Interviewed by MAGS (Museum and Art Gallery Society Magazine) Team, December 13, 2021.
David Unwin at Lizard Point in Cornwall. Picture Courtesy of David Unwin.
How do you think climate change is relating to us/museum studies people?
Events that we hear about every day are often very easily related to climate change. And one of those is that we're impacting on the living world and the really important thing that's happening now is that the number of different kinds of animals and plants and living organisms, what we call biodiversity is actually declining, and it's declining in lots and lots of different ways. And some of those are incredibly important to humans. They're probably all important to humans, they should be. But there are some things which we probably should be worrying about.
Something I've mentioned in lectures quite a bit is the rise in sea level. Our current models for sea level rise whenever they get revised. It's very, very rare for people to say, oh, I think we overestimated it. Scientists generally go, oh, we might have underestimated it because we still don't understand in many ways, how our planet functions. We know about a lot of the
things that are easily accessible to us like, you know, we can go and count how many species of animal there are in Britain or Africa or wherever it might be. But it's very hard to understand things like the currents that move around deep in the ocean. But actually, those currents have huge impacts on how heat is distributed in the oceans and that affects the weather. And it also affects many other things as well. But we're only just beginning to understand some of these. And it's clear that climate change impacts on those so we have one final thing just in case we're not depressed enough already.
Creator: Matthew J Thomas | Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto
The other thing that humans are doing is polluting the planet. Plastics are, while on the one hand, they've made our lives a lot more comfortable. And they are everywhere in almost everything that we do. We encounter plastics most probably loads on my desk just here. But the problem is that many plastics that going to the environment last 1000s of years. And there's a slight irony here. We talked a lot in the last few weeks and how conserving collections. Sadly, plastics are really good at conserving itself. And while it might get broken down, it forms these dreadful things called microbeads, which are tiny, I mean they are less than a millimeter in diameter. We face actually, it's not just climate change, we face biodiversity or in particular biodiversity decline, biodiversity loss, and also pollution.
What are your thoughts on oil and gas companies sponsoring museums and exhibitions, especially exhibitions on sustainability?
The bigger context is how do we ultimately stop using fossil fuels? We have to do that because it's the major contributor to greenhouse gases. And I fear that sponsorship within museums and art galleries is one way that this sector feels that they can cling on, or they can hang on a bit longer. And there's various aspects of that. There's a thing called greenwashing, which is a concept whereby companies, while what they're doing well damaged the environment, sort of put money into things that look good, and they can say, you know, we plant so many trees, or we funded this exhibition in this museum, which draws attention to the fact that we've got climate change. Oh, yeah, we're still we're still digging out, or, you know, piping out billions of tons of crude oil or gas every day. But don't look at that, you know, look at the good things we do. I think museums and art galleries have to be incredibly careful that they're not consciously or unconsciously helping that whole industry, the fossil fuel industry in a sense, to continue to survive.
Last year, I had a terrific tutee, who did a dissertation on a new exhibition in the science museum that was funded by, I think it was BP and her conclusion was an extremely critical one, as indeed many people have written about this exhibition and said it's a classic case of greenwashing. It kind of highlights some of the positive things that are happening in terms of reducing the amount of fossil fuels that we're using, but it very carefully excludes or what we call airbrushes out all the negative things which might have been in there if BP hadn't been funding that particular exhibition. And it's interesting that the director of the Science Museum has taken huge amount of criticism for that one, and rightly so. And perhaps in that case, we have an example of a director who's not fully engaged with where we are now.
From my point of view, I'd be very radical, and I would say it's very hard to see any examples where the fossil fuel industry becoming involved with museums, or whatever it might be zoos, Botanical Gardens, or what have you, ultimately, sends out a positive message. I think, collectively, we need to take a much, much more aggressive stance towards that industry as a whole and the message that needs to be got across is you need to be winding down. I think for the museum sector, the most effective thing will be to say, we cut all ties it might hurt us, you know, financially, we're going to cut those ties, because that's part of our spectrum of activities, which relate to our key mission statement, which is how do we make people's lives better?
What Museums can do?
Speaking of roles, I've talked about Natural History Museum have played incredibly important roles in terms of understanding biodiversity and what's happening to it. Can museums save the planet while they're on their own? They can't. But they could help a lot. And I think there are a couple of big ways that they can really help. One is by being greener themselves. If we've got 55,000 museums around the world, that's a lot of buildings, and it's estimated that up to 70% of the energy costs of a typical museum go in looking after the collections. Museums tend to use a lot of energy. And that energy means co2 going into the environment while we're still using lots of fossil fuels as we shift to greener sources of energy that maybe become less of a problem. What we need to be doing is just using less energy and being much more efficient. Often museum practices are energy inefficient. To give an example, exhibitions are a problem in many ways. When we come to the new exhibition, and we spend 5 million pounds on a big art exhibition that uses lots of energy and materials, which we also need to be manufactured and moved to the museum. And what happens with them afterwards? We chuck them away. Therefore, exhibitions need to be massively more efficient, and we need to recycle and reuse and repair to use the three R's mantra in exhibitions throughout museums and art galleries. And museums need to become institutions that set examples to other public and private institutions about being green because they can if they work at it, and there's many things they can do. And I think a key thing here is that when many people think about sustainability and green museums, they only think about Natural History Museum and Science Museums and zoos. And that thinking needs to change dramatically that everybody is involved. No matter you're the smallest rural visit with two people, a very famous art collection like MoMA, or a museum like V&A. Every single institution has a role to play, and part of that role is trying to be greener.
Any museums that did an excellent job in climate change. Maybe not in an educational way, but in a green design, because I remember what you talk about the architecture design that matters. For example, the building in the Natural History Museum, so the usage of space is one of the issues we have to concern in the green Museum, right?
Okay, there are two things. If we look at all the 55,000 museums, okay, quite a lot. There is a significant number that has been built in the last decade or two. And most of those were built in China. China has this extraordinary building booth, and there's a huge opportunity there to be great. There are many, many ways museums can be built that help them save energy, save water. Just to give one other example, museums often tend to be big spaces. They have big rooms, and they have spaces around them. And increasingly, what people are recognizing is they can do things with those spaces. Having a roof garden is a cool idea...... And also, they can use the spaces around the museum to communicate ideas about green environments. How we can improve our own microenvironments, little environments where we live in lots of ways by being greener. New museums have huge opportunities to be much, much greener, and some of them do and the US has been very prominent in this regard. And lots of museums, which are there. There are lots of different environmental standards nowadays, but there's a very famous one called LEAD, which is Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, and buildings get these awards.
Edited by MAGS Team