 to welcome everybody to today's webinar. This is Mike Morneau from Learning Times. I'll be your producer. If you require any assistance at any point in time with the Zoom platform, please feel free to communicate with me using the chat panel located at the bottom of your screen. You'll see that there's also a Q&A button available there, and if you have questions for our presenter today, we encourage you to use the Q&A as opposed to the chat, please, as it makes it easier to facilitate the questions when we get to that point. There's also some closed captioning available, and so if you do not see the captions but would like to make use of them, please click the CC live transcript button at the bottom of the screen, and then select show subtitles. If you wish to hide the captions, just select hide subtitle, and on that note, I'll turn it back over to Robin. Hi, everyone, and welcome to another CDC Care webinar. My name is Robin Bauer-Kilgoe, and I am the CDC Care Coordinator. Before we start, I would like to acknowledge this webinar is being moderated on the traditional lands of the Mikosuke and Seminole people and their ancestors, and I pay my respect to elders both past and present. So to get started, I'm just going to do a couple of quick slides today before we get into our program just because we have a lot of really great programming coming up. So I wanted to make sure we could tell you all about it before we actually started today's program. You are here today for reducing environmental impacts of collections care and management. We'll be running from 1 to about 2.30pm Eastern, and we will be having a Q&A period afterwards. Also, this webinar, as you guys might have heard, is being recorded, so we're going to be hopefully posting that up to our YouTube channel probably another day or so, or to the actual platform. As I said, my name is Robin Bauer-Kilgoe, you just saw Mike Morneau. We're here to answer any of your questions that you might have in the chat today. This is our home on the web, connecting to collections.org. On that website, you will find information on upcoming programming and webinars. You will also find some links to some really important resources. We have our community link that leads you to our online moderated community platform where you can ask questions about direct collections care or anything else, and we have a group of fabulous monitors who will go out and try to find you some great information when it comes to those types of questions. We also have our course archive and our webinar archive. That includes the entire history of CDC care, what you can get access to. There's a lot of good information on there if you want to watch old webinars or old courses. We also have a curated resources area, so if you click on that, you'll be able to find all sorts of resources on all sorts of topics, collections, and collections related. For upcoming programming, we're going to be launching a course at the end of this month. It's called building collaborations between museums and indigenous communities. We're really looking forward to this course. The CDC care courses you do need to pay for, it's $99 for this five webinar course. We're running out through the entire month of October. It's $99 until September, I think 22nd, and then the fee goes up a little bit. So if you're interested in this topic, I would encourage you to go take a look at our website. The entire course outline is there along with our list of speakers and a lot of other information. So I think it'll be really good and we're really looking forward to doing this course. We have a few upcoming free webinars as well. We do one of those once a month. So if you'll join us on October 13th, you'll see care of painted surfaces from 1 to 230 Eastern. And then on November 16th, you're going to see a webinar called Long Term Storage for Large Functional Objects, Vehicles. So for that webinar, which is happening November 16th, we're actually asking our community to come up. If you are currently storing a large vehicle and you would like our expert to take a look at it and talk about it during the webinar, we have a form on the website. You can submit it. We're encouraging pictures. We're encouraging videos. You could give us a little tour if you want to. You can even do it anonymously if you want to. But we would really like some information from you all to actually feature within that webinar. So I would encourage you to look at that as well. We have two places on social media that you can look at. You can actually go to C2 on Facebook. You can find out information on there. And you can also follow us at C2Ccare on Twitter. So again, encourage you to check out those places for any kind of information you might need. As Mike said, we have two separate boxes for Zoom webinars that you can use when it comes to communication with our speaker. We have the chat box that's there for just, hi, how you doing? And today our speaker will probably be asking us questions. So please utilize that chat box when you can and you want to talk to everyone. You can even just say hi now and where you're located if you like. The Q&A box is there for questions. So if you have a question of our speaker at any point, put it in that box. We will go through it during the Q&A period. It's just a little easier to actually follow questions within that box. So I encourage you to use that then. Well, I'm going to go ahead and introduce our speaker for today. Let me one second. Our speaker today is Sarah Sutton. She is CEO of Environmental and Cultural Partners and Non-Profit Accelerated Cultural Institutions Leadership and Climate Actions. Today's topic again is reducing environmental impacts of collections care. And I'm going to stop sharing my screen and hand it over to Sarah. And I will see you all at the end of the webinar for the Q&A period. Go for it, Sarah. Whenever you're ready. Thank you very much. All right. So everyone's looking at a welcome screen, I trust. Hi, I'm Sarah Sutton. I'm delighted to have you join me today. And I hope you'd use the chat feature in order to give me just a little bit of information. Not so much, I should say, not so much for me, but for everyone in the group. For introductions, I'd like you to tell the group now what you do that is smart for the environment or climate and something you'd like to do that is smart for the environment and climate. So to give you an example, my answers would be that I offset my personal and business carbon footprint each times two using climate neutral now. And I'm working on going entirely paperless. That means for me improving my screen reading and learning abilities. I'm very tactile. I really like paper. I like to hold paper and read it and write it. And so I have to rewire my brain in order to operate off the screen. But I know that I can master that skill. So go ahead and enter in the chat some of those things that you do or would like to do. Let me get my screen up and rolling. So some of you know me as Sarah Sutton, who is the principal of Sustainable Museums. And on the 1st of September, that sole proprietorship, that business turned into a nonprofit called Environment and Culture Partners. Because the need for and the capacity to do this work is just expanded dramatically. And as a nonprofit, we'll be able to accomplish more. And our goal is to accelerate environmental leadership in the cultural sector. So I thank you for being part of that today just by showing up. What we're going to focus on is something called agency, our own ability to create change. So as we go through this, you'll see that there will be a theme of agency. But I want you to start by keeping in mind that no one goes green all at once. You're all listing good things that you're doing. You're probably feeling like you wish you could do more. And some of you are probably afraid to say what it is you're doing. Please understand that no one goes green all at once. No one goes all green yet, because we just haven't figured it out. And there's too much to change. And that you need to let go of any guilt you have about the non green things you do, because that guilt interferes with the progress on the good green things. And remember that you are learning all the time. It's okay to not be perfect. And that we will get better at this. Every one of us does, including me all the time, make mistakes and get better. The good thing is it gets easier because one, you get practice and two, other people learn things and share them just the way you are in the chat right now. And that helps you think of new practices and pursue them more confidently. But most of all, anything you do really, really, really matters. The problem is huge. It's complex. We're all contributing to it, and we need to all contribute to the solution. So what you do matters. And the most important thing is to talk about environment and climate issues. We do that in order