 Hello and welcome to Conservators Combating Climate Change, a new podcast series by the American Institute for Conservation's Emerging Conservation Professionals Network. I'm Emma Hartman, and I'm Natalia Swanson, and we're so excited to be hosting this series that we hope will inform, empower, and inspire action in conservation and collections care professionals at every stage of their career. This podcast is generously supported by the Department of Art Conservation at the University of Delaware in honor of Bruno Pugliott. We're so grateful to the University of Delaware and to the entire AIC and ECPN community for supporting us in this new venture. We're related to welcome our first guest speaker, Henry McGee, to the conversation today. Henry's background is as a bird ecologist, and he has always centered his career around the environment and environmental issues. Henry has led collections-related work in museum settings, and he was head of the Manchester Museum's curatorial team for nearly two decades. At present, he works with everyone from individuals to museums to coalitions to accelerate partnerships, research, collections-based projects, and public engagement in support of a better future, locally and globally. Henry actively works with museums on climate change and sustainability, notably on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. He's a member of the International Union of Nature Conservation Commission on Education and Communication, and the International Council of Museums Sustainability Working Group, where he advises on how to mainstream the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement. Okay, well, welcome to the program, Henry. We're so excited to have you here with us today. Thanks for the opportunity to be here with you in these very strange times. Yeah, thank you so much for being here, Henry. So as our first guest in this series, we'd like to start with something a bit broad and ask you to talk a bit about what sustainability means to you and how sustainability then relates to climate change. Sure. So, I mean, sustainability is a bit like one of these kind of mystery words. It's a word that you hear a lot, but if you were to ask people to explain what they mean by it, they're often sometimes a bit unclear, and part of the challenge of that is that if people haven't got a kind of shared language or of a concept, then they're not necessarily talking about the same thing. And so one of the best ways I find to think about sustainability is to recognise what it's not. And so as I look around in the society we live in and you look at the kind of system that we live in, it seems to me to be really, really unsustainable. Like I go to the supermarket, I try to buy produce that's going to not have such a negative environmental impact, but often I don't have the choice because the choice isn't there. And so sustainability, although it's easy to kind of trot off definitions of these things, you know, like the most common one is the the Bruntland Commission definition from 1987 that about sustainable developments, development that needs the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. And that's the most popular one, but there's a bit of a mouthful. And really sustainability and sustainable development to me are they're about responsibility and they're about acknowledging that we're all connected to the world around us, that what we do has an impact, whether it's a big one or a small one. But by the same token, the world around us has an impact on us. And I mean, my background is as an ecologist and I mean, I know a few people who work on sustainability museums and we've got a similar kind of background. We're from an ecology background and whether that kind of predisposes you to be thinking about sustainability. But I've got lots of other people and people have worked with from different fields and they would all kind of say the same thing. Like, I know I've worked with archaeologists and they would say, oh, of course, our work is about the connections between people and their environment now and in the past. And so maybe each of us, you know, all of us with our different career paths and our different contributions, we all have a part to play in sustainability. It's maybe means slightly different things to us. But generally, it's about, I think, is just having some kind of interest and attention to the future. It's like working with the future in mind. I think it's really interesting to frame sustainability in terms of what it's not, you know, perhaps an easier concept to kind of grasp onto. Do you mind talking a little bit about how the conversation of sustainability is related to the narrative about climate change? Yeah, well, so I think what I'd say about this is like when you're faced with kind of mass media reports about climate change, very quickly, you can literally in one paragraph, very literally in a paragraph in the newspaper, you can see something that goes from climate change to biodiversity to sustainability. And sometimes even the Anthropocene, you know, just to throw in another huge concept. And these are all exactly that. They're all huge concepts and they're not necessarily the same thing. And so to talk about the relationship between sustainability and climate change, I think what I'd say is very often the way climate change is presented is as if climate change is a big, scary, you know, kind of big monster that's coming to get us as some kind of judgment for an unsustainable lifestyle. But in a way, climate change is just the symptom of something else. Climate change is the symptom, a pretty serious symptom of, as I say, our unsustainable relationship with the world around us. That's the way that we consume resources and we produce our waste is actually putting the planet's atmosphere, the gases in it, out of the balance that was there before. And so the way I would think about sustainability and climate change, it's a little bit like if any of the listeners have seen the film Fight Club, where the lead guy is kind of fighting against something. And that's a bit like the way that climate change is, you know, the kind of popular