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As part of The Natural History Museum’s exhibition Mining the HMNS, on display at Project Row Houses in 2016, the NHM developed a series of pepper’s ghost hologram dioramas, featuring a docent tour of the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences (HMNS) and a toxic tour with communities living along the fenceline of Houston’s fossil fuel infrastructure.

This mini-diorama depicts a hologram of NHM’s Beka Economopoulos giving a tour of the HMNS.

More information: https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/mining-the-hmns/

As part of The Natural History Museum’s exhibition Mining the HMNS, on display at Project Row Houses in 2016, the NHM developed a series of pepper’s ghost hologram dioramas, featuring a docent tour of the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences (HMNS) and a toxic tour with communities living along the fenceline of Houston’s fossil fuel infrastructure.

This mini-diorama depicts a hologram of two members of the local environmental justice group TEJAS giving one of their “toxic tours” of East Houston’s Manchester neighborhood. The installation was part of The Natural History Museum’s exhibition “Mining the HMNS”, on display at Project Row Houses in 2016.

More information: https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/mining-the-hmns/

Is the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences a museum, or a PR front for the fossil fuel industry? This was the central question of “Mining the HMNS”, a 2016 exhibition by The Natural History Museum that interrogates the symbiotic relationship between the Houston Museum of Natural Sciences and its corporate sponsors.

In this video, NHM’s Beka Economopoulos offers a guided tour of this exhibition, which excavated key narratives and displays in the Houston museum, and highlighted the voices and stories that are excluded–those of the low-income predominantly Latino and African-American fence-line communities along the Houston Ship Channel.

More information: https://thenaturalhistorymuseum.org/events/mining-the-hmns/

In the spring of 2015, shortly after launching our campaign urging museums to cut all ties to the fossil fuel industry, The Natural History Museum occupied the largest exhibitor space at the American Alliance of Museums annual convention in Atlanta. The AAM convention is the world’s largest gathering of museum professionals, with 7000 museum staff from 60 countries in attendance.

The Natural History Museum highlights the socio-political forces that shape nature, yet are excluded from traditional natural history museums. Our primary subject of study is the “fossil fuel ecosystem”, characterized by a complex set of interrelated feedback loops encompassing land, energy, politics, society, economics and culture.

At the AAM convention we turned our anthropological gaze on traditional science museums as ideological habitats within this ecosystem. We re-created installations from New York’s American Museum of Natural History, including previously excluded socio-political context about the museum’s board member and biggest sponsor, David H. Koch.

“Museums should tell the stories we need to learn from: not only the story of the downfall of great societies, the destruction of societies created around greed, but also the story of our culture, our language, our identity—who we are, and the teachings we’ve been governing by for thousands of years.”

Chief Rueben George is a member of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation (TWN). After serving his nation as Director of Community Development, he shifted his focus to protecting Burrard Inlet, traditional Tsleil-Waututh territory, from the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline and tanker project as part of the TWN Sacred Trust Initiative. He is also a spiritual leader and was made a Sun Dance Chief by Chief Leonard Crow Dog in South Dakota, former medicine man for the American Indian movement. Rueben has become one of the best known voices in the media locally and internationally in the conversation about the proposed Kinder Morgan pipeline and other related issues.