to normalize the issue and the concerns and the conversations so that more people feel comfortable tackling it. It gets easier to talk about environment and climate with practice. But if you feel stuck, you have questions. The best woman with the answers is Catherine Hayhoe. And her website is right there. You can follow her global weirding presentations on every Wednesday. And you can just check in for her fact sheets. She's awesome. She's also on the Board of Regents for the Smithsonian Institution. Somebody got smart. And one more thing you can do is listen to the AIC Combating Climate Change podcast. It has two whole seasons of great presentations on regular folk and experts who are doing good environment and climate work. So I really encourage you to listen to those free podcasts. Now, before we talk about the things you can do, we need to back up and look at the big issues. So let's make sure we understand what environment and climate are. So weather is what's happening today. Climate is trends and conditions over time, like decades and centuries and thousands of years. That's climate. Environment is what we feel around us, but climate is what the planet feels. Climate change shows itself in the droughts and the fires and the more intense storms that we're all experiencing all around the globe. We might experience them differently, but they're all happening and they're happening everywhere, those climate changes. And they're harmful to us and to others in the way we lead our lives. So what is it about the relationship between museum humans, people in the museum field, and environment and climate? It's important to examine the difference between environment and climate. You don't have to get it right every time. You have to be aware that sometimes climate issues include environment components and sometimes environment components leak over into climate change. Just being aware that they interfere with each other or related to each other because they're part of the same systems is important. So what are our environmental impacts? We contribute toxins to chemicals that are in the air, the soil, and the water. We create and we dispose of waste. So the waste means unproductive materials that may be polluting the atmosphere, polluting land. They may contribute to damaging ecosystems, ecosystems that creatures, other creatures, and we depend upon for healthy, happy, safe lives. We might be doing things that damage or destroy habitat for plants and creatures, and we might use up all those plants and creatures, making it so that those populations can't survive. Those are environmental issues, extremely important, and there are climate issues. We refer to it as climate forcing, where we force the climate into a different pattern because of the things we do. Greenhouse gas emissions is the biggest climate forcing impact that we have. So when we use coal, oil, or gas, those are fossil fuels, we contribute greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Those are emissions. Those emissions create something that is like a blanket, a heat trapping blanket around the globe, that when the sun comes in, it doesn't get to, that energy doesn't all get to leave. Some of it gets trapped here, and that's what's heating up the earth. So those emissions also come from food waste, farm activities, melting permafrost from a variety of sources, and all of it matters. Some of it's CO2, some of it's methane. Those are all considered greenhouse gas emissions. But we also do things with resources that interrupt the systems. So we make cement, and we spread it all over the place, and that creates hot spaces in place of cool spaces, hot spaces in place of planted spaces that actually consume carbon dioxide. So sometimes when we do things, we just make this climate cycle worse. Why does it matter to the museum field? Because we are charitable and educational institutions. We're community-minded, we're socially responsible. So I'm going to pause here and take a meaningful sip from my museums are not neutral mug, because our work is to follow the science and to tell the truth, and to do it with compassion and heart. That's good museum work. That's also climate work. That's also good community work. Now in a selfish way, our museums, our collections, our visitors, our staff, ourselves are also affected by climate change. So it's a good thing to do for community, and it's a good thing to do for our jobs to address climate change. Now what are some of the things that that affect us the most or cut to our heart the most? That's when climate change and environmental issues touch our collections, and they do it whether they're in our museums, like particular objects that we're caring for, or when they're in situ, when they're historic structures or materials that are on historic structures, or like archaeological sites that are still in the landscape. So temperature, relative humidity, and pollutants can affect materials, and weather and water forces can affect sites and buildings. And if you think about it from a mechanical point of view, the concern about something like an archaeological site or a structure on a coastline is mechanical damage from actual erosion due to wave action or storm events that actually drag those materials into the ocean and we lose them. But it's also more subtle, and this tweet is about the loss of peat in the UK that when peat dries out, all the material, the archaeological materials that are protected by them are no longer protected in a moist atmosphere. They're exposed to oxygen and they begin to deteriorate. So drought, which is a climate change impact on peat, is damaging to archaeological collections, and then environmental impacts such as draining peat bogs is damaging to environmental collection, into collections. So keeping an eye on what environment and climate are doing to our objects is our first line of defense. And then we can bring everything else that we contribute to the museum sector to bear on this issue. So I believe that museums hold in one body all of the physical and intellectual resources that we need to solve this problem. We are creative people. We have the freedom to do this work and the authority to do this work in a way that the world needs most. And so all of the people listed on this slide, the curators, the registrars, collection managers matter in doing this work. So do your conversations with exhibit designers and program leaders. So do your conversations with facilities operators who manage the energy control, energy systems in your building, or with whom you contract to do that work. And anybody who helps you raise money or spread the word about the work that you do, all of us are involved in this. And if you're a one woman or one man show at your site, I want you to know that you have colleagues who have similar situations who can be your boosters and your assistants in this. Yeah, it's pretty complex, but it's doable. So I'm going to talk a little bit about the complexities and then I'm going to move into the things that you can do. The reason I talk about the complexities is that I will be able to tell you what to do today as much as you wish that I would. The what is very dependent upon your particular situation, the resources you have, the objects you're dealing with, and the weather and climate conditions that are affecting you. I can't predict what those are, so I can't tell you exactly what to do, but I can give you the skills to make good choices yourself, which means that after this webinar is over and you have a different job or a different activity or a different role, you'll still have the skills to apply to it. You'll know how to tackle the problem. So to tackle the problem, we have to understand that it's part of a system, even if what you're doing is treating a particular object today or putting it in a particular package, that activity is part of a system of collection care of museum operations. There are other people probably involved, people you buy things from, other collections professionals who trained you, institutional leadership that gives you money or takes it away. There are consumption choices, how much energy to use, which materials to buy, and then there are content responsibilities, protecting the item and making sure that information is available to the public. So all of those things go into your thinking. So let's have a little tutorial on systems thinking, because you need this in order to make good decisions. So a system is a complex whole, like you can wrap your arm around a system and say this is the system I'm looking at, and all the parts of it make up that system. Those parts and those processes, when they work well together, they're all balanced, the system works. When something's not working, it gets out of balance and it stops producing, performing the way you want it to. When you're trying to influence a system to get a better result, you'll