narrative of how we relate to climate change. It's something you've got to fight against. And then at the end of the film, the guy realises he's fighting against himself. And I think it's that kind of recognition is that the way that we address climate change in a way is not by addressing climate change, it's by addressing everything else because it's everything else that contributes to climate change. So climate change will be addressed through just to go through, just to pick some examples from the top of my head. Climate change will be addressed through the way we shop. Climate change will be addressed through the way we work, through the way we throw away our waste and through the way we use our energy. And because, so just to give a kind of parallel example, we'd be looking at this coronavirus situation we have. You think, oh, well, coronavirus, that's a disease, that's a health issue. Then we quit, you know, as we see health issues are social issues that are environmental issues that are economic issues. These things are all tied together. And the idea of sustainability is that you can't think about, you know, the economy and society and the environment as if they live on different planets. They're all part of the same thing. And so, I mean, the model, one of the most popular models for sustainability is think it looks a bit like a bull's eye on a centre of the world. It's that there's the environment as the outer sphere circle and then society exists within the environment and the economy exists within that. And that's a kind of nice idea, particularly for environmentally minded people because it kind of grounds people that, oh, well, of course, the environment's the biggest one, we all exist within that. But a few years ago, when the sustainable development goals were put together in 2015, they were kind of rephrased a bit as these things called five Ps, which makes it super easy to remember that sustainability is balancing considerations of people, planets, prosperity, peace and partnerships. So people, planet and prosperity are another way of saying like the old three pillars of sustainability, which would be people would be society, planet would be the environment and prosperity would be the economy. But there was this recognition that you need peace in order to grow the sustainable development goals and just as a steady basis for a result to live and exist in. But also that peace is an outcome of sustainability, a harmonious relationship between countries and sectors and reducing inequality would be great. It would make for a nice, peaceful world. But the thing that helps us get from where we are now to where we want to get to is partnerships. Partnerships are absolutely crucial because they're what enable you to do new things and to get us out of the kind of the wheel that we're on that's trashing the environment, to be honest. Can you talk a little bit about the role that museums play in kind of facilitating those partnerships or what are their responsibilities? Yeah, so I think what I'd say to that is some of the things that I said in the guide I did about the museums and the sustainable development goals is that there are estimated to be somewhere, well, the usual, the very common estimate you hear is that there are 55,000 museums in the world but that estimates about 30 years old. And then if you count up the number of museums that the different big regional networks and say maybe the American Alliance of Museums and the Network of European Museum Organisations already comes to more than 50,000. But if we reckon that there are about 80 to 100,000 museums in the world, well, what are they all about? There is a definition of what a museum is but these definitions are slightly ex, they're kind of slightly put together after the fact to make some kind of sense of all these different institutions that have got lots and lots of different histories and trajectories and so on. But if I was to think about what I think museums are all about and what kind of, what they share in common is surely some kind of attachment to the importance of education and of people's right to have knowledge and the chance to participate in their own culture. And so that kind of language starts to sound very like some of the articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that was put together after the Second World War about everyone has the right to cultural participation, everyone has the right to education, everyone has the right to leisure and I think it's those kind of, if museums kind of acknowledge that they're not self-evident institutions, they exist because they all have some kind of unwritten, tacit commitment that these things are important, whether it's in their admission statements or whatever, it doesn't really matter. And so that starts to make more sense to me than having all these different institutions all slightly doing their own thing because one of the challenges of that is that museums slightly lock the, let's go for something like, let's say they lock the culture for really very extensive partnerships. So if you were to think of something like libraries, libraries to me in the public imagination people are really super clear of what a library is and they're all roughly, they're all quite comparable in some kind of way. They are a kind of public service of a kind. If you were to think about museums, they're much more diverse in a way, they're very different. There are huge ones, there are really really small ones, there are community-run ones, there are national ones, and they just seem a little bit different. And so finding the models or the initiatives that museums can participate in that help them work in partnership is a really, really good thing to me, and that's why I totally love the sustainable development goals. And just to return to your questions, I've got a bit off the point about, what are museums' responsibilities? I think they have responsibilities to themselves, of course, in terms of safeguarding cultural and natural heritage, but they also surely have responsibilities to society. And it's very common to hear museums talk about how trusted they are, and if I'm