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31 Displaying the Anthropocene in and Beyond Museums

Libby Robin, Dag Avango, Luke Keogh, Nina Möllers and Helmuth Trischler

As global warming and climate change affect communities in different ways, museums become places for personal reflection on the future of the planet. The public is thirsty for clear information and nuanced discussions on environmental change at both local and global scales, but there are few opportunities for serious conversations about these issues that include diverse audiences. Museums focus on the material world: objects, artworks and historical collections. Such materiality can be helpful in environmental discussions, which are often abstract and filled with modeling that is beyond the mathematical literacy of the general public. Objects speak directly to people of all ages.1

This chapter explores some of the ways museums have engaged with the ideas of the Anthropocene and how the display of objects and cultural heritage can help foster conversations in times of rapid environmental change. The way the planet works is often explained through complex science and technical language. The “fast and furious” commercial media that Christensen and Wormbs explored in the previous chapter, snatch simplistic sound bites and images from all over the globe without context. Through museums of all sorts, it is possible to sponsor a “third way,” something neither too technical nor too simplistic, which is suitable for the interested general public. The exhibition is a form of slow media; and the museum can be a secular cathedral or forum for thoughtful reflection.2

By analogy with the slow food movement, the slow medium of a museum gallery offers room to explore the complexities of a rapidly changing world on a personal scale. The very pace of a museum visit and the process of engaging with physical objects and artwork is itself helpful in coping with the stress of accelerating change in the twenty-first century, a “no analogue” time, when we have moved beyond the conditions of the Holocene, the geological epoch of the last 10,000 years.3 Change has become so widespread that a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, has been proposed.4 Time spent with well-chosen displays, perhaps enhanced by casual companionship with other visitors in that gallery space, can give people room to respond to a spectacle where they can “reshape media content as they personalize it for their own use.”5

The big narrative of the Anthropocene is that human activities are shaping the way the planet works. The geological concept held immediate appeal for global change scientists more broadly: oceanographers, glaciologists, environmental physicists, soil scientists and earth scientists were all discovering patterns of unprecedented change in their respective long-term data sets.6 The metaphor of the Anthropocene has also proved attractive to artists and humanists, who explore how people respond emotionally to our changing Earth.7

There are debates about when the Anthropocene began: was it the agricultural revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the atomic bomb or even the Stone Age that made humans a planetary force that can be read in the rocks in the deep future?8

Whichever origin story they prefer, most proponents agree that there has been an acceleration of change from the 1950s onwards, the “Great Acceleration,” called by some the “second stage” of the Anthropocene. The 1950s may even be designated the “first stage” by the International Stratigraphic Commission, as they need to identify material change in the lithosphere (rocks) to mark and adopt formally a new stratigraphic epoch.9 Such change may be provided by the nuclear signatures in soils and sediments from the Atomic Age around 1950.

Museums are also concerned with the material world: they have collections and galleries that explore the meaning of objects. This chapter explores some possibilities for using a museum context to help understand and critique the ideas put forward as the Anthropocene. A museum gallery offers audiences concrete ways to think about this concept, which is abstract in both space and time. In the exhibitions and displays documented here, the Anthropocene idea has moved

beyond stratigraphy and natural science, and considers the moral and ethical context for global dynamic change.

We first consider the 2014–2016 exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands” [Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde] hosted by the Deutsches Museum in Munich, a traditional science and technology museum, the first major exhibition on this subject in the world. Then we turn to the north and consider the Anthropocene as a whole landscape spectacle of in situ industrial heritage in Svalbard. This is not so much an exhibition but a place that has been transformed slowly over a century or more and is now an attraction for climate-change science and heritage tourism. Here the objects of a hybridized local landscape promote reflections on the Anthropocene, a quasi-museum, but also a tourist site because of the changing sensibilities of our times.

A museum for the Anthropocene?

Figure 31.1 Installing the Welcome to the Anthropocene exhibition. (top left) Placing the “robot” in the

Humans and Machines exhibit. (top right) Curating the crochet coral reef, Evolution. (bottom left) Lining up

the dogs, Evolution. (bottom right) Calligrapher creating the wall. Deutsches Museum, 2014. Photos: Axel

Griesch. See Plate 37.

