Book Review: The Upcycle, beyond sustainability - designing for abundance

This marvelous book is your inspiration and your guide for changing how you think about environmental sustainability.

Michael Braungart's and William McDonough's follow-on to Cradle to Cradle reflects how two powerful minds have grown in their work and their understanding...and we all benefit.

I am listing here three important take-aways for museums, zoos, gardens, aquariums and sites, but please treat yourself to the full read: smart thinking, positive approaches, and valuable language for describing what we're doing and how to live green and prosper.

• This work has "no endgame". That means that, instead of finishing your checklist, you continuously improve. I believe that checklists provide a valuable framework for getting started and learning but, after some experience making green choices, you can graduate to project metrics and institutional values that accelerate change and involve everyone around you. "No endgame" also encourages you to focus less on reducing negative impact and more on creating positive solutions for the planet and your life and work - it adds whole dimensions.  

• "Starting with a metric blinds planners to the larger effect of ones actions". A values-based plan allows for more expansive thinking and options. A simplistic example: focusing only on energy use reduction closes the door to renewables; you will get better results pursuing a value: the most appropriate collections care with the least fossil fuel use possible at this time. Values encourage holistic approaches that might include microclimates, buffering, reorganization, energy efficiency and labor savings, renewable energy and co-generation. Metrics are critical features, but they are only part of the picture. Your goal is to mature in this work until you can start from a bigger place.

• Strive for "additionality: more of a good thing". With the collections care example, if "the good thing" is quality collections care, let's have more of it. Remember when visible storage became a "thing"? Museums began to use quality storage as a visible display and increased public access. That's additionality. Let's say your city now requires you to manage all your stormwater onsite. You can do that with cisterns for water reuse, and catchment ponds and rain gardens to retain water as it percolates into the soil. The good thing is reducing flow (with dirt, oil, leaves, etc.) into surface water sources or treatment plants, and reducing the chances of treatment plant overflows that send waste and surface water straight to rivers and oceans. The additionality is water available for reuse to flush toilets or to water plantings, and gardens that contribute to the quality of open space for viewing, programs, or events, and to habitat for bees and birds. "Additionality" supports my mantra that good green work always "does more than one thing". Synergy can take you a long way. 

We all need encouragement as we keep on with the good hard work. The Upcycle gives a good dose, and helps shift us all to a positive outlook of abundance, opportunity, hope and success.

IPI's Guide to Sustainable Preservation Practices: What Every Museum Should Buy Itself for the Holidays

If you're thinking about changing - or learning more about - climate control and energy savings in your collections spaces, then please get yourself IPI's Guide to Sustainable Preservation Practices.

This is a practical what-is and how-to manual that will demystify the discussion on collections climate standards and HVAC systems for your staff, your HVAC vendor, your board, or an MEP engineer unfamiliar with museums. And it's the background you need for your next grant proposal on collections spaces and HVAC systems.

Diagrams explain about how general types of mechanical systems are designed to work in buildings; how air supply is managed, and about "return air"; how humidification works; what data loggers do and how to choose the right location for your environmental monitors; how to document your mechanical system so that you know what you've got - something we all must do and never get to; and how to recognize all sorts of actors on your energy and climate situation: windows, lights, people, air movement, and sunshine.

Understanding how your building works and how that affects your collection could not be made any easier. Here is the Table of Contents:

Section 1: What You Need to Know
1. Basic Elements of the Environment and Their Effect on Material Decay
2. The Factors that Shape the Storage Environment

Section 2: What You Need to Do
3. Document the Current Storage Environment
4. Document Each Storage Facility's Mechanical System
5. Understand the Role of Dew Point
6. Analyze Collected Data

Section 3: Institute Sustainable Preservation Practices
7. Create and Environmental Management Team
8. Specific Activities of the Environmental Management Team
9. Investigate Opportunities for Energy Savings

Section 4: Additional Information
(a bibliography, worksheets, NEH grant opportunities, and IPI products)

I'm using it in my role as sustainability advisor on an NEH Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections planning grant team at Dumbarton House in Washington, DC. It will be a boon to our work there.

So if you want the science behind the move to change the 70/50 T/RH guidelines; you don't understand Dew Point or humidity, really; or you are ready to bring your "collections care and facilities staff together to manage the environment to reach both preservation and energy savings goals", this is a gift to you from IPI and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Surely you have $25 (add shipping) left in your budget to do yourself, your collections, and the long-term sustainability of your institution a huge, huge favor!

 

Headed to AAM's Annual Meeting - High Green Expectations

Each year I wait to see how many others are presenting green topics - I'm conflicted over hoping for many and hoping for few -

Many means we're getting the word out on this important topic, and enough practitioners have enough to say to support multiple presentations.

Few could mean there's too little work going on, too little interest, OR it's too 'normal' for special sessions.

So the truth is that I hope for that last definition of few.  Sadly we are nowhere near that yet.

But I am heartened by what I see on the schedule  - I can't even get to them all!  I"ll report on those I can attend; then post-conference I'll get the CD's of those I miss.  Remember - you too can buy CD's of all these presentations in case you're carbon-reduction plans are keeping you at home!

 Here's what I get to attend:

• Sunday - Climate Change and Collective Action
• Monday - Changing Environmental Standards (on collections care conditions)
• Monday - Green 101 Workshop (presenting)
• Tuesday - Going Green at the Museum
• Wednesday - The Long View - Leadership Decisions for Environmentally-Sustainable Museeum Projects (chair)

Here's hoping there's green magic in the air at AAM this year.