Bridget McKenzie is the founder of the Climate Museum UK, a venture that brings together creative practitioners to work with their communities on responses to the environmental crisis. It is one of a number of projects that Bridget is involved with, putting environmental issues squarely in the cultural arena. Bridget will be speaking at this year’s CILIPS Conference, and here she tells Rob Green why cultural activity is so important in the fight to save the planet.

As well as recently setting up the Climate Museum UK, Bridget McKenzie has been active in a world that crosses culture, environment and education for over a decade.

Alongside her role with the Cultural Museum UK, she is a researcher and curative curator in culture, learning and environment; a director of Flow Associates; and works with Culture Unstained, Culture Declares Emergency and Museums for the Future.

The intersection between culture, environment and learning is clearly an area where Bridget sees the potential for positive change. She explains that Climate Museum UK is an extension of that experience and a deep-seated need to encourage every sector to play their part.

She says: “I founded the concept of Climate Museum UK in 2018, after 12 years or so running many creative climate projects and making calls to the cultural sector to face the Earth crisis. I wanted to feel less lonely, and to form a crew with whom to navigate and prototype a museum that would respond to — and evolve with — this worsening crisis.

“At first, I hosted several prototyping workshops which grew a community of interested people, and we registered in the UK as a Community Interest Company (CIC) in December 2019. Our group is formed of independent artists and communicators, currently based in the South East of England but with ambitions to expand our reach across the UK.”

Mission, Vision, Values

Climate Museum UK’s goals help to underpin the role it plays in bringing together voices and people with a shared mission.

Climate Museum UK’s goals help to underpin the role it plays in bringing together voices and people with a shared mission.

Mission: we are a mobile and digital museum, stirring and collecting responses to the Earth crisis. We use artistic approaches and objects to help people talk about this crisis, explore it in relation to emotions, places and histories, and to open imaginations to solutions.

Vision: to become a resilient distributed organisation, a catalyst for radical system change, seeding regenerative culture everywhere and online, with partners and members running activations across the UK and beyond.

Values: holistic and ecocentric worldview; compassionate, participatory and intersectional with people; ‘possitopian’, not utopian or dystopian; planet-kind in our practice; non-hierarchical in our team structure.

Bridget wants to encourage more people to consider how they can take action – making a stand in a way that is both comfortable and meaningful. She says: “Climate Museum UK is an experiment in what can be achieved with almost no resources – no building, no collecting budget, mostly just ideas and people.

“I think that a lot is possible if you pledge together to take meaningful action and keep holding each other to account. This might mean pledging to invite many voices, to tell truths and to be a platform for science communication. It might mean pledging to be the best model possible for de-carbonising your work and building. It might mean pledging to see your service users as communities of need, who need support to cope and to be more resilient as food prices rise, as pandemics affect them or as climate impacts hit.

“You can’t do everything but facing the reality of the climate and ecological emergency is the first big step.”

Adapt to fit

Taking that first step and then following up by supporting others and being supported is crucial, and Bridget wants the Climate Museum UK to inspire all three of those actions – delivering a sustained and sustainable model that can be replicated and repeated.

Building networks of support is a clear goal – not just in one sector. Again, finding one model that works and adapting to fit offers a simple and effective route. Bridget’s association with the likes of Culture Unstained, Culture Declares Emergency and Museums for the Future demonstrates how cultural activity can start to deliver positive change.

Culture Unstained highlights and campaigns against fossil fuel company sponsorship of the arts. It raises concerns about “arts washing”, where big oil companies associate their brand with galleries, exhibitions and museums.

Museums for the Future hopes to “envision a world in which every museum is climate-conscious and a bold advocate of the Paris Agreement, drawing on their rich cultural capital and storytelling expertise to engage their audiences and communities with relevant and compelling messages that drive positive change to prevent ecological breakdown and secure a sustainable, equitable and culturally diverse future for all.”

