Amanda Gore on how museums, cultural institutions and public engagement initiatives can play a critical role on the journey to global climate consciousness
The way we feed ourselves, build our homes and cities and generate energy is impacting life on earth in a way that is not sustainable. We need urgent global action in order to protect future generations and the biodiversity around us that is under threat from the age of the Anthropocene. But when it comes to the climate crisis, the image in many people’s minds is of melting ice caps and rising sea levels. While this can be alarming, it is also far away and disconnected to our daily lives.
Greta Thunberg, the impressive poster child of climate activism, has inspired millions of young people the world over to engage with this state of emergency. But whilst most are aware of, and often concerned by, the climate crisis, the vast majority of young people still don’t know how to make change on a day-to-day level, or understand the impending implications in any real depth. For others, the enormity of what’s at stake can often feel paralysing and anxiety-inducing, too big to feel like they have any part to play. Fundamentally, the challenge is that climate change is not something that appears to directly connect to their lives today – it’s rare that environmental issues are ever described in ways that truly chime with their own. Without the tools to connect the dots how can we expect them to make any significant behavioural changes?
The older generation are similarly excluded from the climate emergency dialogue. Whilst millennials march and boomers buy electric cars, often the young, the old, and those who have less money sit outside of the middle-aged, middle class collective handwringing. It’s not that the climate crisis doesn’t affect everyone. Or that it’s only those that shop in Waitrose that care. It’s just that the media and institutions that engage on the topic tend to orientate to those already evidently engaged, and sometimes speak down to these other audiences, or worse, exclude them.
“Museums, cultural institutions and public engagement initiatives are critical players on the journey to global climate consciousness. They hold the key to wider public knowledge and debate, helping the public to understand and connect with the big issues of our time”
Museums, cultural institutions and public engagement initiatives are critical players on the journey to global climate consciousness. They hold the key to wider public knowledge and debate, helping the public to understand and connect with the big issues of our time. As museums ask the question ‘how can we make an impact and give our visitors the agency to make a difference to our planet?’, it is important to think about how to build a tangible connection to contemporary lives and personal experience for all audiences, as well as how to reach and resonate with those who are not already walking through the door.
Earlier this year we worked alongside Natural History Museum curators to make the complex content of their new Anthropocene exhibition, Our Broken Planet, relevant for a new audience of teenagers and young adults. Inserting tangible objects and interventions that question and interrogate the artefacts on display and link them to daily habits and routines, we created an experience that invites audiences to consider their own role in the changing world and to make active, positive choices to improve their relationship with the planet. From a gooey chocolate cake iced with questions of modern slavery, innocently displayed beside images of plantations, to an interactive recipe builder where visitors can design their perfect future menu, we added touchpoints that provided an everyday lens to the specimens preserved in the museum’s vast collection.
The exhibition also invites visitors to make their mark in the space, and places their thoughts and suggestions for behaviour change directly alongside those of the museum’s scientists – giving a voice to a young audience with limited power in the big systemic issues and empowering them to become more conscious consumers. The success of this exhibition can be measured not just on the impressive visitor numbers (over 300,000 so far), but also on the positive agency it is creating, as witnessed by the many in-exhibition selfies found on social media and the thousands of suggestions lining the walls.
We know, however, that many of the solutions and conversations around climate action focus on choices and actions that are only accessible to those with the privilege and autonomy to prioritise sustainability. As one senior Science Centre Professional said in response to our recent enquiry: ‘How can we ask low income and excluded audiences to come to our cultural spaces and make climate pledges when we barely have a relationship with them, and they aren’t able to have agency in their own lives, let alone those of a collective planet?’
“Cultural institutions are an integral part of the public sphere, and hold the key to community connection and action. Museums need to listen and respond to the needs of their local communities…actively encourage their participation in creating a future environment that is inclusive, radical and accessible, fostering new bonds between different community groups”
Connecting to these audiences requires breaking down the walls of our cultural spaces, and bringing narratives that chime with their lives to the places they live. Cultural institutions are an integral part of the public sphere, and hold the key to community connection and action. In order to hold space for excluded and minoritised audiences, a symbiotic relationship with them must be cultivated. To develop this dynamic, not only will institutions and museums need to listen and respond to the needs of their local communities, but also actively encourage their participation in creating a future environment that is inclusive, radical and accessible, fostering new bonds between different community groups.
Food, for example, is a great connector across society. Everyone eats, just as everyone is part of the climate crisis. Yet most people don’t realise that reducing our meat consumption is the single biggest way that each of us can lessen our impact on the planet.
Traveling around the UK this summer, our pop-up exhibition called Meat Your Persona was created to raise awareness about the environmental and health impact of individual food choices, whilst also gaining valuable insight into the country’s eating behaviours. Created in collaboration with academics at the University of Oxford, it was designed to break down a complex global problem of rising greenhouse gases into a personal and non-judgemental discussion of what is on your plate – through the mechanism of a personality quiz.
From Blackpool to Redcar, the bright yellow horsebox appeared in shopping centres and city centres across the country and engaged over 100,000 people, from bricklayers to body builders, teenagers to octogenarians. Enabling each person to lead their own journey through the content, the process of the personality quiz asked questions of the audience, each of which revealed a bite-sized piece of information. And the many people who showed an interest in reducing their meat consumption were given guidance on how to actually do that – from easy and affordable recipes, to simple steps that they could take the next day.
Not everyone is going to be a Greta, but everyone is part of the climate crisis. Everyone should be included in the conversation, and working harder to reach those less connected to it by finding what resonates and meeting them on their terms is crucial if we want to move forwards together. Cultural institutions are uniquely placed to do this and it is exciting to be working with partners in this area to start bringing about the changes that are needed.
Amanda Gore
Director, The Liminal Space
Published 6 January 2022
