Tag Archives for climate change

Putting Natural History Museums to Work for Human Rights

Written by Henry McGhie, Curating Tomorrow, henrymcghie@curatingtomorrow.co.uk.

Every year, 10th December is commemorated as International Human Rights Day, the date when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the members of the United Nations. This year is particularly momentous, as it is the 75th anniversary of the Declaration’s adoption. What has this got to do with museums? The original Declaration includes a number of commitments (set out in 30 Articles) that are obviously related to the work of museums: the right to education, the right to information and freedom of expression, the right to take part in public affairs, among others. Museums often focus on one (article 27) that gets summarized as being ‘the right to participate in cultural life’, but that isn’t it’s full or proper title or scope: more correctly, it is that “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” Note especially the part about sharing in scientific advancement and its benefits: we will come back to this.

Now, the Universal Declaration is not perfect, it is 75 years old after all, and it reflected a world rather different than our world today. Hundreds of millions of people were still under colonial rule. The environment didn’t feature in the Declaration, as human impacts on the environment were not as massive, and not as obvious. Nevertheless, the Declaration has been supplemented by many additional agreements, many of which have a legal standing. However, the necessity of a decent quality environment has been recognized for decades. Indeed, it has been argued that most or possibly all of the 30 rights in the original Universal Declaration rely on a decent quality environment. Sustainable development really got going in the early 1970s, with the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, that recognized that people have a right to a decent quality environment. Fast forward 50 years, to 2022, and that right was finally formally recognized by the United Nations. More recently, the inherent rights of nature have been the subject of court cases and in some cases natural features have been granted rights, which helps protect them and to take polluters to court for environmental damage. 

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Rights-based Environmental Action: A key element of Sustainable Development

Written by Henry McGhie, Curating Tomorrow, henrymcghie@curatingtomorrow.co.uk.

Bio: Henry McGhie has a background as an ecologist, museum curator and manager. He set up Curating Tomorrow in 2019 to help empower museums and their partners to contribute to sustainable development agendas, including the SDGs, climate action, biodiversity conservation, Disaster Risk Reduction and human rights. He is a member of the ICOM Sustainability Working Group, and a Churchill Fellow working on these topics.

This blog post takes in some of the development over the last couple of years, and sets out some current opportunities for museums with natural history collections to strengthen their contributions to environmental sustainability.

This blog post builds on a previous post, on the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Paris Agreement. 

Museums can seem to have lots of rules – conditions for loans, environmental conditions, rules for acquisition and disposal, rules on what people can and can’t do in galleries, and so on – but what about the goals? What is the point of museums? If we look at museums from a rights-based approach (i.e. from the perspective of respecting and fulfilling human rights), we can easily see museums as related to the right to participate in cultural life, to education, to information, to take part in public affairs, freedom of expression, and more. Yet museums don’t make much of human rights or rights-based approaches. The same can be said of environmental protection and restoration. 

As I wrote in the last post, the Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity are both now over 30 years old, yet their main aims are not written into the work of the museum sector, or indeed the wider cultural sector. This is unfortunate on three counts: first, it holds back the international agreements from making progress to address these massive challenges; second, it denies people the opportunity to even know about these agendas and related programmes; and third it stops the museum sector from contributing effectively to achieving these agendas. 

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Unpacking the Unnatural History Museum (Season 1)

Written by Verity Burke, John Pollard Newman Fellow of Climate Change and the Arts, University College Dublin.

Blaschka Models. Image credit: courtesy of the National Museum of Ireland: Natural History.

We’re at a crucial historical moment, in which the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List has announced a catastrophic decline in global biodiversity, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has reported on the devastating trajectory of the climate crisis. Museums have an important role to play in communicating the value of nature. Yet nature is, necessarily, mediated in museums, through taxidermy dioramas and skeletal mounts; virtual tours and digital databases; image, text and film. While the natural world has always been mediated in the museum space, what does this mediation mean now for natural history museums and collections, and the natures they present?