have more success if you understand all of the parts and you make an educated choice of which part to influence. You test to see how it worked, and if it works, you keep going. If it doesn't work, you adjust and you try a different approach. You'll use that many times over in developing new systems of managing your work. The thing is, the systems that we've been using have produced this problem. If we keep using them, we won't get out of the problem. So we're going to shift our systems. And the way we do that is with three different types of agency. So that's the core of my message today. There are three ways you can tackle this work. And I hope by the end of the session, you'll be able to pick one or two from each of these three levels to do for yourself. Individual agency are the two things I listed in that welcome page of the activities I'm doing now and working towards. Those are things within my sphere. Elective agency is when we pool knowledge and skills to act together. And a good example of that is you all came today in order to learn things that you can do. They provided a platform for you to collectively learn about how to create change in the cultural heritage sector. Proxy agency is when you influence someone else on your behalf. When you call up AIC and you say, hey, we really like that session with Sarah. Now we want some with other folks who are doing green work and can give us more examples. That's an example of proxy agency. And the way you acquire it is by watching other people listening to what they do and trying it on your own. So that's why I asked you to write all those ideas in there because you will find cool ideas from everyone else that you can use. You're going to build your own agency just by looking at that list, even if you don't find anything I say that's useful today. So what's an example of individual agency? Whoever figured out that they should organize all of these materials in this way was using individual agency. They organized materials so that you knew what was available in the workshop and didn't have to buy extra just because you weren't sure if you had enough. That one activity of buying extra because you don't know how much you have is a very wasteful activity. And you can avoid it. You can be more sustainable by keeping a good inventory, visual or written of the materials you have so that you don't have to go buy more that you don't need. Now creating this is individual agency that one person said, hey, this is important to me. I'm going to do it. And it had some co-benefits because not only does that person now make it so that everybody else doesn't have to buy extra materials, but now everybody else knows where to put things away to keep the shop clean and they know how to organize the things in the shop. It makes it more efficient, energy, I mean time efficient for everyone in the workshop and it means that no one has to keep instructing someone else or ask for information. So someone's gone and created a system that has multiple co-benefits that makes the whole operation more sustainable and more efficient. That's the kind of thing that we're looking for. So the usual suspects, the activities where you do your work, the areas where you'll do your work will focus on materials consumption and energy consumption related to objects. So materials is how we store, display, ship and exhibit objects or clean and conserve them, how we protect them. For energy, it's how we manage temperature and relative humidity. It's how we light up those objects in our displays, how we clear, clean, conserve and protect them and how we move them around. We use an awful lot of energy in that issue. And your advice to your peers, colleagues, co-workers and contractors about how to be efficient with energy is critical. They need to know that you're aware of this and you're paying and you're asking them to be thoughtful about energy efficiency. But let me back up to materials. This is often where people start because it's the thing in their hand, literally the glove that's in their hand that's driving them crazy, but because they want a more sustainable approach. So materials is usually where we start. Setting up systems so that people can understand which materials to select is the best way to help people be more efficient. So you're probably used to this reduce reuse recycle mantra, the three Rs. That's been expanded to seven Rs now. We're going to focus on six of them. The first one is to just rethink that glove or whatever material you're choosing to use. Why do I choose this? Why do we as a profession do this thing or use this material? Is it appropriate now? As long as you've rethought it and concluded your next best step forward, you've taken a step towards being much more sustainable. When you can refuse to use the things that have the worst impact on the climate, that's important. So you might compare two useful items, find out that one has a higher carbon footprint than the other and refuse to use the one with the highest carbon footprint. You can always reduce the amount of stuff. Do you need a full board or pieces of a board of backing board? Do you need and is there a way to reuse it or to repurpose this material? So reuse same use again, repurpose and alternative use for it. Recycle is the last resort because when you recycle it, it decomposes, including emitting greenhouse gases that make the atmosphere worse. So we want to avoid getting to the point where we have stuff that we recycle or rot. Same sort of process. Now I glossed over that carbon calculation and the choice about gloves because I wanted to tell you about them when we get to Stitch. So Stitch is a project of AIC funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. It's a website under construction but open and operational and it's life cycle assessment of the things we use in collections care and it has three types of materials in it of resources in it. That carbon calculator where you compare blue board to regular cardboard, it has fact sheets which says, hey, what is life cycle assessment and how do I do it? And then case studies which takes that glove question, a really complex glove question, all the different types and uses and reuses and materials in them and examines them as a case study to give you information about how to make best choices. Now the gloves case study is under way. It's not published yet but it will be published by the end of the year. But I encourage you to go to Stitch right away. You can use it to make good choices about your work. Now energy is next. If you haven't read sustainable preservation practices, it's the first thing you do when this program is over. You go to the link at the bottom of the screen and you can download the book for free or for $25 you can purchase a copy and you see how well used mine is. This is the best science available on temperature and relative humidity and how we can thoughtfully care for collections while reducing how much energy we use. The material science for collections care of the current moment is far ahead of the HVAC research that was conducted in the 1970s about how to design an HVAC system for a museum. We have to bring our HVAC operations up in line with the material science and so much of it is right here and so much of it is provided and supported through AIC. So please avail yourself of this even if you don't feel like a scientist. The information is there and it's accessible and you use it in partnership with your engineers and your conservators in order to make good decisions for your collection. But before I leave this individual agency section, I want to warn you that you should be aware of gas lighting and misplaced emphasis and this cartoon talks about both of those things. So gas lighting is like blaming the victim saying it's your responsibility and deflecting the responsibility from the real source. Misplacing the emphasis is focusing on the wrong thing to solve the problem or to get to the result you want. So the issue about straws, they're light, they're small, they're everywhere, they blow into the ocean, they interfere with wildlife in the ocean. That is not as substantial an impact on wildlife in the ocean and on pollution as the nets are. So it's misplaced emphasis if all we do is focus on straws and not on getting the ghost nets out of the ocean and stop using nets, which brings us to the gas lighting part. It's not our fault that all the straws exist and that they're in the ocean. Somebody produces those straws, sells them and puts them in our drink without asking us. So all the guilt we have about straws is misplaced responsibility for the problem. It starts back at a higher level, which is why collective and proxy agency are so important. So let's get to collective agency. We learned an awful lot about the role of collective agency during COVID-19. There are activities that individuals must take on behalf of others. But