Time to mend: rewilding museums

ABSTRACT

This is an account of an enquiry by Climate Museum UK (CMUK) into the potential of rewilding museums towards systemic repair. Rewilding is a progressive approach to conservation enabling natural processes to reshape places. To rewild museums bears the implication that museums must rewild themselves if they are to be agents for rewilding of the Earth. This might mean undertaking mission-altering work for community wellbeing, or addressing legacies of biocolonialism. We used this enquiry into rewilding to inform our evolution as a new activist museum, generating a vision to become more distributed. Inspired by the mutual exchanges of mycorrhizal fungi with plants, our members issue spores of regenerative change by carrying out “activations” in their communities across the UK. This piece applies theories about rewilding to museums, illustrating them with some of CMUK’s activations, including The Wild Museum, an experience led by animal curators, and Acts of Tree Kindness.

KEYWORDS:

• Rewilding
• distributed
• planet-kind
• Possitopian
• reparative
• regeneration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 About our Stories of Extraction enquiry https://medium.com/stories-of-extraction

2 About our Everyday Ecocide enquiry https://medium.com/stories-of-extraction/collecting-everyday-ecocide-cbf6d8f8b5a3

3 About our Extreme Weather Stories collection https://medium.com/extreme-weather-stories

4 We declared as active founding members of Culture Declares Emergency https://www.culturedeclares.org/

5 United for Biodiversity coalition https://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/biodiversity/coalition/index_en.htm

6 Olivia Sprinkel compares the Eden Project managed as a tourist destination to a parcel of Costa Rica jungle fenced off for 20 years: “Thirty years ago, it was degraded farmland. It was then bought by the former owner who said, “I want the birds to shit it back to life” and fenced off the 10,000 acres for 20 years. The birds did their job and the land is now burgeoning with diverse plant and animal life, including ocelots, puma and jaguars. And what was once an arid region, with people fighting over water rights, now has four rivers running through it, 365 days a year. The local people also now have the opportunity to create livelihoods in the rainforest, growing cacao in the shade of the trees.” (Sprinkel, 2021)

7 About the Culture Takes Action framework https://bridgetmck.medium.com/culture-takes-action-framework-29e8dfaaba24

8 An account of our prize application https://climatemuseumuk.org/2021/05/24/a-wilder-museum/

9 About the Ant-ic Museum project by Feral Practice at Scarborough Museums https://www.discoveryorkshirecoast.com/discover/whats-on/feral-practice-the-ant-ic-museum-p1492281

10 Timber Festival website https://timberfestival.org.uk/

11 Urban Tree Festival website https://urbantreefestival.org/

12 Trees on Film selection https://treesonfilm.wordpress.com/

13 About Acts of River Kindness project https://climatemuseumuk.org/2021/04/06/acts-of-river-kindness/

14 Queer River project by James Aldridge https://queerriver.com/about-the-project/

15 The Beaver Trust website https://beavertrust.org/

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bridget McKenzie

Bridget McKenzie is a creative curator and consultant dedicated to Regenerative Culture as the force of hope in the face of the Earth crisis. She braids creative practice and audience research together in projects to help communities and cultural organisations grasp the dimensions of this crisis, find their flow and to change the world. Her past experience includes managing learning services at Tate and the British Library in London, and delivering a wealth of audience research projects as director of Flow Associates since 2006. In 2018, she set up Climate Museum UK and co-founded Culture Declares Emergency – a sector community declaring and acting on the Earth crisis.