And Culture Declares Emergency offers the opportunity for institutions and individuals that show support for environmental action. It provides a kitemark for those who declare “climate and ecological emergency”, and calls for all those committed to the cause to tell the truth, take action and seek justice.

Libraries matter

Bridget says that while these initiatives look to be an influence in the traditional arts and cultural sector, there is scope to expand. She looks at public libraries, which enjoy a privileged position on high streets up and down the country, and points to the power they could harness.

She says: “Libraries matter because they’re present and ‘everyday’. While hyperlocal they’re also well networked to local governments and academic institutions and to the library profession as a whole. It would be great to see the emergence of a group called Libraries Declare to join the ‘ecology of declarers’ forming alongside Culture Declares Emergency.”

Already libraries show how the ‘circular economy’ can work. Sharing items that may only be used occasionally or once, means less of the earth’s resources are used in their creation. The Circular economy is a concept that tries to move a way from an economic model that is centred on ‘take-make-waste’ as a means of growth. Instead there is a vision that the economy can be built on a model of re-use, reparability and recycling. Already there is some movement towards this through the ‘library of things’ movement, which sees expensive and rarely used items such as tools being made available for loans.

Bridget says these ideas fit neatly with positive environmental action, saying: “I’d also love to see libraries being places for the commons of things, of tech equipment, or plants plus plant knowledge, or places to meet people who have ideas for ecological change.”

Again, this notion of libraries as meeting places and spaces to share ideas is gathering momentum. The library as the “Third Space” already provides access to physical and intellectual resources in buildings that are adaptable and conducive to collaboration. Increasingly library spaces can be created in ways that suit the needs of the local community, and community-driven action will shape how spaces are used.

Bridget believes that individuals and community will be the power behind change, saying: “The message of hope is YOU! You have to choose a side – either you are for continuing biodiverse life on this amazing planet, or you are for letting it be destroyed. This sounds a harsh choice that I am putting to you but it’s the breached boundaries of the planet’s operating system that are giving you this choice. There is the adage that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, the second best time is today. It has been too late for many already traumatically impacted by anthropogenic global warming over the past 50 years, but it’s not too late to help future generations.”

Fragile system

And while Bridget says there is still hope, she points to the huge impact of Covid-19 as a reminder that the need for action is constant. Global pandemics have been warned about for years, with many of those warnings linked to the effects humans are having on the natural world. Bridget says: “Covid-19 itself is a big loud message about what we’ve been doing to the environment. It’s a result of deforestation, encroachment on animal habitats and an unsustainable food system. It’s also worsened by air pollution and flight-based tourism. (See more about our enquiry into this here).

“I think it’s making people more receptive to messages about the value of science, and more aware of how fragile our economic system is. We have to tap into this, provide people with the resources to learn more and take meaningful action to tackle the extractive, exploitative systems that make us unhealthy, unequal, and anxious about our futures. The danger is in how media can be dominated by powerful voices such as polluters who want continued licence to operate, more state subsidies and less regulations.”

So how do we get involved? How can we make a change? Bridget says that there are no simple answers, but instead urges us to look at paths we can take to minimise our impact. She says: “Rather than three top tips I’d suggest three pathways to action on which you have to decide what are your first steps. All three pathways need to be taken, but you can start on one to reach the others.

“One, radical de-carbonisation. The UK plan to de-carbonise is too slow, so civic organisations and businesses have to lead the way. Two, go regenerative. Look at how you can generate more biodiversity and energy in positive, self-sustaining ways that solve multiple problems. Three, adaptation. The impacts of the climate and ecological emergency are here and worsening, so how can your own organisation and communities cope with these changes? “What do they need to learn? What resources might be unavailable in future? How might you need to adapt your building?”

Bridget will be speaking at CILIPS Annual Conference, which takes place online on 7 and 8 June. Places can be booked by visiting www.cilips.org.uk/about/cilips-annual-conference-2021.