those activities are far more effective when more of us do it. One person wears a mask, it's better than no one wearing a mask. Everyone wearing a mask helps us solve the problem, the same for vaccinations. All of those practices that approach applies to climate action. Use the science, take individual action, but cooperative behavior makes the difference, makes a difference at a scale that moves the needle, that really changes things. How do we do collective action? Right now, you can support AIC sustainability committee or the environment and climate committees of AAM and AASLH. They need volunteers to spread the word, to bring up presentation ideas, to contribute research, to contribute data. Please join those and support them in any way that they ask that you're able to do. You can't do everything. Choose the things that are good for you, valuable for you and of interest. You can volunteer for disaster relief training. You can start a green team at work. You can start a green buddy group from other museums in your region and meet for green drinks on Friday night and talk about what you're doing in order to address green issues at your museum. That's the beginning of cooperative agency. You can all gang together and talk to our suppliers and tell them that you require more sustainable materials and practices in your work. And you can encourage them to provide information about the materials they do produce to the folks who are doing Stitch, the Lifecycle Assessment Project, so that we can make sure all those materials can be part of the carbon calculator. We can understand how to make best choices. All of these choices are going to be trade-offs. There are no clear answers, but the more information we have, the better we're able to make those choices. And a collective activity would be for us to work together within the sector to call for smart energy efficient approaches to this work. So remember I talked about that the 1970s HVAC approach doesn't match with the material science. Well that 70-50 rule comes from that. We have determined a decade ago that the 70-50 rule for all objects no longer applies. But that if we applied the conservation science working with conservators and HVAC engineers, we can come up with museum-specific approaches for caring for collections. The Bezo Group and many others agreed that this was the appropriate approach, but it has not been taken up across the field. If we ask at every museum that we examine and consider these rules and adopt them, then we will be able to move the needle. But right now it's stuck and we need your help to bring up that conversation at each institution. Which means we have to think differently, which is hard. We have to rethink every single one of our activities. We have to rethink that HVAC rule, and it requires us to do some things that are a little risky in our minds and require us to examine a different approach. And there are two currently discussed approaches available through ArtaCheck that are asking us to think differently. And this one about doing examinations of objects, conditions reporting, and sharing information about collections, gives you a way to do all of this work without paper. It can be considered a green practice because there's no paper. But I'm sure you're saying, but what about that iPad? And what about the energy to run it? What about the cloud energy that it costs? You'd be right there. That is the life cycle approach to a choice about sustainability with an electronic material. But if you compare that iPad and all of its uses to just one piece of paper, then your equation will be off. So you want to think about are there co-benefits to this new practice that have other efficiencies? Does it improve the quality of information? Or does it mean more people have access to better information? Or does it save the amount of time required to do this work? Is it efficient in other ways? If there are sufficient co-benefits, then it might be the thing that you need to pursue. Here's another example of understanding the options. COVID-19 taught us that objects can travel without people. It was scary. It was terrifying, but the objects could go and the people couldn't because of COVID-19. And in its space, virtual couriers and bookend couriers moved higher up on the possibility list of sustainable of practice. And they happened to have sustainability features. A life cycle assessment of the loan of an object tells us that by far, the biggest carbon impact is the travel of the courier back, forth, back and forth. We've come up with other approaches where one courier takes multiple objects instead of four different couriers going with four objects. This is another evolution of that. In some cases, having a bookend or a virtual courier is good for the object and it reduces greenhouse gas emissions. So it's something we can consider. We can consider also whether or not we make all those loans. Knowing the greenhouse gas impacts of an exhibit, including all of the loans, will help us make a decision about whether or not it's worth that investment. Can five objects instead of 10 tell the same story? Can any virtual version make a difference? It's important that we think about whether or not we want to take on high maintenance loans or we want to send all of our loans. So we need to think about right sizing our collections. So as a field, can we have a conversation about whether or not all collections are cared for as if they're Rembrandt's? Can we restart that collection discussion about tiering, care and prioritization? Can we restart the collection about the conversation about whether or not we need to keep everything? And do we need to keep everything and for how long? We've always felt that we give everything the best care in perpetuity. But if it costs us the health and safety of the planet or if the planet is so damaged that we can't care for the collections, then what sense does it make? Which moves us to proxy agency where you ask others to influence on your behalf. The things that are outside your control. Somebody else has the power to do and you need them to do it. That's where we ask the folks who make policy to consider our requests and requirements on behalf of environment and climate. We ask them to change their approaches to exhibit loans and borrowing. We ask them to change their approach to exhibit design. Can we specify more sustainable materials in our exhibits? Can we put that in the contract? Can we think about accessioning and deaccessioning in ways that involve a carbon footprint for collections care or that involve a limited capacity? One object come in, is there an object that goes out? Are there more exacting criteria of what gets selected? How do we go about that deaccessioning process? Does the climate carrying cost of an object factor into whether or not you keep it? Collections management, triage, tiers and conditions care. So we're learning in a face of a disaster that we need to know what the tiers are for the things we rescue first. Those same tiers can apply to what are the things that we put the most effort into caring for. The most energy and materials that affect the climate. The tier three stuff, the one at the bottom, doesn't get the same investment as tier one. We can't save everything, we can't do everything, we need to make choices. How are we going to do that? When you ask the policy makers to think about energy management, let's get back to that energy efficient approach with responsive collections care, with temperature and relative humidity. And conservation, let's ask our policy makers to pursue projects that develop and distribute clean collections care materials. Materials that do not hurt the environment, but they do help the collection. We might need a little more power behind us. But there are some other things you can do in your institution that others will do on your behalf. And you can ask whoever is in charge of HR, or if you're in charge of HR, you can do this work yourself. Say that we need people in this profession, all people in this profession to have climate and environment training, exposure or experience or awareness. Any of those four things is valuable. Make it a priority that this is part of the discussion. Put it in training programs, ask for it as part of the criteria for hiring the next person who joins you, maybe even make it desired or required in job description. Asking for this on your behalf will raise the power of climate action in your institution. And you ask other folks on your staff if you have more than one or you ask on your board to make changes on behalf of the museum and the planet. Ask them to sign up for Energy Star Port Folio Manager in order to record your energy use in your carbon footprint. And then make that part of creating an Energy Star score for museums. There isn't one now. I don't know if you know that in order to get lead certification, a simpler