Why a Climate Museum for the UK

First prototyping workshop for the Climate Museum

I’m setting up a Climate Museum for the UK (CMUK) to stir a creative response to the climate emergency and our threatened biosphere. It doesn’t have a building, and may not ever have a permanent one, but it is mobile, digital and wearable. Museums do not have to be in one building, following traditional methods and approaches. They can be vitally alive places, where questions and meanings are debated, past interpretations challenged, connections are made, people are transformed and solutions are found. A museum is a place to muse. CMUK will be a mobile and participatory programme of conversational activities, diverse voices and creativity, first and foremost.

The aim is:

• To develop the capabilities of arts, science and cultural workers to address the complex and challenging area of engaging audiences with climate change
• In turn, to educate and empower audiences in ways they might take action around climate change and other biosphere threats.

Currently, there is a growing digital collection of resources and inspirations, and there have been some online collecting projects, prototyping workshops and museum tours, and a LOT of people-meeting. A mobile pop-up museum is in development, and will soon be available as a resource for training workshops with cultural workers and participatory activities with their communities. Partner organisations can host the pop-up museum, and/or work with us to develop a Museums+Climate tour.

In terms of its structure, one option had been to establish a new dedicated charity but we decided that CMUK would be a major development project using our company Flow Associates as a platform, but that we will reconfigure this to be more of a charitable company. So, that transformation is underway. The new name for our organisation will be Flow Experience.

This post is about WHY a Climate Museum for the UK.

Our work in Flow involves planning, design and evaluation of experiences for learning and change. Planning for change begins with reflection and discovery, with an in-depth look at the current context. So, for CMUK we carried out a detailed contextual analysis.

This identifies all the drivers for change and the opportunities for any cultural organisation working to tackle social and environmental challenges. Of the many drivers for change and opportunities identified, CMUK is founded on the belief that the climate emergency is the most fundamental and significant driver for change in terms of its urgency and impact. All other issues will either be magnified by it, or will pale into insignificance. But it’s not just climate change on its own that is causing the planetary crisis, and it didn’t come out of nowhere.

Due to the dominance of an industrial system and growing population, the planet is experiencing the linked catastrophes of:

• Non-linear and rapid disruption of Earth’s operating system due to climate change
• A mass extinction of vital biodiversity due to deforestation and climate change
• A degradation of ecosystems health everywhere, with our air, our rivers and oceans, and our food-chains full of plastic, chemicals and other pollutants.

Linked to all this is rapidly rising inequality within and between nations, and the deterioration of democracy and human rights, as powerful groups (the Carbon Lobby in particular) exploit the emergency, delaying restorative action so that they can profit and protect themselves. We are not yet on the path to prevent going over 2 degrees warming through emissions reductions. The Carbon Lobby is behind the international alliance that has interfered to bring about the election of Trump, the Brexit vote and other moves that disrupt international action on peace and environmental protection.

The environmental crisis is worsening injustices faced by people in the Global South, indigenous land defenders in particular, and it will intensify inequalities experienced in every country.

It is now clear that these injustices will spread much more quickly than even climate alarmists imagined. ‘Climate change’ is no longer an issue amongst many. It is now a current ‘climate emergency’ or ‘climate breakdown’, which will lead to social and economic collapse in the near term.

There is growing recognition of the contribution of arts and culture to prompt shifts in the ways we relate to one another and the world, in our values and behaviours. Climate change is widely understood as a cultural and systemic problem. There is also a growing international movement of cultural organisations concerned with these social and environmental challenges. However, in the UK, this work is minimal, patchy, and not always responsive to diverse communities.

Moreover, there is a strong tendency for public to disconnect from the issue. The British Social Attitudes survey of July 2018 reports that more than 90% of Britons agree climate change is a fact, but only c. 25% describe themselves as very worried about it and only a minority feel a responsibility to reduce it. Climate change struggles to get into the top 10 of issues that voters tell pollsters that they are most bothered about and almost never reaches the top three. This means that, while most Britons appreciate that there is a threat, not enough grasp its scale or think that it ought to be a serious priority for the government.

In this context, CMUK aims to do the following to address these problems:

• Advocate for funding: There is very little funding and support for cultural engagement with public/communities around environmental challenges. Overall, only 4% of philanthropic funding goes to environmental causes, and most of this to animal welfare. In the UK, public funding for culture is very stretched and, if it does support social issues, it focuses on needs of specific groups rather than a broader, systemic — or environmental — approach. In a survey of 49 cultural workers the biggest barrier to engaging with climate change was lack of funding for this type of work.
• Train and support cultural workers: There is tentativeness across the culture sector about the radical approaches needed to address the climate emergency, such as tackling the political influence of the fossil fuel industries. Also, in order to engage with public around climate change, cultural workers need support to explore their own feelings and values about these issues.
• Enable people to talk about climate change: This self-censorship in the cultural sector about the climate emergency is echoed across media, academia, business, education and other civic realms. This means in turn that the public is less able to prepare for change and to have constructive conversations that might aid our mental health and practical readiness in facing such a crisis. In particular, people need more support and voice if they have been affected through experiences of being a refugee or having family in countries more extremely or directly affected by climate change, resource wars or environmental problems.
• Enable systems thinking and eco-literacy: All the above issues relate to a lack of ecocentric thinking across all professional sectors. Ecocentric thinking acknowledges our dependence on a functioning stable Earth system, and the right for other species to exist peacefully. It is an expanded perspective that always puts issues or ideas such as diversity, inclusion and justice in a geophysical, systemic and bio-empathetic frame.
• Collecting the contemporary response to climate change: As far as we’re aware, no museum in the UK is collecting about; shifts in people’s frames and emotional responses over time as climate change unfolds; climate change stories of people affected; stories of activism; media responses and debates; networks and initiatives; educational resources; design solutions, and artworks.

If you would like to find out how you can help or ask to be on the mailing list for email updates, please get in touch on ClimateMuseumUK@gmail.com

If you feel moved to support me in my work as an unsalaried Regenerative Culture leader, you can make a donation here.