honest, I find some of that slightly complacent, because they're trusted by the people who trust them and completely mistrusted by the people who don't. And so trust is an earned thing, and also trust is something that if it's lost, it's really, really hard to rebuild. So to me, if museums are to fulfil trust, then they have to be attendant to the world around them, looking at, well, what's going on outside? What do they have inside? Put the two things together to make some kind of public value. And I don't mean that museums have to be these kind of old fashioned heroic institutions that are the last word and provide the expert voice and all that kind of thing, because that's really old hat. But it's to acknowledge that they have a part to play, but so does everyone else. And it's not to say that they can play the part, but they need to be at the centre of things and all that kind of thing, because that just sounds like competition. But it's to say that all sectors of society have a part to play, and society will work better with museums than without them if they play their part. And so what do I think museums can do, or what responsibilities do they have? I think museums do, in a way, museums have much greater freedom than politicians, because politicians have to balance lots and lots of competing interests, all this kind of thing. If museums are surely in the business of some, surely they're in the business of upholding human rights, that would seem to be the most basic foundation for them to operate from. Because if they didn't, that would almost sound illegal if not immoral. And so this is nothing to say that it's not the same as talking about museums taking sides, because that's something completely different. But if museums do have a role in society, it is to bring different sectors of society together and imagine and debate and create the futures that the public and communities want to build, drawing on their resources, their collections, their exhibitions and so on. And so I'll give you an example around climate change. So climate change is based on this biggest assessment that's done each year is the global risk that is most likely to occur and will have the most serious impact. It's already here, it's already happening. But if you were to look at how many museums are really embracing the importance of climate change, and I don't just mean in terms of doing the odd exhibition or the odd event, I mean really embracing the seriousness of the situation and what it means for them as a sector. I'm afraid it's not that many. And so this is how it comes to, it's not just institutions who have roles. That's a bit like saying that everything depends on the government telling us what to do. That's just not how society works. It's about us all recognising we all have a part to play, whether we're an individual worker in a tiny museum, it doesn't matter if you're an individual worker in a huge museum, it doesn't matter. You're still an individual worker. And we all have a sphere of influence that we can work in. And that's where I think responsibility comes in. It's not just about professional responsibility or sectoral responsibility, it's just about personal responsibility. Yeah, absolutely. I think the idea that museums can be centres of collaboration and community is really powerful. Henry, you mentioned your museums and sustainability or sustainable development goals guide briefly just now. Do you want to talk a bit more about that and perhaps a bit more about how that guide might pertain to conservation and collections care professionals? Yeah, so I'll explain why I wrote the guide. Like I wrote it last summer. It was published last August. And I mean, if I'm honest, one of the things, like I have enough self-awareness to know is one of the things I'm pretty good at is spotting a model that I totally love models. If I see a model, I think, well, how could we apply that? How can that help us move forward? And I saw the Sustainable Development Goals a few years ago and they're just totally brilliant. I'll explain the reason why is that I mentioned before that one of the challenges for museums is that if they don't have a kind of common language, common goals, then they're always going to be kind of scattergun, you know, each doing their own thing. And that's really problematic because it doesn't, it prevents them from making collective, a collective impact. And the other reason I love the Sustainable Development Goals is that, I mean, they were put together as a follow-on from the Millennium Development Goals, which had run from 2000 to 2015. And the Millennium Development Goals were about seeking to address poverty and poor health in the Global South. And they had some, they had a lot more success than you generally see, but that's another story. But when they were looking for the revised programme, there was a recognition that, you know, we have one planet, you can't just deal with problems in one place without, you know, perhaps the problems are generated somewhere else. And so the Sustainable Development Goals were put together as a much, much more ambitious programme. And they were launched, well, they were agreed at the end of 2015 and really launched in 2016. And one of the reasons I totally love them is because the 17 goals and the 169 targets that support them were not put together by the United Nations or governments. They were put together by a big exercise that involved lots of different sectors. And so the reason I like this is because rather than museums saying, oh, well, you know, we're museums, we can do all these things, which of course they maybe can, but that's also just museums talking from an internal viewpoint. It's not from an external need. And so the 17 goals and the 169 targets were put together through this exercise. And I think the important thing to recognise as well is that the goals and the targets are not an end in themselves. They are the means for achieving something else which is called the Agenda 2030, Transforming Our World. And if people aren't familiar with it and want a really warm, fuzzy feeling, then please have a read of the vision that's in Transforming