path to lead certification is to get an Energy Star score of your efficiency. Museums can't get an Energy Star score because there aren't enough museums contributing data to Energy Star Port Folio Manager, a free monitoring tool. If we can get that number up then we've got benchmarking and we compare our own operations to other museums and we can do lead efficiency or we can just compare our own work to our peers. Ask your leadership to do a carbon footprint of your museum. I don't care how simple it is or how complex. Do a carbon footprint of your museum. Create a baseline and then start measuring against it because that will help everyone understand the role of environment and climate in museum operations. And then ask your curators and educators to talk about climate change and to position the museum in the discussion as an actor on behalf of the community on addressing climate change. Ask the planners to make some changes. Ask for sustainability topics and conferences. Ask them to continue to allow virtual participation. It's a socially responsible approach because more people can participate virtually than they can in person. And it reduces the amount of carbon impact from air travel or train travel or car travel. And if you decide to go in person, can you go by train and can you go with a carpool? So how can you reduce your energy transportation impacts on attending a conference? You can ask the folks who are planning your storage to think about energy efficiency, human access, you know, so when they design collection storage and the energy systems and the conditions for it, are they taking into account human access to that space? Or do we need to create schedules and access systems that support the efficiency of that storage space and operations in that storage space? Ask them to be thoughtful about size. You know, we design these storage places in order to have 10 more years of collecting. Does that make sense to have 10 more years of collecting space that we're currently conditioning and waiting to fill? And we can ask the folks that plan for disasters to plan for resilience. Don't just plan for a crisis and recover. Plan for surviving the crisis and coming out of it better than we were before. Preparing for many, not just 100-year floods, but prepare as if there will be a flood or there will be a heat event or there will be an energy event every single year. And how do we protect our institution from that? Protect our business, protect our collections, protect our people. And here's the ultimate example of proxy action. So the United States in April rejoined the Paris Agreement and the president announced a nationally determined contribution to the Paris goals of reducing our United States greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52 percent by the year 2030. When they made that announcement, they mentioned cultural institutions because cultural institutions have joined America as all in and we are still in. In making a point that this work to protect the climate is important to all of us. It requires all of society to participate and that means cultural institutions. The president of the United States didn't mention cultural institutions because we were silent and in the background. They included us in the calculations and in the announcement because we keep raising our hands and saying that we're important to our communities, we're important to climate action and we're here to help. That's proxy agency and that's something we're able to pull off. Now I'm going to pause right here and give us a chance to have all the questions. I'm going to turn off my screen. We're going to do our discussion and then when we feel like we've exhausted that, I've got about 10 more minutes of concluding slides I want to share with you. So I see we've got a few questions. We do and I would encourage everyone to put some questions in the Q&A box and we'll get to them as we go. But yes, we do definitely. I'll start with the first one that came in, which is where can I learn about disaster relief training? I'm not currently at a museum. Thanks. I'm sure somebody from AIC actually has a better answer than I do on that. I can give a couple just because I do some disaster planning as well. I live in Florida so I feel like most of my year is spent disaster planning. Hentiff, which is one of the big groups, is a good area to go to, the Heritage Emergency Network I think is their acronym or something along that line. Oh, excuse me, Heritage Emergency National Task Force. Go check them out. AIC has emergency planning and stuff, so I would check out their website as well. Another group I work with, ARCS, the Association of Registrar and Collection Specialists. There's an emergency subcommittee. They're actually running webinar training right now and it's made more for registrars and collections managers. I would encourage you to go check out that group if you were looking for like a webinar series. So there's quite a lot out there to kind of help out with disaster training and all that. So yeah, I would take a look for all those for sure. The next question says, a local organic market used TerraCycle for a wide number of materials and had a large bank of bins for the public to utilize. But subsequently, the market reported issues the way TerraCycle actually dealt with the materials and stopped using them. Perhaps this was a singular incident, but I wonder if anyone else has heard similar reports. Now there are other organizations that offer the same types of recycling services. So do you have any experience with any other groups like that, Sarah? I have found that some destinations like Whole Foods or particular agencies will be a collector of materials like recycling gloves and that's very locally based. I know that in DC, the Dumbarton House organized the local historic house group to have a collective for collecting gloves for recycling as a way to have enough to have it be worth shipping and so that individual sites host the glove collection in a cycle and then ship it off and then they have a partnership I believe with the hospital in order to build up the you know contribute their limited amount to the larger amount that gets recycled. So that's been very local. We are looking into that as part of that glove life life cycle assessment because TerraCycle and then Kimberly Clark are both options for recycling gloves, but Kimberly Clark only takes the ones that they produce. So we don't have a great answer yet and it tends to be local word of mouth is most useful. Yeah, and I should quickly add before I forget too that we're going to be talking a lot about different companies that do this kind of stuff because I do think it's important for us to share and I see people talking about it in the chat as well. But I have to say you know C2C Care and IMLS and FAIC we don't endorse any of these groups. We are literally just sharing information so people know kind of what's going on out there. Someone asked what programs do you use for digital paperwork? My institution has been struggling to find a centralized way to fill out condition reports, hand stuff out to volunteers without printouts. So Artichek seems to be one of the best available options for that or the ones that I have seen most frequently. I'm wondering if anybody else in the chat has an example that they can contribute? I don't have another good answer for that. Well, I also use on my iPad because I'm trying to go more digital myself. I use just GoodNotes. Like I downloaded the GoodNotes app which is just an app program unto itself and in that you can create all sorts of wackadoodle templates and forms and stuff like that and what's nice about the whole iPad world now is with the pencils you can write actually pretty normally. I mean it's still a little wonky for me personally, but that works well too. So there's a couple out there that you can use when it comes to digital condition reporting. Just as a heads up. Someone asked how do you establish your institution footprint? Where do I look for specialists? Okay, there are two parts to that question. The specialist part and the how to do it. The folks at World Resources Institute are the super data crunchers for doing for anything to do with climate and particularly to do with carbon footprints. And they have some excellent training programs on how to do scope one, two and three analysis of your greenhouse gas emissions. I've taken those training programs and I do not do scope one, two and three analysis of emissions. It is highly complex, but there is a global certification approach that sets out guidelines for everyone in order to do accurate reporting that would align with the nationally determined contribution and go to the Paris Agreement. So that's one whole level of approach. The other levels of approach are much more accessible calculators and I encourage you to use those because they at least give you a