This chapter puts the idea of justice in environmental and natural resource management in a historical context, particularly since the rise of 'the environment' and the global era in the 1940s. It argues that the future is understood by different experts at different times, and that justice cuts across many sectors: prominent in law, history and governance, but also invoked by natural scientists concerned about the environment and resources. Key global ideas in environmental justice include human rights, sustainability and intergenerational equity, and the precautionary principle, all of which became important in global settings, but have specific local and national applications for natural resources such as water, forests and fisheries.

Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change explores the way museums tackle the broad global issue of climate change. It explores the power of real objects and collections to stir hearts and minds, to engage communities affected by change. Museums work through exhibitions, events, and specific collection projects to reach different communities in different ways. The book emphasises the moral responsibilities of museums to address climate change, not just by communicating science but also by enabling people already affected by changes to find their own ways of living with global warming. There are museums of natural history, of art and of social history. The focus of this book is the museum communities, like those in the Pacific, who have to find new ways to express their culture in a new place. The book considers how collections in museums might help future generations stay in touch with their culture, even where they have left their place. It asks what should the people of the present be collecting for museums in a climate-changed future? The book is rich with practical museum experience and detailed projects, as well as critical and philosophical analyses about where a museum can intervene to speak to this great conundrum of our times. Curating the Future is essential reading for all those working in museums and grappling with how to talk about climate change. It also has academic applications in courses of museology and museum studies, cultural studies, heritage studies, digital humanities, design, anthropology, and environmental humanities.

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 book springs from the convictions that climate change demands urgent transformations in the ways we think about ourselves and our world, and that museums are effective places for supporting conversation about and action on this issue. This book also responds to the perception that museums need to develop new modes of thinking and practice in order to fully embrace this role. Curating the Future considers how contemporary museums are reshaping some of the conceptual, material and organizational structures that have historically underpinned their own institutions and, more broadly, modes of living in the world that have produced climate change. It explores how diverse museums are engaging with attitudes and practices of ‘relationality’, tracing how these institutions are, along four key trajectories, building bridges across deep-seated separations between colonized and colonizer, Nature and Culture, local and global, authority and uncertainty. Curating the Future brings together perspectives from many parts of the world, celebrating how museums can function as spaces that enable the ‘coming together’ across time and geo - graphy of peoples, ideas and stories. The book explores museums as places that foster learning of many different kinds, including through congregation and sharing and in emotional and embodied, as well as analytical, modes. Moreover, it gains impetus from the ways in which museums, despite decades of critical re-evaluation, remain for many of their publics trusted sources of information.1These traditions suggest that museums are well placed to enable new forms of collaboration and community through which innovative responses to the frequently highly politicized issue of climate change might be nurtured. The chapters that follow discuss a variety of initiatives in this vein, reflecting on interpreting collections in collaboration with communities, engaging diverse visitors with climate-change science, and experimenting with exhibitions and performances that excite people’s hearts, as well as minds. Reflecting their centrality to museums, Curating the Future focuses strongly on objects and collections. Many of this book’s chapters investigate how collections of diverse types, media and locations, including those held outside museums proper, can be understood as materializing processes of climate change. Short “Object in View” studies sketch out how individual objects can prompt imaginative engagements with this issue. In a sense, this book presents an assemblage of texts through which collections emerge as inter-generational carriers of stories - things that dramatize experiences of cultural-ecological crises and have the capacity to foster cohesion and resilience in the face of them. We hope that it will stimulate museums to consider more fully how they might build new collections, interpretations and collaborations that engage communities and develop their capacities to respond to climate change.

This article looks at how environmental life histories have been used for particular purposes. It considers whether the use of life history by science is part of the effort to find common languages between and across sciences. Discussing Charles Elton, Aldo Leopold, C. S. Holling and Rachel Carson, the article argues that important figures can provide a “prehistory” and authority to the sciences, just as Paul Kruger’s name lent authority to the idea of the national park in South Africa.