You Can Watch Freighter Ships From the Parking Lot of Panama’s New Biodiversity Museum

Panama’s new museum of biodiversity, the Biomuseo, sits at the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. When it officially opens to the public on Thursday, visitors will enter galleries with names like "The Living Web" and "Gallery of Biodiversity" overlooking the entrance to a man-made ditch that links two oceans and divides continents. It is a Frank Gehry-designed monument to the natural world, square at the entrance to one of humankind’s greatest attempts to reshape the Earth.

Panama hosts both one of the busiest shipping lanes in the Western Hemisphere and 1,200 varieties of orchid. A century ago, the canal excavations flooded huge tracts of forest, produced millions of tons of rubble, and linked the Atlantic and the Pacific, which had been separated for approximately three million years, in roughly a decade. Today, about a quarter of Panama is protected land. Despite deforestation in some areas, the country hosts more than 900 bird species. It is home both to large preserves of jungle and mangroves and to what a turn-of-the-century British observer called "the greatest liberty man has ever taken with nature."

The Biomuseo highlights these contrasts, perhaps unintentionally. A roof of overlapping curves intends, according to the museum’s website, "to tell the story of how the isthmus of Panama rose from the sea, uniting two continents." But the building sits on a causeway constructed with rubble from excavations that separated those same continents with a shipping lane. Visitors to a gallery called "Worlds Collide" will see models of long-dead species made of plastic; at "Panamarama," guests can watch footage of monkeys on an immersive set of screens. In November, the museum will screen Biophilia Live, a concert film about Björk, the Icelandic musician. Biomuseo, in its advertisement for the film, quotes the Guardian: "There are not many artists who can combine the lifecycle of a jellyfish with a breakbeat and make it work."

The collision of nature with artifice at the Biomuseo is puzzling, but in light of Tuesday’s news about global species loss, it’s also a reminder of tragedy. The World Wildlife Fund claimed then that global populations of mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibians and fish have fallen by more than 50 percent since 1970. In two human generations, the WWF suggests, the world’s animal population has halved. Panama has done a better job of preserving its plant and animal species than some biodiverse countries. But the Biomuseo, which cost around $100 million to build, is a reminder that the retreat of the natural world is more than material. Biodiversity, the museum confirms, is largely an idea, not a reality, and even where it still exists — in some of Panama’s preserves, for example — it is accessed most easily on a screen. On Thursday, instead of travelling to the rainforest, you can pay $10 to take an Über from Panama City to the new museum on Amador Causeway. Inside, the sounds of jungle animals will be piped through speakers.