How did the Deutsches Museum in Munich become the host for the first large- scale special exhibition solely dedicated to the Anthropocene? Of primary importance were the objects and collections of the world’s largest science and technology museum, which provided suitable real display items for explaining the technical and scientific dimensions of climate change and other biophysical changes at the end of the Holocene. It harbours technical measuring devices that can measure in nanoseconds and in eons, and at micro and macro-scales in air, water and earth. But a good exhibition also needs stories and a human touch, and here its important partnership with the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC), an international research center of environment and society came into play.10 The scholarly partnership between the RCC and the Deutsches Museum proved a way to deliver research stories to diverse public audiences.

The Deutsches Museum was founded to promote the principles of science and engineering in the early twentieth century. German engineers sought social acknowledgment for their creativity and innovation, reinforcing their role in steering and planning a new modern society.11 It opened permanent galleries on

“Museum Island” (by quirk, formerly “Coal Island’) in the Isar River in central Munich in 1925. Its galleries presented progressive histories of scientific and technological development, starting with older, simpler versions and ending with the newest and most “advanced” technology. The successive lines of objects in the exhibitions reinforced a message of linear advancement, the progressive view typical of engineering at that time. The museum drew on traditional basic sciences and industry support. Exhibitions ranged from large engineering installations and stories of transportation to the innovative design in household appliances. Neither the environment nor the social context of the new technologies was included in such exhibits. Nature was not a subject of its inquiry or display.

Over the century, the Deutsches Museum has “greened” and now includes a range of exhibitions and collections including those that engage with environmental issues and other aspects of technology in society. In 1992, the year of the United Nations Conference on the Environment at Rio, the Deutsches Museum opened a gallery Environment [Umwelt]. Following the museum’s original mission to trace “development,” the new notion of sustainable development inspired a gallery that took in very different ideas, including population growth, fossil-fuel use, the hole in the ozone layer, recycling, and water and air pollution. In general, this exhibition relied not so much on the objects of the collections of the history of technology, but on models, texts and images for its storylines. The environment was framed as a story of decline with technical innovations offering alternative pathways towards a more sustainable future.

Each of the themes in Environment was presented through objects, images, text and media installations that conveyed a message that through harnessing technology, humans have caused problems, but also that new and emerging technologies might offer solutions. By making causation the focus, instruments used to analyse and measure the environment became its objects. The exhibition was otherwise carried by images and text, which was reworked in 1998 and moved to a different place within the museum, but the basic storyline reflected the museum’s approach to the environment. Environment still stands at the time of writing (2015).

Triggered by scientific findings and public discussion on climate change

resulting particularly from the IPCC reports, the Deutsches Museum presented a special exhibition on Climate: The Experiment with the Planet Earth in 2002. This dealt mostly with the scientific background on climate change. Sub-themes included worldwide networks for measuring and gathering data, meteorology, historical technological ideas for influencing climate and natural catastrophes resulting from climate change. The exhibition also included a historical review of human reactions to climate variability in the past and present. The underlying idea was that nature and technology could no longer be viewed separately, but were inter-dependent:

Weather and climate, one might think, are not suitable topics for a museum of technology, as they concern nature. … Nature and culture, however, may no longer to be neatly separated from each other, which is why the prominent symbol of technological culture, the steam engine, is chosen as the opening

of this climate exhibition in the museum of technology.12

A new philosophy for Welcome to the Anthropocene

Climate change, more than any other issue before it, brought into sharp focus the ability of the human species to influence planetary systems as a whole, but this is only one of many anthropogenic changes affecting the Earth’s systems in the twenty-first century. As well as the carbon cycle, humans have significantly altered the nitrogen, phosphorous and sulfur cycles, changing sediment movement and water vapor flow from land to atmosphere (through land-cover change). There has been a Great Acceleration of global changes, both physical and social, since around 1950.13 For example, population, wealth and energy usage have all risen exponentially in this period. Financial and business institutions have become globalized, and so have people, who move faster and more often around the world. Some say that humanity is driving the sixth major extinction event in Earth’s history.14

Humanities scholars have cautioned that an overarching concept such as Anthropocene, with its scientific basis, lacks cultural diversity and might even reinforce regimes of power and capital that have brought us to this point. The Deutsches Museum recognized that cultural diversity provides an important creative friction in a globalized world and that a museum was well positioned to

display this.15 The museum exhibition constantly critiqued the “we”: might a species-level understanding of humanity downplay the challenges of environmental justice, where the fossil-fuel-prints of the few drive adverse changes for the many?16 Finding material representation for unequal consumption patterns and the distribution of resources and wealth was by no means easy, but was a priority for the exhibition team.

