One of my favorite tropes from environmentally-themed media, especially for children, is the magical Everywhere-and-Nowhere island home to every possible environment and habitat and animals (and sometimes people) from all over the world (and sometimes prehistoric and outright fantastic creatures, too), that is both equally distant and equally close to everywhere else. It’s probably remote, maybe even hidden or uncharted, but somehow you can easily reach any other wild place from there and it’s often not specified exactly which ocean the island is in (and sometimes it moves, or at least seems to!)
Of course it’s a magical island, because an island is by definition a place apart. A place apart from the norm where fantastic things can happen— as the Encyclopedia of Fantasy puts it, Either in this world or another, islands are almost always significant. They must be escaped from or arrived at. They contain that which must be reviled, or that which must be found and revered.
These islands are like those fantastic illustrations of impossibly varied landscapes intended to teach geographic terms that fired our imaginations in school, but made into the actual settings of stories. We actually get to see visitors (often children like us) explore these varied terrains and meet the creatures that inhabit them as they have their educational adventures.
TerraTopia from The Nature Company’s Tales of TerraTopia comics series is the purest and most prominent example in my mind, and probably the one that made the biggest impression on me as a child, especially that wonderful daydream-inducing map on the inside covers. Hope Island from Captain Planet and the Planeteers was smaller, and the Planeteers’ headquarters was more high-tech than the Terratroopers’, but had a similar vibe. The Island of the Aunts from Eva Ibbotson’s book of the same name was a little more of a traditional Fantasyland by including fantasy creatures like dragons and sea serpents with its real-world endangered menagerie, but it was similarly distant, strange, and home to wise caretakers.
Discovery Island, the “Hub” land of the Animal Kingdom park at Walt Disney World, is appropriately also this kind of everywhere-nowhere place, where visitors see animals from all over the world as they wander around a giant tree carved with images of even more species. From Discovery Island, a guest can easily walk to Africa, Asia, or, in the park’s original configuration, summer camp in the forests of the Northeastern US or a dinosaur dig somewhere in the Western states. Indeed, most entry and “Hub” areas in larger zoos carry at least a touch of the mystique of the imaginary Everywhere-Nowhere Island.
I don’t recall if Animal Junction from Zaboomafoo was ever said to be on an island, but it is a similarly liminal everywhere-nowhere place where any creature might be encountered and from which the Kratts could easily travel to anywhere.
With a Victorian setting and a higher than usual population of human civilizations, mysterious ruins and lost magitechnology, and extinct creatures, Dinotopia feels like a slightly more fantastic cousin of these islands. Manoa Lai and the Pelago Commonwealth from Endless Ocean are a cousin more towards the realistic side, as a fictional South Pacific archipelago whose waters are home to aquatic species that in reality are found in different oceans.
(I’m pretty sure these aren’t the only examples, they’re just the ones that stick out in my mind.)