reference of information and an awareness of the process of collecting data and figuring out where your impacts are. So any carbon footprint calculator that you Google is will give you a general understanding of what your emissions are based on travel distance and type and the energy that you use and a little bit maybe about waste. I think the best one for you to use is energy star portfolio manager because it will help you do energy, waste and water. You can also do transportation calculator someplace else because EPA is focused on your building. You can also use a transportation calculator for commuting and going to conferences and things like that and you can put those numbers together and come up with your own carbon footprint. What matters is that you establish the method approach and tools and you write it down in a reliable way, creating a baseline for a year that for you is normal. So don't do it during a COVID year 2020 it was not normal. Go to 2019 for your baseline or preferably something like 2015. Establish your baseline and then continue to measure it each year in order to show where there is change. Energy star portfolio manager is free and it will give you the reports that show you the graphs, the lovely graphs you can share with your board that says how much your energy has gone down. It will tell you how much money you save and what the greenhouse gas emissions are. So I'd go to energy star portfolio manager and they have really good tutorials and how to sheets. Great thank you. This is important with anything we do right because most of us are working in collections so most of us are behind the scenes. So what are some strategies to increase stakeholder buy-in to prioritize this type of work? Tell me who your stakeholder is. I'll throw one out while she answers. Let's say your stakeholder is your I'll just say like the director. Let's say the director. Okay so this is a long answer. You can adapt and apply it to other stakeholders. But what you're asking is for somebody else to agree that what you want to do is the thing to do. That's stakeholder buy-in. You may have to change their mind so let's assume this person doesn't feel the same way you do. Then what you're doing now is behavior change management. The green stuff comes later. You are doing behavior change management and we know that people who share values are able to and therefore have something that they agree upon then have grounds in which or into making taking the neptsticks of what they want to do. So establishing what your shared values are and Catherine Hayhoe that climate scientist I mentioned at the beginning who's Canadian but lives in Texas can have a conversation with anyone about climate change and find common value and when she was asked to say what's your elevate you get into the elevator with somebody who doesn't believe in climate how do you have a conversation with them and she said well let's assume we're in Texas and for all of us quality of life is important and water happens to be critical for quality of life. Another thing that's likely important is family your children and that you want them to have quality of life in the future. Climate change is affecting the quality of drinkable water and access to drinkable water in Texas and it's also driving storm events that bring climate damage so they can start from a conversation about the importance of a water access for the future of Texas and have a conversation about climate change. So in the conversation with the director is the director motivated by the bottom line then where you save money on energy or materials or anything else is the place that you start having the conversation with the director. If the director is interested in what the public thinks of what they do then the question is does the public already want to see climate action in which case you're helping the director serve the public in the way the public is asking for it or is the public not so sure about climate action and the director's afraid of the risk involved with it in which case you have to help the director see where there are actions you can take that have lower risk or you have to explain how the risk is perceived not real. So depending upon what motivates that person is where you take your approach. I long ago gave up my hopes that people would just do this because it's the right thing. I don't care why they do it I just care that they do it and if it's because of money if it's because of status it's because of convenience that they do green things that is good enough for me and that's what I speak to and whatever it is that motivates that particular person. But let's say you just establish that okay they see all right they're willing to do it but gosh it's so hard because I got so much else to do. Then your job is to help them understand how they can accomplish this while doing the other things at the same time. So how does this work fit into their current practice and how do you make it easier and you might almost have to babysit them make it really easy simple steps here are the instructions that help them get over that barrier of the first steps and then it does get easier and after they do that first one the next one will be easier. So getting buy-in is behavior change it takes a lot of time and you can't allow yourself to be too frustrated by it because the end goal is worth it and if you go in knowing that this will take a while but have lasting impacts then it's really worth the investment in my opinion. That was great thank you and she did clarify she was talking about like directors advisory boards the board of director you know any of that kind of group so I think finding any of these little ways to talk about this are incredibly important. The other thing someone said is that the image the photo with the sea turtle with the plastic straw stuck in this nose is a powerful image and I agree like I live as many of you know I live in the Florida Keys so there's a very it's very heightened down here where everyone has paper straws everywhere and everyone's very aware of all this kind of stuff and it's interesting to me that as soon as I leave I go back to the land of everyone you see like not paying attention so it's always very like almost like a culture shock whenever I go to other places so it's it's super interesting. Yeah someone says can you speak more about how the 70 Fahrenheit 50 50 percent RH environmental monitoring requirement is being reevaluated and updated. Tell me more about reevaluated and updated my I don't look at it that way I look at it as it's gone the discussion has gone silent and it needs to be restarted that the science continues to expand and that the only I wouldn't say reevaluate I'm saying we're restarting the discussion because people got lazy it was easy to not tackle this complex problem but it's even more urgent now that we do and that's why I feel so strongly about restarting the conversation we've done all the work to figure out how to make these changes we've cleared all the paths we established all the shared values and then we got lazy and we need to restart the conversation in a way that helps people prioritize this because heck if you spend less energy on keeping that flat line which you do by by not trying to keep that flat line you save energy you that directly translates to money for your mission you have to do it in partnership with conservators and object history and the engineers who understand the capacity of your particular system and then you have to monitor it in order to get it right so this is an investment in time but it's good collections care and the systems we have can do this they can do it very well they can't necessarily do the 70 50 most of them don't and if you put in your system in the 70s and you haven't changed it anything you do to upgrade that system will save you so much energy why not do the two things at once establish better parameters while you're resizing and replacing your systems to effectively care for the collections you have and when you have that science of what the objects need and the science of your carbon footprint and your energy use and you put them together in a grant application for a new HVAC system you have a much easier case to make than hey I just need a new furnace yeah it's interesting with the 70 50 thing too because I remember when I first started it was that was what I was taught and this would have been like in the mid-oaks right I was told 70 50 70 50 70 50 and then you know as even as late like 10 years ago it feels like people were like that's not really true you know what I mean like that you need to really look at more not creating fluctuations for the health of the object right you don't want that to happen and then also talking about energy consumption and that kind of thing so it's interesting to me that this idea of 70 50 is still prevalent so much with everyone because it is still