Figure 31.2 Three dimensions of the Welcome to the Anthropocene exhibition. (top to bottom) Artistic

interpretation: Victor Sonna’s recycled art bike “Guernica,” Cities exhibit. Publications: Catalogue and

graphic novel, with curators Nina Möllers and Helmuth Trischler. Participation: Field of Daisies, 2014.

Deutsches Museum. Photos: Axel Griesch. See Plate 38.

Accepting that humans have fundamentally altered the way natural systems work and have shaped global climate change closes the bifurcation between the natural and the cultural: in the Anthropocene natural and cultural systems are interdependent. As chemists Will Steffen and Paul Crutzen and historian John McNeill noted: “Humanity is, in one way or another, becoming a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system.”17 This new period also reshapes our understanding of humanity, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty notes: “To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human.”18

Drawing on insights from a wide range of scholarly disciplines, the members of the Deutsches Museum exhibition team decided to use the concept of an “usworld” (translated from the German Unswelt) advocated by the geologist Reinhold Leinfelder.19 Such a notion of “us” makes it difficult to separate nature and culture, and forces thinking with a hybrid nature-culture world. An usworld challenges how we know ourselves. Although as a species we have become a geological force, as individuals we are pro-active actors on this stage. The

Anthropocene is not just about irreversible environmental changes, it is also a historical phenomenon. Anthropocene changes have accelerated over a period that showcases many of the great innovations and thinking about human freedom. The usworld approach blends nature, culture, technology and society into a single hybridized perspective, an Anthropocene imaginary, compatible with the original mission of the Deutsches Museum and also with the expectations of its twenty-first century visitors.

As literary theorist Sabine Wilke has argued, a critical Anthropocene approach must engage with frameworks and insights from postcolonial theory and environmental justice and continuously expose the ideological underpinnings of the Anthropocene narrative as it develops.20 Just as surely as “data” are added from the physical sciences, insights about meaning, value, responsibility and purpose structure this new epoch.21 The geological time depth of the Anthropocene can provoke new scales for imagining the material conditions of human life: it brings Big History to this history museum.22 Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse work with a group of artists and scholars to explore the geologic in contemporary life, unpacking the “geological turn” and human responses to it. Inspired by the work of Jane Bennett, they use materiality – the Earth’s surface itself – to:

recalibrate infrastructures, communities, and imaginations to a new scale – the scale of deep time, force, and materiality. …[W]e are not simply “surrounded” by the geologic. We do not simply observe it as a

landscape or panorama. We inhabit the geologic.23

Since we inhabit the geologic, then the gallery of the Anthropocene aspires to place people in their own strata.

Practicalities

Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands,24 opened to the public on 5 December 2014. It displays the effects of humanity as a biological and geological actor and the extent of planetary changes in the three-dimensional space of a gallery, so that the visitor actually experiences the Anthropocene, while learning about the current state of scientific knowledge and debate. The

Anthropocene here is a complex and often ambivalent story of destruction and re-shaping, threaded through feedback loops; nature and culture is an integrated and hybrid system. Practical examples include an installation about the spread of invasive species and how they remake ecosystems, and an experiential section that deliberately disrupts preconceived ideas about what constitutes “nature.”

The curators instigated an internal survey to find out what their audience already knew about the Anthropocene, and to get a sense of how to “pitch” the text-based panels. They drew on the views of over 100 patrons in a two-month period in late 2012. While 80 percent of those interviewed supported the idea that the museum should engage with “controversial topics,” an even greater number (86 percent) had not previously heard of the Anthropocene. Many were interested in the environment, and saw the impacts of industry as bad for the environment; almost half of the patrons said that industry could not solve environmental problems.25

Informed by the survey, the curators “pitched” the Anthropocene as a holistic, systemic, and reflective concept, enabling the inclusion of a range of global-scale environmental problems in an open-ended format that enabled visitors to engage actively. The Anthropocene brands the exhibition and also frames the responses of the visitors.