Our World. It's really easy to get on the Internet. And it's basically about setting the world on a path to a sustainable future by 2030, looking at reducing inequality within and between countries and developing an economy that doesn't rely on trashing nature in the process. And so the 17 goals cover a range of things. There's on poverty, on health, on the economy, on jobs, on consumption and production, on conserving nature and peace and justice and partnerships. I'm not going to trot them all off because it's 17, it's too many. And what I realised was these were such a fantastic opportunity for museums, not just because museums can benefit from them, but because here's an agenda that museums can participate in. So rather than museums going, oh, we're really, really important, you know, we've got all this great stuff, really the museums are much more credible if others can see them playing a part in an initiative. And they certainly have different parts to play in. So I wrote this guide to help them get started. I spent a long time thinking about the goals and targets and I used to work in museums for a long time, for nearly 20 years. What I did was look at, well, what are the things that museums do and how do they kind of align with the different goals and targets? And so I came up with my own model, which has these seven key activities and I will trot them off because I can remember them, to protect and safeguard cultural and natural heritage, both in museums and in the wider world, to support education for the sustainable development goals, to promote cultural participation for everyone, to support sustainable tourism, to support research that contributes to the sustainable development goals, to take internal museum decisions like management decisions and operational decisions that support the sustainable development goals, for instance, around energy use or waste, and lastly, to direct your partnerships and your collaborations to the sustainable development goals to map these against the targets and so that would cover around a third of the targets for the SDGs. There are some that museums are just not a very natural fit. And so the other great thing with the sustainable development goals is because they're already agreed by all countries, so they're a kind of universal programme, it already exists. It has lots of resources attached to it, not necessarily financial, but there are lots of resources you can pull on, you can draw on, and so in terms of how the impact it can have, so that guide, because I have it on a blog where you can see who downloads it, so that guide's been downloaded about 9,000 times now in pretty much every country in the world. And that's what I like to do, is to look for what is the kind of model that can help us collaborate and so on. And so I am very happy with that. And it's great to have opportunities to participate in things like this, to talk about them, because if people think that, oh, well, the sustainable development goals, that's all about governments, and that's all about the United Nations, it's totally, totally wrong. And when that goes back to the point I was making before about, we all have a sphere of influence. And actually in the agenda, it's set out as an invitation to all sectors and indeed every person to participate, because the future shouldn't just be something that we, it's not like where I was to leave the house tomorrow and get in a taxi and someone says, oh, I'm going to take you to this place. It's like, no, that's not how life should be like. We should occupy the future that we want. And we should occupy the future, and if we want to occupy the future we want, we also have a responsibility to make it that way. And so that I think applies to all of us. And so in terms of even very junior staff in museums or people who are interns or volunteers, it doesn't matter. And in a way I would say that, because I think quite a few of your listeners are younger people, that in a way younger people, I'm not going to come out with some really cheesy line about young people in the future, all that kind of thing. Thank you. But what I would say is that in people who are in the earlier parts of their career, they haven't got some of the bad habits that those of us who have been around for longer, that we think these fixed ideas in our mind about things have to be like this. So it's extremely helpful and very healthy for early career people just to, you know, when they're told something, well, it has to be like this, is to really, really challenge it, because very often that's just a kind of faulty thinking that actually perpetuates the wheel that I was talking about before. So for instance, like in terms of conservators, so if ever I hear someone say, well, you know, that such and such, that has to be exhibited at 50 lux, it's like we'll challenge that, you know, like rather than talking about absolutes, it's like, well, what would need to be put in place in order for it to be done differently, you know, and to look for alternatives and so on. And I would also say that, I mean, if conservators think, well, what have I got to do with sustainable development and so the one of the sustainable development goals is around sustainable consumption and production. And it's got something in it, it's got a target in it about chemicals and so on. As we all know, conservators use chemicals and some of them are not so nice. Or looking at lighting and just to, you know, just to challenge some of these things and look, well, we all produce weight, we all have negative impacts, like sustainable development is not about having a kind of beauty parade where some people go, oh, well, I'm fantastic, and everyone's go, well, I'm sorry, I'm terrible. That's totally the wrong way to look at it, like sustainable development is the commitment to change. It's about what your positive impacts are, your negative impacts, and making a conscious choice and saying, well, actually I want things to be different and recognizing that they're not going to be different by accident, they have to be different by design. Two things to say. One is that for those who are unfamiliar with your