DES MOINES -- Forget cornfields and covered bridges.

Ted Townsend has a new symbol in mind for Iowa: a rain forest.

A wealthy designer of meatpacking equipment, Townsend wants to build the world's largest man-made rain forest in Des Moines. That's not all. Inside the forest, he plans an aquarium, a science center, a theater and an elementary school that, he promises, will set the agenda for education in the 21st century.

Townsend boasts his project is "several powers of magnitude greater" than anything anyone ever dreamed of for Iowa.

That's precisely the problem.

Iowa is a modest state. Proud of its agricultural bounty, yes, but not at all prone to putting on airs. Its most glitzy tourist attraction is a self-guided tour of the bridges of Madison County. Or, perhaps, the build-it-and-they'll-come baseball diamond from "Field of Dreams."

So the notion of a huge rain forest -- which consultants predict would attract up to 2 million visitors a year -- strikes some Iowans as unsuitable. Especially because Townsend wants to plop a school in the midst of it, allowing tourists to peer in at the kindergartners should they get bored waving at the orangutans.

"Having been told about [the project]," one resident wrote the Des Moines Register, "my first question was, 'Where's the casino?' When I learned that an elementary school was to be at the center of it all, I wanted to cry."

Barnstorming Iowa with a binder full of feasibility studies, Townsend, 50, has earned several powerful endorsements.

Gov. Tom Vilsack applauds the project for sending "a strong and bold message that we're doing something different -- and better -- than the rest of the country." House Speaker Ron Corbett said he loves the education component; he expects the Legislature to authorize a yearlong feasibility study soon.

Yet the venture's audacious scale has provoked criticism as well as awe.

Townsend estimates the cost of his project, which he calls Iowa CHILD, at $270 million. To finance it, he's asking state and local governments to pitch in close to $100 million apiece; once they commit, he's confident he can raise private funds (including $10 million of his own) to finish the job.

Some Iowans, however, have other suggestions for spending their tax money, such as improving public schools and updating shabby libraries. What's more, they question the logic of a rain forest in Iowa. "Here we sit in the middle of the country's breadbasket, with our farmers disappearing at a rate exceeded only by the disappearance of our native prairie, and the best our leaders can think of is to build a rain forest," one skeptic huffed in a letter to the Register.

Townsend responds that only a rain forest will draw enough tourists to finance the education research that gives Iowa CHILD its reason for being. Plus, he says, the forest will provide the perfect atmosphere for teaching children "ecological literacy."

Pub Date: 3/25/99