The exhibition covers 1,450 square meters (ca. 15,600 square feet) and is structured in three parts. The first section provides a comprehensive introduction into the Anthropocene both as a geological hypothesis and new conceptual framework. The introduction includes a range of technological objects that highlight the eras of industrialization (from the late 1800s, building on Paul Crutzen’s narrative of the origins of the Anthropocene) and the Great Acceleration from the 1950s. The second part of the exhibition consists of six thematic areas, islands that are jig-saw fragments of a whole, which present selected phenomena of the Anthropocene. They explore systemic connections, global and local interdependencies, and temporal dimensions. The themes covered are urbanization, mobility, nutrition, evolution, human-machine interaction and “nature.” Connecting these themes is a geological layer of materiality that embeds visitors in the strata of their creation. The third and final part of the exhibition discusses the future in the Anthropocene. It looks at past visions of the future, emphasizing their transformative potential while

simultaneously highlighting their fragility and ambivalence. It then discusses possible scenarios of the future for people to consider in a more relaxing space; the final installation invites people to listen to possible scenarios and to plant their own possible scenario in an evolving field of paper daisies (Figure 31.2). Thus, each individual visitor has the opportunity to offer a personal reflection on their aspirations for the Anthropocene.

As an epoch, the Anthropocene encompasses the entire globe throughout Earth history. As a new epoch and a philosophical framework, it weaves connections between many disparate phenomena, often previously unconnected. The challenge for a museum is to research, shape and represent the Anthropocene epoch even as it unfolds. While exhibitions are always selective representations of specific interpretations of our world, the uncertainty that surrounds the Anthropocene challenges traditional perceptions of museums as authorities and mediators of knowledge, and demands space for raising questions and reflecting on uncertainty. Museums of science and technology, like the Deutsches Museum, can no longer represent themselves as mere purveyors of authentic knowledge. Welcome to the Anthropocene created a space – literally and figuratively – for free thinking, discussion and imagining a new concept, drawing on abstract and academic ideas and creating ways for the public to participate.

Traditional museum objects were not easy to incorporate in such an exhibition. When it came to pinpointing the stories and finding an “Anthropocene moment” (or even origin story), it became messy. In the end, the curators elected to live with the complex messiness and concentrate rather on the networks, systems of interconnections and chaos. Since the world in the Anthropocene is no longer ordered, the exhibition explored the navigation of chaos. In translating the Anthropocene into a three-dimensional gallery, the exhibition explored the systems of the Anthropocene and their interrelationships and feedbacks. An exhibition space affords visitors multi-perspective and nonlinear opportunities: they make their own paths, touring where they want to, forming their own experiences, and coming up with different interpretations. Part of the idea of the landscape of paper flowers folded by individuals was to capture the diversity of visitor experience.

The gallery was not only based on intense research provided by the curatorial team and the Rachel Carson Center which resulted in various publications.26 It

also became a springboard for follow-up projects. One of these projects resulted in a cabinet-like exhibition added to the gallery: the Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, which opened in July 2015. Based on a collaboration with the Center for Culture, History and Environment at the University of Madison- Wisconsin and the Environmental Humanities Lab at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, scholars and artists were invited to an Anthropocene slam to suggest objects with the aim to create the cabinet of curiosities.27 The outcome of the slam was then “translated” into the cabinet which combines exhibits on wondrous and curious relics with films and sound bites to display the different forces that shape relationships between environment and society.

Figure 31.3 Various elements of the Welcome to the Anthropocene exhibition. (top left) Engine block inside

object shelf. (top right) Brussels sprout growing in shopping trolley. (bottom left) The digital media cube.

(bottom right) Planting a tree. Deutsches Museum, 2014. Photos: Axel Griesch. See Plate 39.

Pyramiden, industrial heritage and the new tourism of climate change

Moving beyond museum walls to the “spectacle,”28 we now consider the Anthropocene in situ at Pyramiden, a coal-mining settlement within the Arctic Circle, recently refashioned for climate-change science and polar tourism. This is

a museum without walls, a gallery on a landscape scale that provokes thought about the Anthropocene at the extremes of the inhabited world.