seems to be being taught somewhere and I'm trying to figure out where you know what I mean to try to nip it in the bud that sort of talking about this that gets us to that behavior change issue another thing of establishing values shared values the other thing is you establish shared values but you have to understand what the mental models are that drive people to make all these decisions and choices this way one mental model three mental models for the museum field are 70 50 highest and best practice and everything matters you put all three of those things together and we are built to control to perfection so it's hardwired into us to do this and rethinking that is very very challenging and everything is so complex that whenever you have an easy rule to remember and follow your tired brain is just going to go to that because you don't have enough time and energy in order to sort out the difference which is why individually we're not going to fix that problem we need to commit the sector to examining it together investing together our resources to solving the one problem to make it easier for everyone to implement it just needs to come back to the top of the list yeah I agree and what you just said about how those three things that you're taught I mean like the big thing and you if you guys have been to see to see care webinars before you've heard me say over and over again is that you do the best you can right you do the best you can with your budget what supplies you have what you can do it would be great if you could do everything perfectly but like most of us don't have an unlimited budget in every institution has the the scary stuff that you know usually you can trade those stories over a conference bar you know what I mean you kind of be like yeah no we have some crazy stuff out back so like everyone has that stuff so I like the idea that you're like those are the three tent pulls that you have to almost reeducate yourself against when you're actually out working in the real world and being kind of like okay let's really look at what we have and what we can do within our scope you know what I mean and that's that's really important on all those bits going back to the gloves thing because I know this has been a topic that has come up again if the gloves are being used to handle objects with pesticides and stuff can they still be recycled and then other people were asking kind of before with gloves it feels like it's been a challenge sometimes for a lot of people to find places to either take the gloves off their hands or if you're using reusable gloves to wash them because you're like okay am I if I washed them after I've dealt with this kind of stuff that I'm sending all these chemicals down the water supply you know what I mean so I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more just about glove usage and kind of what your recommendations are well the reason the glove problem is still a problem is because it is so complex and it's hard to see all of the parts of the system so you don't know how to make a choice so that's why I really am going to reserve my comments until after the life cycle assessment project has been done because we are looking at that we did a survey in order to understand how often people wash cotton gloves for example and what types of detergent they use when washing those gloves we asked how many they used and what types they use and we use that sort of as a reference point to understand the boundaries of our assessment project and now the engineers are looking at all of the energy that goes into harvesting the materials or collecting the materials the energy that goes into putting those materials together to make a glove the chemicals that are involved in that and the impacts of the materials themselves all put together into a glove and then the glove comes to you we're using an estimate of 500 miles we're not we can't make it geolocated then it comes to you and they're examining the case of how it is most likely to be used in a museum and so that's a certain amount of impact and then disposal so that life cycle assessment report will talk about all of those things for the impact of the particular glove you still have to decide what you're going to use that how you're going to use that glove in your collections care and management but we'll tell you about the impacts of the glove during the usual types of collections care and management that's great thank you and someone put just put in the q&a box a comment rather than a question there are plenty of examples of museums that are doing inspiring things environmentally thinking more broadly beyond collections care the fits Pittsburgh just won am sustainability excellence award so people might want to go check out that for sure and yeah that's a really good point as i like the idea of looking outside of looking outside of just collections care because there's other things that you can help out with you know what i mean to handle that um what else it says love the point about temperature and humidity parameters and object history it's something that isn't talked about enough monitoring condition of objects over time or perhaps there was an optimal temperature and humidity control can provide valuable data and insight so yeah i agree with that that just seeing kind of what's happening with these objects i think will be very important someone just put in the chat where can i find more information on a tiered approach to collecting or is cheered more of an approach when deaccessioning i think it's more of an approach for deaccessioning and for degree of care but absolutely prioritizing which things you collect from a climate point of view i think would be critical and yesterday i was trying to find it i have the image of collections avalanche you know and reynie tisdale's book that it just came to me reynie tisdale's book she wrote it with at least one if not two other authors on this approach to collections it it's awesome and i encourage you to consider it and if we step back to the 70 50 um i saw janice's comment thank you about how you know conservators figured this out a long ago and they did they did um and conservators often don't have a voice at the table the national endowment for the humanities sustaining cultural heritage collections project has given conservators more of a voice on this particular issue and so in the places with those grants they've been able to um have influence and folks at getty conservation did great research anthropological research on the role of human practice in creating this kind of change and the role of the conservator and the voice of the conservator and the lack of agency for conservators which is just a crime and um the the point is that we need to build up that voice of the collections manager and the conservator to say hey this is the important decision to make and i have a contribution to that and that's collective cooperative effort all of the conservators saying this is important we're doing it everyone should be talking about it uh is very valuable and all the curators and collections managers backing them up and asking for policy to reinforce it especially around loans so that you can send objects to places and not require them to have these ridiculously high standards that they may not be able to keep anyway so talking about it and backing each other up really matters well and that also opens up the idea of people maybe institutions or facilities that can't do those standards because of lack of funding or um minority museums or any of those places like i again i live in pretty much close to the caribbean and there's lots of museums around even down here plate tourist places that they don't have a c or their a c controls are very different right and whenever we walk into those places often go with family members who are like they need to a c everything and i'm like that would be a lot like it was like and also the objects aren't used to that so that's like asking the objects to go through a lot to all of a sudden be like air conditioning you know what i mean like it's it it would be hard for them but anyway you can open up parameters for other groups to loan your stuff or to get access to some of these collections that come from institutions that maybe couldn't be able to handle them or have them because of these conditions i'm all for like i'm like yes we need to look at making sure collections get out there especially to you know less represented communities and stuff and don't let the invite don't let these stringent environmental conditions that aren't really even true stop the collections from getting out there you know what i mean to for educational programming and that kind of thing like that makes sense if you're to extend that theme past the border to the united states if your museum has these really strict standards for things that don't necessarily require it so we're not