In a miniature world, climate change and environmental issues loom large

Watching his dad make a brand-new miniature train car look old, placing the wooden parts to weather in the sun and rain, pulled Peter Martínez into the world of miniatures. He recalls his father, who made model trains mostly for collectors or hobbyists, wondering why anyone would pay him to do what he thought was the most fun part of the hobby. “But luckily they did, and we were able to build an industry around it,” Martínez said.

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The Argentine family business, United Scale Arts, is now partnering with Germany's Miniatur Wunderland, a museum that houses the largest model train set in the world, to develop new exhibits depicting parts of South America, including the Amazon rainforest and Atacama Desert. But with miniature power comes great responsibility — and both Martínez's company and the museum are determined that the miniature world reflect both the good and bad of the real thing. So alongside the perfectly shaded rocks and trees, they depict poverty, crime and environmental degradation. In the exhibits already running in Hamburg, built by a team that has grown over the years to hundreds of people, it means that tiny trains pull tiny coal cars into a mining town, but also, on a city bridge, a tiny semitruck hauls the tiny giant blade of a wind turbine.

And the builders say it means the new models won't shy away from illustrating real life in the Amazon: they will include scenes of illegal mining, deforestation and forest fires.

“These are social problems that exist in the real world, and we need to show them also in the models, because I think it’s important not to make this kind of idealistic view of the world, but also to show reality and to use these tools as a learning experience for everyone that visits the Wunderland,” Martínez said.