By Daniel Rigney
An Open Letter to the Houston Museum of Natural Science:
Our city is justly proud of its museums, and the Museum of Natural Science is certainly one of our finest. This year I’ve visited your exhibit halls three times, hoping each time to educate myself further as a concerned citizen about the looming issues of global warming and climate change.
On each visit I’ve been delighted to find clear and informative displays on topics ranging from astronomy to zoology. Yet for some reason I can’t seem to find the museum’s climate science section.
Today, well into the second decade of the 21st century, it’s hard to believe that a leading science museum could still be keeping its public in the dark about what may be the most urgent scientific issue of our time.
Since moving to Houston three years ago, I’ve noticed that scientifically-informed public discussions of greenhouse gas emissions, global warming, and climate change rarely rise to the surface in this city, arguably the carbon capital of the world.
I’m wondering why this might be. Are local ‘energy’ (hydrocarbon) companies using their financial clout to muffle or muzzle public discourse on the relation between carbon fuels and climate change?
Does short-term profit and the Growth of the Houston Economy (GHE) always take precedence over the long-term economic and ecological health of the world we leave to future generations?
I notice that local media seem reluctant to address climate change issues head-on. Yet they run frequent guest editorials written (or ghosted) by carbon industry executives and lobbyists, presenting industry-serving talking points while downplaying the overwhelming consensus of non-industry climatologists that climate change is real, generated by human activity, and hazardous to posterity.
Meanwhile, I note this week that an environmental science textbook recommended for use in Texas schools is under scrutiny by oil and gas interests for its unwanted treatment of climate issues. Are we permitted, in this region, to acknowledge and speak frankly about the relationship between CO2 emissions and climate? Or is this the Houston Taboo -- our dinosaur in the living room?
My hope is that Houston’s Museum of Natural Science will do its part to open up this inevitable conversation, at a time when the world’s CO2 number (parts per million dry air) has crossed 400 ppm and continues upward.
As a start, the museum could mount special exhibits and programs on climate change that draw upon scholarly and financial resources other than those from within the carbon industry itself.
Other major science museums in the United States and around the world, including New York’s American Museum of Natural History and Chicago’s Field Museum, have already risen to meet their public responsibilities in this regard by establishing major climate science exhibits and programs.
Yet when I walk through the halls of our own museum in search of pertinent information and insight, I find only a drib here and a drab there. Where is the integration of these few isolated facts, and hundreds of other missing ones, into a more coherent and comprehensive picture?
The museum’s Wiess Energy Hall devotes perhaps two percent of its floorspace (and one touchscreen presentation) to “alternative” (or renewable) energy sources such as solar and wind power, while most of its remaining space is given over to oil and gas. The paleontology exhibit notes in passing that global cooling contributed to several past mass extinctions (e.g, near the end of the Permian period), but has nothing at all to say about global warming or climate change in our own time.
Even the Earth Forum downstairs, with its cool wave machine and its fascinating bathymetric globe, is mute on the subject of carbon and climate.
In short, museum space devoted to the potentially disastrous impact of carbon fuels (including marginally cleaner natural gas) on world climate is at or near zero. Or did I miss something? I'd be happy to go back and look again, and urge others to do so as well.
I notice the museum’s current exhibits on energy are funded proudly by the likes of Exxon Mobil, Saudi Aramco, British Petroleum, and the usual others. Confidentially, is the museum under some sort of gag order from its donors to suppress inevitable scientific questions and inconvenient answers pertaining to the environmental impact of fossil fuels?
What I propose is not just the mounting of a modest and ephemeral exhibit on carbon fuels and global warming. I propose that the museum build an entire new wing dedicated to climate issues. Big Carbon has already given ‘generously’ to the construction of current energy exhibits. (See photo above for this year's honor roll.) Maybe the museum could approach Big Sun and Big Wind to fund the wing of the future, if and when these industries grow to rival the wealth of the oiligarchy.
In the meantime, I hope Houston’s Museum Natural Science will rise to meet Big Nature’s oncoming and inexorable challenge, and not keep us in the dark any longer on issues that will only grow more urgent and expensive to address as time goes on.
If concerned climate scientists are right about the need for an urgent transition to a renewable, sustainable world economy, then neither the museum nor the city of Houston will be able to live in climate denial much longer. Reality will bite.
I wish the museum well as it faces the hard institutional and ethical choices that lie ahead, and I look forward to returning often in the coming years to see how the museum is evolving in response to its changing environment.
Sincerely,
Daniel Rigney
originally posted in Danagram
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