AAM 2011 Session: Sustainable Preservation Strategies for Museums

These NEH-coordinated sessions are so valuable. They bring together NEH program staff and the practitioners and participants in the agency's Sustainable Cultural Heritage Collections grant program. If you're considering assessing, planning and implementing upgrades to your climate conditions - in storage and on display - you owe it to yourself to attend (or buy the CD of) one of these sessions.

NEH's Senior Program Officer, Preservation & Access program, Laura Word describes this important grant program this way: As the field grapples with how to define guidelines for good collection environments, there is a growing acceptance that one size does not fit all; that striving for flat-lined conditions is not always necessary and is rarely sustainable. There is also growing interest in making the systems already installed work better and more efficiently, and in looking for passive and low-energy alternatives to complex, energy-intensive mechanized systems for managing environmental conditions. [National Archives Conference, 2011]

The environmental sustainability achievements from this are huge - not to mention the benefit of better, more thoughtful, care for collections.  I urge you to check out the website at http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/SCHC.html [2011 deadline not yet announced]

And just quickly - here are some tid-bits from this year's presenters. Note that though they discussed T/RH, it was not a feature of either presentations ... thoughtful, responsive, integrated design is what stands out:

Mike Henry (a marvelous preservation engineer who has provided services for many, many grantees)

• decisions about the best, most-efficient use of your space available is basic sustainable practice
• with those spaces, choose which are the best and worst for which types of collections
• remember that case exhibits buffer objects from the larger space's conditions
• but box within a box is not an "active" microclimate
• "if you use recipes you might overlook the opportunities"
• "go for the base hits; fill the bases then go for the home run"

John Childs, Historic New England (a grantee)

• follow the KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid)
• if you can use off-the-shelf, do it - its simpler in so many ways
• the planning and design process should be inclusive: curators, registrars, directors, engineers, architects, preservationists all at the table at the beginning
• prioritize threats to the collection
• analyze and understand current systems
• consider phased approaches 
• and small and doable is better than big and impossible: "The Best is the enemy of Good"

If you would like more information on the early public discussions that led directly to this NEH program, there is great content here: May 2009 NEH-CNR Conference in DC.

Book Review: Sustainable Museums: Strategies for the 21st Century

Author - Rachel Mandan with case contributions from practitioners around the world.
Publisher - MuseumsEtc, Edinburgh See Book Details Here.
[This publisher  has a wide variety of global-perspective publications...keep an eye on them.]

Sustainable Museums provides solid foundational information for greening museums. It is a mix of the author’s work and a solid list of contributed cases from museums, trusts and agencies in the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Denmark and Kenya.

After an introduction on the key events in literature and politics leading to the current state of sustainability worldwide, author Rachel Madan, a UK museum consultant and Executive Director of Green Museums, provides eight sections addressing the value and design of the foundation for greening your museum: vision, leadership, team development, impact assessment, strategy development, use of targets and milestones, developing policies and plans, and then communicating sustainability practices and messages.

She’s dead on when she points out how the world and the museum field has made too little progress on sustainability, and, sadly, I had to laugh and one of interviewees referring to green team situation as more of an ‘after school club’ than an agent of change. It’s true. Green teams have become common, but rarely do they mature past interest-group status to leadership teams.

Madan’s suggestions on developing vision, identifying barriers and ‘drivers for change’, and creating strategic communication methods and sustainability steering groups, caught my eye. I particularly like that in her suggestions, as well as the case studies, that there is very little green ‘bling’ and very much an emphasis on efficiencies, collaboration, and sound baseline information.

The sales pitch is a bit strong, but the author's solid experience, and the valuable cases, soften the advertisements. Among the cases’ great stories I found many valuable snippets I’d hope the field could emulate. If forced to choose favorites, here they are:

 Shedd Aquarium (US) has evolved from a Green Team to A Green Sustainability Department

 Minnesota Historical Society (US) is tackling a statewide, property-wide assessment for efficiencies

 National Gallery in Denmark creates carbon accounts for exhibits

 United Kingdom museums and trusts are benefitting from collaborative, government-supported, direct-delivery programs supporting energy reduction

 The Design Museum (England), uses a cross-comparison of audience datasets between “GreenAware” and “Mosaic” software for evaluating audience awareness of and commitment to green practice, and the correlation to museum interest and support.

 The highly-efficient Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center honors the site by also using local materials, respectful profile and emotional planning.

 Renaissance South East’s (England) Green SLIME program (Science Links in Museum Education) for partnering with schools to advance environmental understanding and practice

 Hull House (US) and its Re-Thinking Soup program using local food to provide a weekly soup lunch for discussing food sustainability, security, and resourcefulness

They were a pleasure to read, and a shot of inspiration. Some days I feel I am banging my head against the wall, and others I feel at least I’m not doing it alone!

AAM 2011 Session: Climate Change & Collective Action

I have a tendency to attend any presentation on any topic by either Wayne LaBar or Emlyn Koster, both of Liberty Science Center, NJ, but this time they were really speaking my language - museums and their role in increasing human practices of environmental sustainability.

Wayne and Emlyn are part of a mostly-Australian dialogue on how museums can collaborate to address climate change...how museums can help humans navigate the Anthropocene (see Wikipedia...new, unofficial term for the geologic age where climate is changed by human activity...see also Curt Stager with Tom Ashbrook and Bill McKibben March 24, 2011 interview. The project is Hot Science Global Citizens and it's an Australian Research Council Linkages Project. Wayne and Emlyn's presentation was sort of  'news from the field' as they reviewed the project's early-stage exploration of museum interventions, intersection of science and humanities, and responsibilities of citizens and the media. 

Two parts stood out - Emlyn's discussion about why tackling climate change is so difficult for the field (with me loving that we agreed on many points, but I also learned a good bit); and Wayne's discussion about how museums must work to address the realities of public response to climate change understanding.
Emlyn listed museums' structural disinclination to address climate change meaningfully. For the most part, museums still tend to:

• focus on collections
• rely on exhibits primarily
• are slow to collaborate deeply and meaningfully
• are poor at integrating past, present and future
• their funders are cautious
• museums tend to avoid the risk of controversy
• museum schools, which might have tackled this topic mightily, have not been a widespread success
• grants tend to support the status quo, not innovation
• and museums are rarely visionary and do not take global leadership positions

Wayne pointed out that "Climate change is no longer a science event, but a cultural change and it won't be solved by science policy." And he tackled the question of "why are people slow to change in response to climate change?"  The collaborative project discussions have articulated two critical disconnects - one of time and risk, and one of science and emotion. 

First:  Education about climate change is scientific; response to climate change (perception of personal risk exposure followed by changes in behavior) is emotional.  Water and oil. 

Second:  Since the risk of loss or injury due to climate change has an uneven and unpredictable timeline for each human perceiving it (will rising sea level affect me anytime soon or in a way I can see? Did a hurricane just him my house?), the debate about when and how much change there will be becomes a distraction that leads to a stalemate.

So Liberty Science Center, instead of doing an exhibit on climate change, much they way they might do an exhibit on skyscrapers or on human health, has chosen to educate about sustainability across all exhibit platforms. It's not a science fact to be learned in a few discrete lessons, but a cultural issue that must seep into human processes from many, many sources.

As a field I believe we should work hard to address the science/emotion and time/risk factors, but let's also use our position as educators, collaborators, and authorities to emphasize positive aspects of environmental sustainability: cost savings, resource conservation, and livable communities, so that we don't lose our audience.     

I'm delighted to be introduced to the Hot Science Global Citizens Project and will follow their further adventures.