having a discussion about paper for example um for objects that have been proved beyond those current conditions or didn't require it anyway um think about the ability to then loan them outside of the country to nations who don't operate their museums that way shutting them off from our collections because of our standards is really inappropriate unless it really is critical for the object yeah yeah i don't think any of us want to be put in the position where we're saying no you can't handle it's it's almost as big colonialist you know what i mean it's like you can't handle your those objects that maybe came from your country originally like that's very like you don't want to be in that position over something like this in my opinion for sure definitely thank you um i think we've hit the end of our questions right now so i'm going to go ahead and hand this back over to you to finish out your presentation um i will say we'll keep checking y'all keep checking the chat while we're doing this and i'll also remind everyone that if you go to the website for this page we have sarah's presentation and we have some other resources there but i'm going to let you take back over and you can finish out your presentation whenever you're ready all right thank you i'm i mean i'm delighted at how many um people stayed through the discussion uh and how active the discussion was and thank you all for your contributions to the chat uh i wanted to wrap it up because sometimes in the discussion you lose sight of some of the points that were earlier in the presentation and so i just want to do a reset and a remind so choosing where to start you know there's so much to be done and some of it is hard that you don't have to start with the hardest stuff or you won't last in this fight start with the stuff that's important to you where you have passion skill curiosity or something that bugs the heck out of you because that's where you'll be able to really invest and see it through and i regularly tell the story of jerry fowst at dumbarton house when i was there probably eight years ago doing an operations audit for sustainability at this historic site and i said so is there something that really bugs you because usually the thing that bugs you is a place to start everybody's motivated to look into it and to make progress and it's easier to accomplish something then and he reached into his pocket and he pulled out a glove and he said this this is driving me crazy and that started me on my pursuit of a glove solution and it wasn't until we got to lca that i was felt like we had any way that we could really address it so sometimes it is long but those things that really drive you are the things that you are most particularly prepared to contribute to the field i mean i don't know what your job is you know what your job is you know your job better than anyone else so you will make better choices about what to tackle there so if that's the thing that drives you crazy or makes you happy that's really to where you should invest your energy you don't let people draw you into conversations that don't satisfy your passion but when you have choices among a few things to do choose the one that affects the widest group of people and or reduces greenhouse gas emissions the most and or has the most co-benefits i mean really the thing that influence that has greater impact is the thing to go for if you can and just do it pick the thing that calls for you and see what you can do to build it into something more now okay lots of words you can't read them all this is in the pdf but this is a summary of activities with the different three types of agency and how you might apply them so if we were to take min max temperature and relative humidity individual agency is to read sustainable preservation practices and start or feed the conversation at your institution collective agency is to talk about it ask for discussions at conferences ask for lists of grant funders who support that kind of work ask for case studies of groups that have done this collect the case studies yourself maybe all the folks here will commit to sharing their story if they've done that work proxy agency ask aic to figure out how it can best contribute to the widespread adoption of these guidelines it doesn't mean that aic has to do it but how can it help facilitate that conversation on behalf of the sector another example let's do treat an object individual agencies use the stitch tool look for alternatives to the things you currently use in your materials collective agency on treating an object vote with your budgets by purchasing materials or not in pursuit of better materials for collections care good for collections care good for the climate proxy agency for object treatment tell epa to ban substances where appropriate and tell nsf to invest in research for better substances that you can use in collections care and management that aren't bad for climate so this whole chart is just an example of things but it's available as a pdf on the website so you can have a look at it and think about the things that you'd like to do and so i'm asking you now to make a list for yourself of three things at each level of agency that you'd like to pursue that doesn't mean you're going to start them all today but put them on your list of the accomplishments accomplishments you'd like to make at each of these levels i'm really hopeful despite the terrible things that are happening about climate because so many of you came today and stayed so long because aic asked that this topic be presented because awesome people like sarah numberg matt eckleman and sarah sanchez are working so hard on the stitch project with me who's not a scientist in order think of think about how to provide life cycle assessment to make it easier for all easier for us all to make educated choices in our work and then people like shannon norts she's helping us do that um glove lca and she's helped she created the survey she was motivated this is something that's important to her and she's working with us on it so people like her make me feel hopeful the whole held in trust team which is part an aic project funded by the national endowment humanities crazy smart motivated people who are trying to come up with solutions for a sustainable and thriving cultural heritage sector on every level because any age is funding things like the life cycle assessment project and held in trust and because the white house actually set out loud cultural institutions that gives me hope that we're going to create change that'll be good for all of us now when the webinar closes today you might feel some things about climate or about your job or the things you want to do maybe you won't but maybe you will if any of those things are worries or frustration want you to acknowledge understand appreciate that those things are real feelings anxiety depression frustration anger they are real and they don't go away and they don't go away by themselves so do talk with other people about those feelings and the things that you want to accomplish you can always call and talk to me about them and you can call and tell me about the good things as well but you can call and talk me talk to me when you're anxious or concerned or frustrated but do do something the doing is scientifically proven to improve our attitudes and our feelings of agency taking action makes us feel better and more committed to climate action and do remember how happy I am that you came today so when the webinar closes and everything silent remember all of those things glad you came today you've got good things to do now and you've got good peers to do them with thank you very much and I'll work a little longer in case there are any questions thank you Sarah um while we're kind of closing out everything I'll let everyone know that we put a link to our survey for this webinar in the chat so if you take a few minutes to do that it would be appreciated um ever is a lot of thank yous happening so thank you to Sarah in the chat right now so yeah just huge thank you this was great and it you do get moments sometimes I think lately just because of the world um for the past like year and a half almost two years that you're just kind of like just feel downtrodden and kind of worn out so hearing all these kind of actionable things and hearing just your your talk and you feel a little better you know and I mean knowing that like there are some things you can do and there's people like you out there hoping to arrange stuff like that so it's greatly appreciated um thank you to Learning Times for producing this webinar today thank you to IMLS and FAIC and um with that I'm gonna close everything out and please join us for our upcoming webinars and again thank you Sarah for everything really appreciate it thank you everyone I appreciate the notes that's kind I will keep paddling see you all next month and thanks again