will tick along, supported by the electronic number-gathering technology, accumulated managerial wisdom, and low-wage labor that make it possible.

Mike Scarpuzzi, Sea World of California's head trainer, learned his craft from his uncle and grandfather who had started a small dolphin show in Florida in the 1950s. This family business was one of many small attractions that existed on the periphery of the tourist economy and embodied a kind of folk knowledge of training; at times the Scarpuzzis barely scraped by. By the early 1970s, however, the industry, was growing quickly and it became clear that the petty entertainments were a thing of the past. With the rapid expansion of mass tourism in South Florida (of which Sea World in Orlando was a part), the increasing governmental limits on the capture and treatment of marine mammals, and the need for larger pools and theaters, it was clear that only businesses with a lot of capital would be contenders in the game. Scarpuzzi hired on with Sea World and began, along with other trainers, to apply his skills to work with killer whales.

When it came to discovering how to keep killer whales alive in captivity, the large oceanariums like Sea World and Marineland were destined to succeed over sideshows, small museums, and parks. The tourist attractions were supported by companies that could afford the construction of huge tanks and elaborate water circulation systems necessary to keep the whales alive, the expensive veterinary care, the thousands of pounds of food a day, and the lawyers to negotiate legislative and regulaton, mazes. And as the Sea World parks grew, they could support specialized training staffs that devoted all their time to working with the performers. The scene was quite different when Mike Scarpuzzi worked for his uncle back in the seventies. As he recalls, "... I took care of the water. I went and got the fish. I gave the medicine, I called the vets. I did the stretches. I trained the [dolphins]. I cleaned the pool. I painted the pool. My family constructed and built the oceanarium. My uncle, my grandfather, my dad, and I. Totally from the bottom. There's just no way you can do that now."

Sea World's size, profitability, and corporate backing allowed it to produce a new commodity--the performing orca--and to dedicate staff to the behavioral shaping and physical reproduction of those performers. The progressive expansion of Sea World from a local company to a national chain, to a publisher's subsidiary, to part of the Busch Entertainment Corporation has meant ups and downs for its entertainment managers, but in general it has also provided a growing bank of financial and technical resources to draw on, and as a result, productions can be more expensive and elaborate.

Given these claims to responsibility, it's fair to ask what public needs the theme park does fill. On the level of customer as individual, Sea World urges us to think about our relationship to the world by having feelings that it helps design; it puts seeing and touching, contact and for the customer, while it argues that the experts will take care of the complicated scientific and technical parts. More generally, Sea World is a material argument for private business solutions to environmental problems that, though unequal in their origins and effects, are of course not private but collective and social in the most profound sense. And perhaps most important, like all major theme parks Sea World is an advertisement for and a triumphal, material celebration capital of the wonders that the private corporation and multinational capital can produce. A public service needs to be assessed in terms of how broadly positive, effective, and equally accessible its benefits are. Unless we think that public service means creating audience emotions that in turn validate and promote private solutions, it is hard to see what progress is made here. Of course, Sea World does serve its corporate parent admirably, providing both a good return on investment and excellent public image benefits. But this is completely private service despite the fact that the imagery of public effort has been channeled to produce it.