Museums and Sustainable Development Goals Guide, we will link to that blog post in our episode notes so that everyone can check it out for themselves. And secondly, Henry, maybe you could just say a brief word for those who aren't familiar with the concept of sphere influence. Just maybe we could round out the conversation where you could talk about what the premise of that is. I mean, I'm in the UK and it's, I mean, I know quite a few people, lots of people over here, lots of people all over the place, and some of the discussion would be along the lines of, isn't it terrible that a certain person who we don't need to name is withdrawing, is not that interested in climate change, like a polyclinical protection for argument. I mean, at the end of the day, I have no influence over those kinds of people, but I shouldn't let that get in the way of the influence that I do have. And so the idea of a sphere of influence is that if you imagine yourself and there's kind of consensual circles around you, there's things that you're very comfortable and safe with, and then there are things that are maybe a little bit more stretching and your sphere of influence, it might be working with different sectors or different people. It might mean within your own institution or more broadly. And then there's outside your sphere of influence. It's just like people in organisations, you're never ever going to influence, never in a million years. But some of that belief that you'll never influence and influence them in a million years is again just a self-generated fallacy that as you try things and you learn and you get better at them, if you keep going with it, that's actually how you grow your influence. And so actually the most interesting and effective place to operate is towards the edge of your sphere of influence, because that's how you grow your influence. But I mean, I'm not to sound like some kind of power crazy, and that's not what I'm talking about at all. For instance, if you're in an institution and it can be common for people in institutions to think, well, nobody understands me, nobody values my work. It's like, well, if you only talk to people who are like yourself and the people that you always deal with, things are never ever going to change. In fact, they're probably going to get worse. They need to kind of step out of it a bit and take the bit of the risk and just talk to people who are from perhaps other parts of the organization, other sectors and so on. And it's about, because that comes to partnership as well, like partnership isn't just between institutions, it's between different parts of an institution. And so I mean, one of the things I realised when I wrote that guide was that I had these seven key activities. And I was thinking about it and it's like, well, if a museum can develop them in all, in balance with one another, is actually how a museum will be sustainable as well. Because I mean, my experience can be sometimes museums, what happens seems to be a kind of slight tug of war between competing interests, between different groups of staff in an institution. And what happens is just the kind of, you know, it's a bit like a tug of war and in the middle, that's what happens. It doesn't have to be like that. It's that the more institutions and those that work in them can recognise that everyone has a part to play, they don't necessarily have the same part to play, that museums aren't necessarily one thing, they don't have one purpose. That's totally great. And that's what I mean about sphere of influence is slightly in the face of adversity as it sometimes seems, it's like, well, that's actually the time to be a little bit brave and perhaps invite someone from a different department or just say hello to someone from a different department and talk about your work. Because if people don't, if they don't understand one another's work, they're never going to value it. And in the same way, this is a totally scalable thing. So you could think about that in terms of within a museum or across a group of museums or a museum in a town. The more all the actors and sectors can understand what each has to offer, that's how we will, that's how sustainable development will happen. It won't happen from people with competing interests, doing their own thing and wishing things were the way they used to be. They're not the way they used to be. But it's like looking at working together, like what collectively do we want them to be like? What part can we play in that and getting on and doing it? Yeah, absolutely. Henry, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us today. I think this was a really, really exciting and empowering way to kick off this series. In closing, do you have anything else that you'd like to say to our listeners? Yeah, so one tiny, tiny piece of advice, like I would say, tomorrow won't be different from today by accident. You have to plan it. And so if you have heard anything interesting and you think, well, there are things that I would like to do, is just put a little tiny note in your diary about what is the thing that you're going to do tomorrow or the next day. And that's how it will start to become a habit. And it doesn't need to be a big thing. It can just be a tiny thing. But it's just about recognising that there's a difference that you want to make, understanding the options that you have to make that difference and then doing it and then reviewing it and enjoying it. That's it. It's super, super simple. And good luck. Thank you. That's really great advice. We so appreciate your time and sharing your information. Well, thanks for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it. And as I say, I just wish you all the best of luck with it. Thank you to everyone for joining us in this conversation. If you are interested in learning more about the topics we talked about today, please check out our episode notes. You'll also find our email address there. So please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or feedback about content or if you just want to talk. We hope everyone's staying safe and well and we will talk to you all soon with our next episode.