Background

In the high latitudes of the Arctic, one degree of global warming makes for greater and faster changes than at temperate latitudes. The “polar effect” has fueled climate-change tourism, with people anxious to see glaciers “before they melt” and extreme environments remote from people, yet disproportionately affected by their activities. The Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland, for example, has become an iconic place for visiting American politicians, a place that signifies “climate change” as surely as an image of a polar bear on a sea-ice floe. The United States and other members of the Arctic council wish to mitigate the consequences of climate change in the Arctic, protect the environment and support climate science. At the same time, however, they want to protect their traditional interests in resources and sovereignty there.29 At Svalbard, Russian and Norwegian actors combine these seemingly contradicting policy goals, by transforming coal mines into industrial heritage sites. Could abandoned Arctic resource extraction sites become resources for a more sustainable economy in the Arctic, based on tourism?

Figure 31.4 Pyramiden: a coal-mining town within the Arctic Circle, 2012. Photo: Dag Avango. See Plate 40.

Norwegian and Russian companies started coal mining at Svalbard (also called Spitsbergen) in the early twentieth century. At this time the energy extraction boom drove an international debate about the legal status of Svalbard itself. The archipelago had been recognized as an international space – an unoccupied “no- man’s land” – until it emerged as potentially profitable. Promised wealth from the primary energy source of the industrialized world at the time – coal – increased interest (particularly among northern states) in staking a nationalist claim for influence in this windy, cold and remote territory. Norway first demanded sovereignty, but was opposed by Sweden and Russia because of their respective economic and political interests. The coal mines became part of this conflict, not just because of the resources, but also because these nations could use their existing mines as “effective occupation,” a precursor to claiming sovereignty.30

Pyramiden was established initially by a Swedish company that built a few huts there in 1910, with a plan to supply coal to the Swedish steel industry, and support nationalist interest in Spitsbergen, aiming to block Norway’s claim to sovereignty. In the end, the mining town was not built and in 1920, Norway was granted sovereignty over Svalbard (Spitsbergen) through a treaty. In the following years, the world economy slumped, and most companies left Svalbard,

Pyramiden’s Swedish founders. The huts were abandoned. In the years that followed, the extraction of energy resources became a project

of Norwegian and Soviet nationalist interest. The only remaining coal mines at Svalbard were run by state-supported companies. The Norwegians wanted to maintain their sovereignty by effective occupation, and the Norwegian economy could use the energy. The Soviet Union was first and foremost interested in it because the rapidly industrializing Murmansk region needed coal, which in turn made this part of the Arctic of strategic importance for the Soviet Union.31 Each operated several mining towns on Svalbard at this time, including Pyramiden, which the Soviet Union had bought from its Swedish owners in 1927. The Soviet company Trust Arktikugol developed an elaborate mining settlement, soon the most splendid on Svalbard. The new owners brought their settlement housing materials and elegant and ambitious architectural designs. There was nothing comparable among Norwegian mining settlements in Svalbard until the 1980s. The settlement at Pyramiden from the 1960s was more than an extraction site for energy resources; it was a signal of strong Soviet intentions for Svalbard.32

When the Soviet Union fell, the new Russian government had little interest in Pyramiden. Trust Arktikugol had closed down the town in 1998. Over the following years, the settlement infrastructure slowly deteriorated, becoming a victim of melt water and looters.

At the same time, an increasing number of Norwegians came to question the Svalbard coal-mining industry, because the mines were unprofitable and hard to rationalize with Norway’s own policy for protecting the environment at Svalbard or its international status as a leader in environmental thinking. In 2001, the Norwegian government passed a new environmental law, limiting the possibilities for mining in Svalbard. Meanwhile the last Russian mine operating in Svalbard, Barentsburg, was running out of coal. The Trust Arktikugol saw two possibilities: either to open another town to mine coal, or instead to repurpose the existing mining towns. Since any plan for a new coal venture would contravene new Norwegian environmental regulations, new towns were out.33 Instead, the Trust Arktikugol moved to re-develop their coal-mining settlements into hubs for Arctic tourism, conservation and science.

Figure 31.5 Ukraine grass planted in Pyramiden, 2012. Photo: Dag Avango.

The Russian state restarted its activities at Pyramiden around 2010. In cooperation with the governor of Svalbard, the Trust Arktikugol carefully renovated parts of the settlement and in the spring of 2013, it reopened the hotel. The company promoted Pyramiden as an industrial heritage site with a unique Soviet character.

