Tag Archives for sustainability

Make Plastic History

Written by Glenn Roadley, Curator of Natural Science, The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent.

In May 2023, Professor Claire Gwinnett reached out to me with an opportunity to host a public event at The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery (PMAG). Claire, Professor of Forensic and Environmental Science at Staffordshire University, is an expert in the study of plastic pollution and has worked with the museum before to lead activities at our various science events, so immediately thought of us when seeing the call for applications for the British Academy’s SHAPE Involve and Engage grants. The programme offered grants of up to £8,000 for innovative engagement activities which highlight humanities research, with partnerships between academic and cultural institutions eligible to apply. Claire and I put our heads together and came up with a plan for a day of family-friendly activities aimed at raising awareness of plastic pollution and the research being undertaken to tackle it. At the centre of these activities would be a workshop run by Dan Lewis, an artist who uses plastic fragments found on the beach to create works of art.

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Making a Green Gallery – A Leeds Story

By Sara Merritt, Audience Development Officer at Leeds Museums & Galleries.

Us: We want to retro-fit a permanent gallery! As sustainably as possible! With £40k! In two months! And we want to keep the space open to visitors!

Them: Umm, are you sure that’s a good…

Us: Great! We’ll get cracking.

2022 saw us undertake the retro-fit of our permanent Life on Earth gallery at Leeds City Museum, with the aim of making it as sustainable as possible. The gallery required an overhaul to meet current visitor expectations, with innovative design ideas and production methods to reflect our greater understanding of climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and Britain’s colonial history.

Our objectives were threefold and carefully considered:

  • To manage and deliver a sustainable retro-fit with the addition of creating a carbon calculator to measure our C02 output
  • To ensure the interpretation was relevant, and that we had a strong idea of our target audience to attract visitors who were already engaged in making climate-positive changes.
  • To identify robust materials and production methods which would stand up to visitors pulling, prodding, and everything in between.

We were used to working with greener materials for temporary exhibitions and knew the implications around material availability, longevity of eco materials, and higher associated costs. We therefore needed to keep the project resource light and put our efforts into the interpretation, rather than dramatic object moves. We took the bones of what we had, large cases and great objects, and retold the story with the emphasis on using our objects to inspire our visitors to live more sustainably.

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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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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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