Museums in a Climate of Change: Chatter Marks EP 70 The myth of climate indifference with Miranda Massie of the Climate Museum

Crude Conversations

crudemag

Society & Culture

5 • 884 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2023

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Miranda Massie is the Director and founder of the Climate Museum in New York City. The Climate Museum uses the power of arts and cultural programming to create an ongoing and progressive conversation surrounding the climate crisis. Her institution is committed to inspiring climate activism through art. The work she and her crew does invites people to recognize their own ability to act on climate change. It’s an advocacy museum, she says, where they hope their audience will take action, to consider themselves as climate ambassadors who actively engaged in climate change action. Miranda says that appealing to a rationalist perspective doesn’t work. That’s actually how she found her way to creating the Climate Museum. It was 2012 and Hurricane Sandy was wreaking havoc on New York City. She lives in the city, so she watched as the effects of climate change were brought to her front door. Before that, she had understood climate change on a rational level, but faced with the destruction caused by the hurricane she was compelled — emotionally — by the urgency and the challenges of the climate crisis. So, she made a radical shift, she quit her job as an attorney and created the Climate Museum. Her mission then as it is now, was a deep civic shift toward climate dialogue across people’s personal and professional lives. A ubiquitous understanding and acceptance of the crisis that will lead to meaningful climate policy. In this Chatter Marks series, Cody and co-host Dr. Sandro Debono talk to museum directors and knowledge holders about what museums around the world are doing to adapt and react to climate change. Dr. Debono is a museum thinker from the Mediterranean island of Malta. He works with museums to help them strategize around possible futures.

Transcript

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0:18.2	All of it felt like it was swamped by the urgency and the challenges of the climate crisis and though I had known that intellectually for a while, again, the distinction
0:23.2	between what we know rationally and what we feel emotionally
0:26.2	ready for, it really took Hurricane Sandy
0:31.2	to push me definitively in that direction.
0:33.4	And then it was only a couple weeks after that for a variety of other reasons I was
0:38.4	looking for a next for a next big thing to throw myself at I knew it was going to have to be something about climate.
0:47.0	And the idea for a climate museum slid so thoroughly and fully formed into my mind that I 100% assumed that I had read about a
0:57.0	climate museum somewhere and that my next big thing would be to go help whoever was doing it and I was astounded to
1:05.7	discover that we would be the first in the US. That was Miranda Massey. She's the director and founder of the Climate Museum in New York City.
1:17.0	The Climate Museum uses the power of arts and cultural programming
1:22.0	to create an ongoing and progressive conversation surrounding the climate crisis.
1:28.0	Her institution is committed to inspiring climate activism through art.
1:32.0	The work she and her crew does invites people to
1:35.5	recognize their own ability to act on climate change. It's an advocacy museum, she
1:41.6	says, where they hope their audience will take action,
1:44.9	to consider themselves as climate ambassadors who actively engage in climate change action.
1:52.2	Miranda says that appealing to a rationalist perspective doesn't work.
1:57.2	That's actually how she found her way to creating the climate museum. It was 2012 and Hurricane Sandy was wreaking havoc on New York City.
2:06.3	She lives in the city, so she watched as the effects of climate change were brought to her
2:11.1	front door. Before that, she had understood climate change on a rational level,
2:17.0	but faced with the destruction caused by the hurricane, she was compelled emotionally by the urgency and the challenges of the climate crisis.
2:27.1	So she made a radical shift. She quit her job as an attorney and created the climate museum.
	...

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