Industry | 2009.09.21
We need a monument to Earth | Leo Hickman
The Darwin Centre is a fine idea, but what we really need is a museum of the environment
On Tuesday the new Darwin Centre opens at the Natural History Museum in London. About 3,000 visitors a day will be able to take a tour of the £78m, eight-storey building and inspect the 17m insects and 3m plant specimens on show. The most exciting prospect, though, is that 200 working scientists will be "on display" too. The Darwin Centre is an inspired and much needed attempt to bring the public closer to science and, in particular, to those who explore the boundaries of our scientific knowledge. I hope to be among those queueing for an early ticket.
But while I applaud the museum\'s efforts to raise awareness of the work of scientists, particularly those studying the ever rising number of endangered insects, the opening of the centre also serves as a reminder that nowhere on the planet can you yet queue up to enter a major institutional museum solely dedicated to the environment. Considering that our understanding of the biosphere and, crucially, our increasingly troubled existence within it is now regularly billed as humanity\'s most pressing concern, it seems somewhat perverse that the foundation stone for a museum of the environment, for want of a better name, has yet to be laid in any of the world\'s great cities.
London, for example, is among the most visited cities in the world, and boasts some of the greatest museums of all – Tate Modern, the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery and the V&A, to name a few. But if you want to stretch your understanding of our own species\' problematic relationship with the natural environment, you currently cannot do so under one roof. Instead, you need to perform a somewhat disjointed and inconvenient dance across London. You could start at the Natural History Museum and marvel at how the natural world has evolved over the millennia before you cross over to the Science Museum next door to take a tour of its "Fuelling the Future" gallery. You might then head to the Museum of London for some timely reminders that there were times in the not too distant past when the capital\'s environment was in a truly shocking state. London did, until recently, also host a Museum of Mankind in Piccadilly, which offered all manner of anthropological insights, but this collection has now been subsumed back into the British Museum .
But surely there is now a compelling and pressing need to bring all these important strands together – in addition to many others, such as, say, the history of environmentalism, and the rise (and fall?) of the western lifestyle – and offer them at a single-site educational visitor attraction. There is ample room in our cultural landscape for such an institution. In fact, there\'s a strong argument to say we urgently need just such a focal point to remind us of the task ahead.
Many institutions around the world are documenting certain storylines – a year-long exhibition entitled Climate Change: The Threat to Life and a New Energy Future has just come to an end at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, for example – but not one has this important task as its mission statement. We need somewhere that documents the impact that industrial-scale food production is having on the environment; we need somewhere that records the implications of an exponentially rising global population; we need somewhere that records the lives and achievements of the great environmental visionaries, campaigners and pioneers, ranging from John Muir and Henry Thoreau right up to Rachel Carson and Wangari Maathai ; we need somewhere that charts our slow awakening to the implications of climate change; and we need somewhere that never lets us forget some of the world\'s worst environmental disasters and follies, such as Bhopal , Exxon Valdez , Chernobyl , and the ongoing destruction of our rainforests.
Perhaps a bricks-and-mortar museum is not the required route. Maybe we need an extensive online museum dedicated to this subject, built and maintained by a coalition of institutions and benefactors across the world, so that people, wherever they are located, can benefit from its resources and scholarship. After all, encouraging people to fly to, say, London, New York or Tokyo to visit such a museum wouldn\'t exactly chime with its core message. Or maybe a global franchise should be launched, so that like-minded institutions are constructed across the world in the way that we now have an international network of Guggenheims .
We live in an age where our interaction with the world around us is both fraught and volatile. We need all the tools we can muster to teach and inspire us. As Charles Darwin himself once said: "It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]rwin-centre-environment-museum