Pyramiden’s facelift also opened a window of opportunity to the Norwegian authorities. During the Cold War years, the Norwegian governors of Svalbard had held back from intervening in Russian activities on Svalbard, but now Norway was free to demand that the Trust Arktikugol abide by Norwegian laws in Svalbard.34 Norwegian regulations require companies to protect buildings and material remains that are older than 1946 as “cultural heritage.”

The Norwegian governor responded to Russia’s new concept for Pyramiden by calling on the Trust Arktikugol to make an area plan. The company contracted a Norwegian firm to do this, whilst the governor enrolled heritage professionals (including one of us DA) to identify structures that should be protected as heritage. Based on the November 2013 report, parts of Pyramiden were declared “cultural heritage.” This Soviet industrial town thus became a heritage site protected under Norwegian law.35

The leading Norwegian mining company on the archipelago (SNSK) had for a

number of years developed plans to establish a museum and a “knowledge center” in one of its abandoned mines near the Norwegian administrative capital Longyearbyen, as a “Corporate Social Responsibility,” giving something back to the mining community on which the company has been dependent.36 For the company there were also other strategic values in re-using abandoned mines as heritage and for museum exhibitions. At a time when public opinion and politicians in mainland Norway question the value of SNKS’s mining operations, the company turned to history to emphasize its role in maintaining Svalbard as a part of Norway.

The abandoned coal mines at Svalbard are evocative remains of former and contemporary boom and bust cycles of Arctic extraction, motivated by resource needs, quick profits and geopolitical interests, a fossil-fuel landscape which is refashioned to serve new futures in the Arctic, including tourism. Re-using the settlement suits both Norwegian and Russian Arctic policy makers. The interested parties can see how these places enable them to continue to control resource use, to maintain influence or sovereignty and to protect the environment. Supporting science, particularly climate science, in this far northerly place is itself a sustainable development for both nations.

By defining abandoned mining sites such as Pyramiden as industrial heritage, and bases for climate-change science and polar tourism, both Norway and Russia can showcase their global environmental and cultural credentials, while keeping a close eye on a region that is increasingly strategically important as the climate warms and the Arctic sea ice melts. Visitors coming to this spectacle can see the hybridity of the worlds of nature and culture, of energy landscapes and their post-fossil-fuel uses. They stay in a comfortably refurbished Soviet hotel, repurposed after the Cold War to meet the needs of new generation climate- change scientists, measuring change in the Arctic.

Reflections: foregrounding the cultural in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene poses a challenge to humanity and to planet Earth. It is also a

challenge for the museum world to engage with this on a human scale and within the space of a gallery, even one beyond a museum building. Yet objects, collections and heritage landscapes offer a new perspective on the Anthropocene. Traditional (and often cherished) museum frameworks that compartmentalize knowledge into disciplines, cultures and periods of time are no longer useful. Nonetheless, because they are collecting institutions, museums are in the position to connect the deep past through the Anthropocene present to the deep future through objects and collections.

The original idea of a museum was that it was a house for collections. The nature of collections has changed over time, and so has the idea of the “house.” In the rapidly changing times of the Anthropocene world, the museum gallery takes on new forms. We see gardens that are set out like museum cabinets and museums that include indoor forests.37 Communities demand spaces that work for their traditional needs, leading to different sorts of museums, and sometimes to significant new sorts of spaces within them, for example, the living marae (meeting house) in Te Papa, the National Museum of New Zealand in Wellington, is used for museum, community and religious purposes.

Museums that seek to explore big abstract ideas like the Anthropocene find themselves pushing the edges of the classic museum form, which is a gallery or room that places objects and visitors in conversation with each other. A science and technology museum offers a unique place for discussions of the unintended and far-reaching consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

Pyramiden takes the idea of the museum form itself to another level again. It is a global museum of a local place, a place where ideas of change, where international debates have focused on the local and specific circumstances, yet they also resound with issues affecting other polar places and regions (including in Antarctica). Pyramiden is only accidentally a “gallery of the Anthropocene,” and its hybrid nature/culture is historical rather than artful. In Pyramiden, the actors have all come from somewhere else and re-made the place according to different nationalist and contemporary visions. Now it is a place where visitors and scientists come to explore ideas about climate change at the far northern edge of the inhabitable world.

