The environmental crisis is widely considered the greatest challenge facing contemporary global society. In recent years museums around the world have mobilised to address this crisis through exhibitions, research, public engagement, and new sustainability measures. Various initiatives have been established to highlight the important role museums can play in climate action, from the Museums for Future movement to Fossil Free Culture. While such activities have drawn attention to the different ways museums might reduce greenhouse gas emissions, or shift public attitudes towards the environment, the deeper historical, material and conceptual entanglements between museums and environmental change have yet to be comprehensively documented.
Since at least the 1980s scholars have drawn attention to the social and political dimensions of the museum. Where this work has focused on natural history museums, environmental issues have understandably been stressed, with questions of extinction, biodiversity and natural conservation prioritised in research and practice. The analysis of other museum typologies however has largely ignored this environmental dimension. What would it mean to write an environmental history of the British Museum, for example, or the Met? Knowledge on museum-environment dynamics is also scattered across different areas of expertise, with conservators, collections experts, exhibition designers, museum historians, sustainability consultants, and curators all approaching the topic from distinct vantage points. This strand of the CHEco project aims to bridge such domains and stimulate novel thinking across museums, political ecology, environmental history, the posthumanities and related fields.
To date, work on museums and the environment has tended to fall into three or four categories, looking variously at natural history collections and narratives, sustainability programmes that aim to reduce environmental impact, the interpretation of nature and the environment in museums, or the role of museums in environmental education. A growing body of literature has documented the manifold intersections between environmental concerns and museum thinking and practice. Along with questions around decolonisation, inclusivity, and restitution, the environmental crisis – encompassing climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, pollution, and many other factors besides – has become a key area of discussion for contemporary museums, as evidenced by high-level policy initiatives from ICOM, the AAM, the UK Museums Association, and NEMO. What such work highlights most clearly is that there is no single pathway of change for the sector in relation to environmental issues and challenges – addressing this crisis involves new imaginaries, new practices and new strategic alliances.
Historical research can contribute to this work in numerous ways. As the Collection Ecologies initiative makes clear, environmental history in and with museums can ‘provide important answers for current ecological issues now and in the future’. In particular, analysing the ‘the circumstances and environments in which organisms and objects were found and created for collections’ can shed light on the diverse ways in which socio-political systems shape environmental change (and vice-versa). Moreover, tracing the different stories told about nature and the environment in museums over a longer time span can tell us much about the evolution of scientific knowledge, philosophical traditions, environmental education, and even energy transitions. From the presentation of ‘exotic’ specimens in Wunderkammer to the rapid spread of exhibitions on the Anthropocene over the past decade, museums have helped structure environmental subjectivities, often intersecting with notions of race, culture, and sovereignty. They have also initiated material impacts that reach far beyond narrowly defined measures of carbon ‘footprint.’
This research aims to bring together theoretical and empirical research that takes a holistic view to consider the socio-ecological relations flowing through and embedded in all museological practices. This perspective builds on the growth of environmental history as a wide-ranging sub-discipline exploring the material and discursive interactions between human systems and the natural world. When applied to museums, this approach allows us to see how any museum may be open to renewed critical enquiry through an environmental lens, investigating for example the materials used in museum infrastructures, the role of museums in producing or sustaining certain ideas about the environment, the ecological entanglements of specific museum practices, the impact of collecting on ecosystems, or the links between museums and extractivist economies. Focusing on these socio-ecological interdependencies, this research asks what might be gained if we begin to consider all museums – not just those dealing with natural history – as always co-constituted through nature. Such an approach aims to show how museums have contributed to the environmental crisis through specific symbolic and material practices (closely linked to colonialism, industrial modernity, the Great Acceleration, and other macro-historical trends), but also how counter-movements have sought to resist such destructive histories.
Key themes within this research include:
Narrative Ecologies: Knowledge, Concepts, Cosmologies, Stories
Taking a long view, how have museums interpreted, narrated, and communicated environmental topics and concerns over the past five centuries? How did such narratives change in response to broader socio-environmental issues and agendas, at local, national, and planetary scales? What scientific and philosophical concepts have underpinned museological approaches to the environment at distinct historical moments (and what approaches did they help shape)? To what extent have museums – typically understood as a distinctly ‘western’ apparatus – embraced alternative ecological perspectives and cosmologies? How has this impacted on specific museum practices, especially those related to exhibitions, curation, and the production of museum ‘experiences’?
While the stories told in natural history museums and science centres will obviously be central to this theme, it is also important to consider the diverse narrative ecologies found in art galleries (historic and contemporary), social history museums, ethnographic collections, design museums, and many other institutions and spaces not typically focused on the ‘environment’ as a distinct category or concern. Crucially, the term ‘narrative ecologies’ attends to the need for materialist and ecological accounts of museum interpretation. This means thinking beyond stories about the environment to consider the ecological grounding of all museum narratives.
Collections and Conservation: Care, Labour, Toxicity, Time
How have different collecting practices shaped environmental knowledge and material-ecological worlds? What are the political, ethical, and social dimensions of such knowledge making agendas, especially in relation to colonialism and decoloniality? How do normative museum policies associated with atmospheric control and object conservation relate to broader environmental attitudes? How have these evolved in line with new approaches to museum management, design and programming, and what can this tell us about shifting notions of care, repair, and maintenance within and beyond the museum? Following Dominguez Rubio, can we think of all museum collections and conservation practices as ‘ecological’? What are the implications of this approach for writing museum histories where the environment has not typically been a core concern (in relation to art, design, or social history museums, for example)?
Objects and practices to be addressed under this heading may embrace natural history collections (including geological and mineralogical collections), but also ‘cultural’ artefacts such as artworks, ethnographic objects, photographs, prints and drawings, and textiles. Thinking environmentally about such collections means paying close attention to precise material histories, but it also means attending to the specific practices that produce and sustain ‘things’ as objects in the first place. Such practices often involve toxic and life-destroying processes that upend insect worlds (and resonate across broader social and ecological systems). Finally, the use of collections beyond exhibitions – in environmental movements, biodiversity conservation, decolonial praxis, and many other fields besides – also extends museum ecologies in urgent directions.
Embedded Museologies: Infrastructures, Materials, Resources, Land
What can the evolution of museum infrastructures (encompassing both ‘front-of-house’ and ‘back-of-house’ operations) tell us about shifting human-nature relations? How might we read different histories of mining, extraction, resource use, and environmental destruction in and through museum spaces? How can a focus on land in all its complexities shed light on hidden or marginalised museum histories? To what extent can we ‘ground’ museums – ontologically and materially – in specific topologies, ecosystems, atmospheres, and knowledge worlds? What would such a perspective bring to our understanding of museology, and what is at stake in such a gesture?
While certain museums explicitly celebrate their connection to localised geologies and topographies (particularly ecomuseums, resource museums, and industrial museums), most rarely centre such relationalities in their curating or broader programming. Museum critique has extensively documented the different ways in which museums emerge from and feed back into social and political worlds; this theme aims to do the same for the environment, which can no longer be understood simply as a mute ‘backdrop’ to cultural practices.
Critical Heritage Ecologies 