These are some of the questions which drive my research into museum representations of the natural world, and was the inspiration behind putting together an event series called ‘The Unnatural History Museum: Mediating Nature in the Sixth Mass Extinction’ (part of the Irish Research Council-funded project ‘Still Lives: Organic and Digital Animals in the Natural History Museum’ at Trinity College Dublin). I was keen to make a space to have these conversations across disciplines and sectors (something which we get surprisingly few opportunities to do, despite often working on similar topics or issues), to allow us to share what we were doing and discuss why. This blog is a short overview of the topics that the first season of the Unnatural History Museum engaged with from September 2022 to April 2023, with some excitement about what arose in the first season, and in anticipation of continuing these conversations in a planned second season.

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Natural History Museums for a World in Harmony with Nature: Now’s the Time!

Written by Henry McGhie, Curating Tomorrow, henrymcghie@curatingtomorrow.co.uk.

Bio: Henry McGhie has a background as an ecologist, museum curator and manager. He set up Curating Tomorrow in 2019 to help empower museums and their partners to contribute to sustainable development agendas, including the Sustainable Developmet Goals (SDGs), climate action, biodiversity conservation, Disaster Risk Reduction and human rights. He is a member of the ICOM Sustainability Working Group, and a Churchill Fellow working on these topics.

This blog post takes in some of the developments over the last couple of years, and sets out some current opportunities for museums with natural history collections to strengthen their contributions to environmental sustainability.

Let’s cast our minds back to 1992, over thirty years ago now, when representatives of all countries agreed to take action in three areas. This was the Rio Earth Summit, which adopted the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Framework Convention on Climate Change (the grandparent of the Paris Agreement) and the Convention to Combat Desertification. It’s entirely possible you may not even have heard of all of these, but don’t worry you’re far from alone. While governments signed onto these agreements, they were broad, framework agreements. It is true that governments were supposed to take the lead in these, and other agreements, but surely sectors – including museums – don’t need to wait to be asked? However, the agreements have just not been turned into action, and that is a fault of governments, but also of the sectors, that could have gained a lot by saying ‘we have something to contribute here’. What I’m proposing isn’t just that museums take up these agreements to look good, sound good, show off, or compete with one another or with other sectors, but to use them as practical tools.

Why? Because connecting with the big picture and international agreements helps museums to:

  • Shape their programmes and activities, to provide people interested in these topics with educational and participatory activities.
  • Put their unique resources to good use in pursuit of positive social and environmental outcomes.
  • Play a significant and distinctive part in an ambitious programme for a better world.
  • Build partnerships and collaborations, with one another and with other sectors, working to shared goals.
  • Create and demonstrate impact, showing that museums and collections are not a nice-to-have, but essential players in securing a future in harmony with nature.
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NatSCA Digital Digest – November 2021

Compiled by Glenn Roadley, NatSCA Committee Member, Curator of Natural Science at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery.

Welcome to the November edition of NatSCA Digital Digest.

A monthly blog series featuring the latest on where to go, what to see and do in the natural history sector including jobs, exhibitions, conferences and training opportunities. We are really keen to hear more about museum re-openings, exhibition launches, virtual conferences and webinars, and new and interesting online content. If you have any top tips and recommendations for our next Digest please drop an email to blog@natsca.org.

Sector News

SPNHC / BHL / NatSCA Conference 2022

Next summer will see the return of the physical NatSCA Conference – a triple whammy partnership with the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Abstract submission opens November 12th, so keep an eye on the conference site if you’ve got a great idea or project to share with the community.

GCG Virtual Winter Seminar

The Geological Curators Group are delighted to announce that the call for speakers for the Virtual Winter Seminar event is now open. In this unprecedented 18 months, GCG has seen a wonderful increase in engagement from international members, and with this seminar, they would like to celebrate this. GCG are looking for submissions for talks of around 10-15 minutes sharing innovations in, relationships with, and stories from, geological collections around the world. These can be surrounding the topic of Covid and how your organisation coped, or anything else you would like to share!

Please e-mail abstracts to events@geocurator.org. The closing date for submissions is November 5th at 5p.m. BST. The maximum word count should be 250 words plus one image. 

Registration will open shortly with tickets at £5 with the AGM following the seminar and a fun event to end the day. 

More details will land soon at https://www.geocurator.org/agm2021.

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