climate change – American Alliance of Museums

Climate Action Heroes: How National Children’s Museum Is Empowering the Next Generation of Climate Innovators

By Meredith Hamme & Paige Childs

African American students walking out of school to march for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Eight-year-old activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins climbing out of her wheelchair and up the steps of the US Capitol to support the …
Historic Houses in the Shifting Landscape of Climate Change

By Jenny Dyer

In combating climate change, we can look to Indigenous and historic practices for models of sustainable architectural solutions to extreme heat, cold, and humidity. Structures built in societies or eras without electrically powered air …
How Museum Educators Are Using Strategic Foresight to Address Climate Change

By Mickey Maley and Daryl Jorgenson

In this series of posts, EdCom’s Trends Committee is taking a deeper look at emerging phenomena identified in the 2021 edition of TrendsWatch from the Center for the Future of Museums. In this post, they explore examples of how museums …
Opportunity! Dedicated funding for museums taking climate action

By Elizabeth Merritt

As I note in this year’s TrendsWatch, this is truly a “syndemic” year. We face multiple crises that, left unchecked, will interact to make each other worse. For example, the pandemic-induced financial crisis will make it more difficult for …
How the Anchorage Museum is Telling the Story of Climate Change

By Julie Decker

As the world faces the unprecedented in climate crisis and pandemics, museums are more important than ever for facilitating essential human connection and meaning-making. As a result of these crises, human lifeways and ecosystems will be …
Earth Day during COVID-19: Green Tips for Closed Museums

By Joyce S. Lee

In 2020, Earth Day falls during a time when much of the coronavirus-stricken world is staying at home. Every part of the global community is impacted, and museums have been hit particularly hard. Meanwhile, we find ourselves living in a …
Decolonizing the Future: museums as agents of generational equity

By Elizabeth Merritt

“We treat the future like a distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradation, technological risk, nuclear waste and public debt, and that we feel at liberty to plunder as we please.” –Roman …
Is the future of museums, museums from the future?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Readers of this blog know I collect exhibits that explore imaginary futures, especially when these explorations inspire people to take action today. In today’s post, Ludwig Bengtsson Sonesson, Project Leader and Communications Officer at …
Monday Musing: Managed Retreat

By Elizabeth Merritt

Did you know that over a third (34.6 percent) of US museums sit are within 100 kilometers of the coast? A quarter of those are in areas that score very high on the Coastal Vulnerability Index, meaning they face high risk from rising sea …
Curator as Catalyst: How an interdisciplinary fellowship inspired “a new way of doing museum”

By Dr. Edith Doron

A few years ago, I had the unique opportunity to work across four fiercely independent and starkly different museums in the fine arts, sciences, and natural history. After being awarded ACLS Public Fellow with the Carnegie Museums of …