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“The museum of the future, if it were to do the job that it should do, would be doing much more to get at the root of the problems, even if it steps on some toes.  They’ve got to be showing the whole story, not just a piece of the story.”

David Ehrenfeld is professor II of biology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, where he teaches conservation and field ecology. In 2011, he was named Teacher of the Year in Rutgers’ School of Environmental and Biological Sciences. His seven books include the pioneering textbook Biological Conservation and, most recently, Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology (2009). A pioneer of the field of conservation biology, he was the founding editor of the international scientific journal Conservation Biology, where he remains a consulting editor.  He has written for Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and other publications.

“Museums are full of opportunity in the way that they confer legitimacy on certain ways of seeing the world, on certain ways of acting.  They normalize them.  They take on unpopular ideas and make them seem normal.  They take ways of behaving that seem strange, and make them seem like that’s how everyone now behaves.  A museum can be a really powerful point of doing that – that’s the reason that corporations are interested in museums and that’s exactly the same reason that we should be interested in museums if we want to change things.”

Gavin Grindon is a post doctoral researcher at Kingston University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum. His research is located within the history and theory of modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on activist-art and its theoretical contexts. He is currently preparing a monograph on this topic, and has previously published in The Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Art Monthly, Radical Philosophy and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. Grindon is a co-curator of the exhibition Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2014. He also organized the conferences The Politics of the Social in Contemporary Art at Tate Modern, 2013; Art…What’s the Use at Whitechapel Gallery, 2011; and Revising /Revisiting the Avant-Garde at Kingston University, 2009.

“The struggle is not only the fight of people like us. The struggle has to take place at every level and in all places. The ideal museum would really speak the truth, educate reality, and support our struggles.”

Patricia Gualinga is a Human Rights and Land Defender from the Kichwa People of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Throughout her life, Patricia has dedicated herself to protecting her community from human rights violations caused primarily by oil exploration and militarization.

In 2012, she was a witness before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in a landmark case filed in 2002 on the impacts of oil exploitation on her community, which concluded with the court ruling in favor of the Sarayaku People. In 2019, she received the Outbreak Environmental Activism Award in Spain. In October 2021, she got the ALNOBA Award for courage and leadership in the US, and in December 2021, the Al Moumin Human Rights Award. Recently, she received the 2022 Olof Palme Human Rights Award for her leadership in the fight to improve indigenous people’s living conditions. Currently, she supports and leads the Amazonian Women Collective dedicated to the protection of the environment, indigenous peoples, women’s rights and the land.

“It’s well known that David Koch and his brother have spent tens of millions of dollars on climate science disinformation. For a museum to accept funding from them undermines its educational purpose, causes the museum great harm, and confuses the public, which is the greatest harm of all. The museum of the future, as the museum of the present, has the responsibility to present the best science and to describe efforts that science, especially by vested interests.”

Eric Chivian, a physician, was a professor at Harvard Medical School and the founder and former director of its Center for Health and the Global Environment (now based at the Harvard School of Public Health and called the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment). In 1980, he co-founded the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, winner of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.

With Eddie Bautista and Elizabeth Yeampierre

To build a global climate movement, we have to address the asymmetries in the burden of responsibility and the burden of impact. This requires that we acknowledge the ways inequalities are deeply embedded in the systems that continue to produce and deny climate change, hindering our abilities to mobilize against it. In the wake of the People’s Climate March, climate justice activists are shifting the discourse and building a movement.

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BIOS

Eddie Bautista is the Executive Director of the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance (NYC-EJA), a network of community-based organizations advocating for the empowerment and just treatment of environmentally overburdened neighborhoods. Previously, Eddie served as Director of the NYC Mayor’s Office of City Legislative Affairs – where he spearheaded efforts to pass several landmark laws, including NYC’s 20-year Solid Waste Management Plan – and Director of Community Planning for NY Lawyers for the Public Interest, where he organized coalitions blocking the siting of polluting infrastructure in overburdened communities, while revising public waste and energy policies. An award winning urban planner and community organizer, Eddie has been interviewed by local and national media outlets. Several books feature Eddie’s work, including The Battle for Gotham: New York in the Shadow of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs, by Roberta Brandes Gratz (2010); Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice, by Julie Sze (2006), and We Won’t Move: Community Planning in “The Real Estate Capital of the World” by Tom Angotti (2008). Eddie is also a Visiting Professor at Pratt Institute’s Graduate Programs for Sustainable Planning and Development.

Elizabeth Yeampierre, a Puerto Rican civil rights attorney of African and Indigenous ancestry born and raised in New York City is Executive Director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community based organization. Her vision for an inter-generational, multi-cultural and community led organization is the driving force behind UPROSE; she is a long-time advocate and trailblazer for community organizing around sustainable just development in Sunset Park and holds a law degree from Northeastern University along with a Certificate of Non-Profit Management from Columbia University. Elizabeth is part of the New York City environmental justice leadership responsible for getting NY State’s first Brownfield legislation, Article X power plant legislation and NYC’s Solid Waste Management Plan passed. In Sunset Park, Brooklyn she facilitated an aggressive urban forestry initiative, helped double the amount of open space and developed a project that resulted in the retro-fitting and re-powering of 12 diesel trucks for a local business. She successfully organized a community coalition that defeated a 520 mega-watt power plant application. Elizabeth created a community participatory model that resulted in a community led greenway design for the waterfront. $8.4 million dollars have been allocated for the greenway and park and $36 million dollars in Brownfield remediation funds for the waterfront park. (the largest brownfield grant in New York State History) Elizabeth secured $1,000,000 for emission reduction projects that have been distributed throughout the community. Three years ago she initiated a climate adaption /community resilience effort to address local climate justice concerns for the waterfront community she lives and works in. Elizabeth serves on Mayor Bloomberg’s Sustainability and Long Term Planning Advisory Board, and served as a Commissioner on the historic NYS Traffic Congestion Mitigation Commission. Elizabeth is the first Latina chair of the US EPA National Environmental Justice Advisory Council where she initiated the inclusion of a youth forum dedicated to developing youth leadership dedicated to environmental justice.