For museum and heritage professionals the industrial museum and the industrial heritage landscape taken together showcase very different ways for

exploring big ideas and grand timescales in stories of the Industrial Revolution. For those already engaged with the Anthropocene concept, these examples demonstrate how the cultural sector might further enliven public discussions about the future of the planet.

Notes

1 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modernity: Crossings, Energetics, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press 2001); Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, (Durham, NC: Duke

University Press, 2010). Parts of this chapter appeared in Libby Robin et al. “Three Galleries of the

Anthropocene,” The Anthropocene Review 1(3) (2014): 207–224.

2 S. David, J. Blumtritt and B. Köhler, The Slow Media Manifesto. (2010) Online: http://en.slow-

media.net/manifesto

3 Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene

Review 2(1) (2015): 1–18, note that the Holocene is the time when most present world civilizations

emerged.

4 Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature, no. 415(2002): 23; Paul J. Crutzen, and Eugene F. Stoermer

“The ‘Anthropocene’” Global Change Newsletter 41(2000): 17–18.

5 Anders Ekström et al., History of Participatory Media 1750–2000 (London: Routledge, 2011): 1.

6 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA Today (Journal of the Geological

Society of America) 18, no. 2 (2008): 4–8; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of

Geological Time?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369. (2011): 835–841; Jan

Zalasiewicz, and Mark Williams, “The Anthropocene: a comparison with the Ordovician–Silurian

boundary,” Rendiconti Lincei: Scienze Fisiche e Naturali, (2013); Jan Zalasiewicz, et al., “When did the

Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal,” Quaternary

International (online 12 January) (2015).

7 Brendon Larson, Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability: Redefining our Relationship with Nature

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Whitney J. Autin and John M. Holbrook, “Is the

Anthropocene an Issue of Stratigraphy or Pop Culture?” GSA Today 22, no. 7 (2012): 60–61.

8 Libby Robin, “Histories for Changing Times: Entering the Anthropocene?,” Australian Historical Studies,

44(3) (2013): 329–340; Jed O. Kaplan, et al., “Holocene Carbon Emissions as a Result of Anthropogenic

Land Cover Change,” The Holocene 21, no. 5 (2011): 775–791; Crutzen, 2002; Joseph Masco, “Bad Weather:

On Planetary Crisis,” Social Studies of Science 40, no.1 (2010): 7–40; C.E. Doughty, “Preindustrial Human

Impacts on Global and Regional Environment,” Annual Review of Environment and Resources 38 (2013):

503–527.

9 Zalasiewicz and Williams, 2013; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015; Steffen et al., 2015; Will Steffen et al., “The

Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” Ambio, 40(7) (2011): 739–761.

10 Luke Keogh and Nina Möllers, “Pushing Boundaries – Curating the Anthropocene at the Deutsches

Museum,” in Fiona Cameron and Brett Neilson (eds), Climate Change and Museum Futures, Routledge

Research in Museum Studies (New York: Routledge, 2015), 78–89.

11 Wilhelm Füssl, The Deutsches Museum and Its History. In Wolfgang M. Heckl (ed.), Technology in a

Changing World: The Collections of the Deutsches Museum, tr. Hugh Casement and Jim O’Meara

(München: Deutsches Museum, 2010): xv.

12 Walter Hauser, ed. Klima – Das Experiment mit dem Planeten Erde (English translation NM) (München:

Deutsches Museum, 2002): 9.

13 Steffen et al., “Trajectory of the Anthropocene.”

14 A.D. Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?” Nature 471 (2011): 51–57.

15 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton

University Press, 2005); x. Andrea Witcomb, “Migration, Social Cohesion and Cultural Diversity: Can

Museums move beyond Pluralism?,” Humanities Research, XV(2) (2009): 49–66; Nigel Clark, Inhuman

Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (London: Sage, 2011); Sabine Wilke, “Anthropocene Poetics:

Ethics and Aesthetics in a New Geological,” Rachel Carson Center Perspectives 3 (2013): 67–74; Andreas

Malm and Alf Hornborg, “The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The

Anthropocene Review 1 (2014): 62–69.

16 Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2011); Wade Davis, “The Naked Geography of Hope: Death and Life in the Ethnosphere,” Whole

Earth, Spring (2002): 57–61; Gaston Gordillo, “Ships Stranded in the Forest,” Current Anthropology 52

(2011): 141–167.

