Are Museums the Perfect Climate Change Education Tool?
- 2015-10-06
- Nautilus
When Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of the New York and New Jersey coastlines, in October 2012, the looming threat of climate change abruptly became personal for a large portion of the East Coast—specifically Miranda Massie, a former public-interest lawyer. Seeing her city wasted, she realized that there was nowhere for the public to assemble and discuss what their future on a warming planet might look like.
So, she started the Climate Museum Launch Project, with the goal of building an education hub to, as its website states, “move climate awareness to the center of public life.” If the Climate Museum Launch Project secures funding, New York City would become home to the world’s largest, most ambitious climate-change museum. And it would be the first in the US dedicated to tackling a challenge all science museums face: how to represent changing and politicized science.
But how does a museum, something that by its very nature enshrines ideas of the past and present, become a forum for talking about the future?
That science museums could be effective at promoting conversations about climate isn’t just a groundless hope. According to a 2010 survey by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, 73 percent of science-museum visitors said they would like to learn more about climate change, and that they trusted museums and other non-academic science institutions more than other sources of information. The same survey found that, while Americans lack a broad understanding of climate change, museum visitors were generally better informed about it than non-visitors.