17 Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming

the Great Forces of Nature,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–621; quote 619.

18 Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222; quote:

206.

19 Reinhold Leinfelder, Christian Schwägerl, Nina Möllers, and Helmuth Trischler, “Die menschengemachte

Erde: Das Anthropozän sprengt die Grenzen von Natur, Kultur und Technik,” Kultur und Technik 2

(2012): 12–17.

20 Wilke, “Anthropocene Poetics.”

21 Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Jill Didur and Anthony Carrigan (eds), Global Ecologies and the Environmental

Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches (London: Routledge, 2015).

22 David Christian, “A Single Historical Continuum,” Cliodynamics 2 (2011): 6–26.

23 Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, “Evidence: Making a Geological Turn in Cultural Awareness,”

Making the Geological Now: Responses to the Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, ed. Elizabeth

Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (Brooklyn: Punctum, 2013), 25; see also Bronislaw Szerszynski, “The End of

the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human,” Oxford Literary Review 34, no. 2

(2012): 165–184.

24 German title, “Willkommen im Anthropozän: Unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft der Erde.”

25 Henrike Bäuerlein and Sarah Förg, “Vorab-Evaluation zur Sonderausstellung, Anthropozän – Natur und

Technik im Menschenzeitalter,” August–September, Internal Report (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2012).

26 Foremost the catalogue: Nina Möllers, Christian Schwägerl, and Helmuth Trischler (eds), Welcome to the

Anthropocene. The Earth in Our Hands (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2015); see also e.g. the graphic

novel: Alexandra Hamann, Reinhold Leinfelder, Helmuth Trischler, and Henning Wagenbreth (eds),

Anthropozän. 30 Meilensteine auf dem Weg in ein neues Erdzeitalter (Munich: Deutsches Museum, 2014).

27 For documentation of the Slam see http://nelson.wisc.edu/che/anthroslam/, and Robert Emmett and

Gregg Mitman (eds.), Environmental Futures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

28 Anders Ekström, et al., History of Participatory Media 1750–2000. (London: Routledge, 2011).

29 See for example Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “The High North. Visions and Strategies. Meld,”

St. 7 (2011–2012) (Oslo: Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 2011); Norwegian Ministry of Justice,

Stortingsmelding Nr. 22 (2008–2009) Svalbard. (Oslo: Norwegian Ministry of Justice, 2009); Vladimir

Putin (Approved 20 February 2013), “Development Strategy of the Arctic Zone of the Russian Federation

and National Security until 2020” (Unofficial translation (2013) by the Embassy of the Russian Federation

at Stockholm).

30 Dag Avango, Sveagruvan: Svensk Gruvhantering mellan Industri, Diplomati och Geovetenskap

(Stockholm: Jernkontoret 2005); Dag Avango and Sander Solnes, Registrering av kulturminner i

Pyramiden. Registrering utfört på oppdrag fra Sysselmannen på Svalbard (Longyearbyen: Governor of

Svalbard, 2013); Roald Berg, Norsk utenrikspolitikks historie. Norge på egen hånd 1905–1920. Bd 2 (Oslo:

Universitetsforlaget 1995).

31 Dag Avango, Louwrens Hacquebord and Urban Wråkberg, “Industrial Extraction of Arctic Natural

Resources since the Sixteenth Century: Technoscience and Geo-Economics in the History of Northern

Whaling and Mining,” Journal of Historical Geography 44 (2014): 15–30.

32 Norwegian Commissioner of Mines, unpublished reports 1934–1966.

33 Åtland and Pedersen, 2008.

34 Jörgen Holten Jörgensen, Russisk svalbardpolitikk. Svalbard sett fra andre siden (Trondheim: Tapir

akademisk forlag 2010).

35 Irene Skauen Sandodden, [unpublished] Plan for arkeologiske registreringen i Pyramiden planområden

(June 28, 2013, Governor of Svalbard archive, Longyearbyen); Avango and Solnes, Registrering av

kulturminner.

36 Sture Norske Spitsbergen Kulkompani (SNSK) www.snsk.no/corporate-social-responsibility.5550233.html,

(accessed May 13, 2015).

37 Libby Robin, “The Red Heart Beating in the South-eastern Suburbs: The Australian Garden, Cranbourne,”

reCollections 2 (2007).