A Cli-Fi Museum Grows in Brooklyn

 

View full screen

A concept sketch for New York’s proposed climate-change museum
by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson.

 

Photo Art Credit / Courtesy Olafur Eliasson

One recent morning on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a troupe of two-year-olds, strapped into their strollers, sat around the grand entrance to the newly renovated Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

 

At ten o’clock, just as the museum’s doors were opening, a lawyer named Miranda Massie arrived.

 

The Cooper Hewitt is the seventh Manhattan museum that she has visited this year. She’s looking for ideas for her own museum—a museum devoted to climate change.

 

Massie is thinking big, and thinking long-term, as in centuries.

 

The occupants of the strollers that she followed through the old Carnegie Mansion’s doors are her target audience, starting in a few years, and if they’re lucky they’ll still be visiting her museum in 2100, when the sea level around New York will likely be four feet higher than it is today.

 

Massie told Carolyn Kormann of the New Yorker, who famously opined in 2013 that the cli fi term would not last more than a year, taht she had the idea of the project in 2012, a few weeks after Hurricane Sandy.

 

“It was a question of: What’s missing?” she said. There were climate-policy organizations and academic centers, like Columbia University’s Earth Institute, but nothing that she knew of for the broader public. “If we have a museum for skyscrapers, mathematics, Himalayan art, food and drink, the First Amendment, then we absolutely should have a museum of climate in the United States,” she said.

 

Massie Googled ''cli-fi'' and then “climate museum,” assuming that such an institution already existed or was in the works.

 

Not in this USA.

 

There is a small one in Hong Kong—the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change—which Massie is visiting next week.

 

And there's a small one in Taiwan called The Museum of Cli-Fi and housed in a small viewing platform in the 8th floor of a building overlooking distant 9,000 feet high mountains of the Central Mountain Range.

 

And then there’s the Klimahaus, in Bremerhaven, Germany—“Be amazed, sweat, and freeze”—which features a climatic tour down the eighth meridian. (“I don’t understand a climate museum that neglects climate change, or fails to foreground it,” Massie said. “It’s the preëminent science, development, tech, health, finance, and social question for our species.”)

 

MORE ONLINE SOMEWHERE IN THE MILKY WAY GALAXY. GOOGLE FOR DETAILS.

BONUS ITEM:

There will never be a Climate Museum in the USA run by Miranda Massie and here's why: she's a well-intentioned, good-hearted progressive liberal who graduated from Hotkiss in 1984 and is really concerned about the fate of humankind and in a Eureka Moment a few years she had a vision: build a climate change museum in America and change the world. Influence world leaders with the museum. Influence UN people. Influence future IPCC reports. As if. As if her museum will even get off the ground!

It won't get off the ground because... it's a dumb idea and there's too much controversy in the USA over the way to tackle climate change and AGW and if if climate change is real. So this museum project, just the project, not the museum itself which will of course never be built, the project will just in the crosshairs of all all the people who believe AGW is real and all the people who are skeptics and denialists. As a result, the museum will never get built, and the very news of such a hairbrained idea that was really well thought out beforehand will attract the skeptics and denialists to attack the museum and the "science" inside it BEFORE it even gets built. Massie is a dreamer, but her dream is destined to fail. Here's why: there are no happy solutions and fixes, Miranda. The human species is doomed, doomed, in the next 30 generations and your museum project is barking up the wrong true. Do-gooders cannot tackle climate change and AGW. We are past that poitn now. Your museum, despite having great PR press contacts via your friends at the New York Times and the New York magazine, VIP pals in the PR world and VIP pals in the money world, do make the museum a reality. It's a pipeline. You'd be better off writing a cli fi novel. Or make a cli fi movie.

A museum aint gonna change a thing.

Sure, there is an exhibit at the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change in Hong Kong highlighting the threat of climate change to polar regions. But it does even even prod or push Hong Kong's master the Chinese Communist Party thugs and the PRC Communist China, which is huge emitter of CO2, to stop its emissions and face up to the reality of climate change. So the musem in Hong Kong accomplishes little except give kids on school field trips a fun time.

While

Miranda Massie came to Hong Kong to visit what she told a New York Times blogger is ''the world’s only museum specifically devoted to an issue that many people, including herself, view as the most pressing one facing humankind.'' She’s the executive director of the Climate Museum Launch Project, a group based in New York that is seeking in a kind of Don Quixote tilting at windmilss kind of way with no real hope of ever getting the thing off the ground, because it just won't take in the USA, for reasons every reader knows and understand, but yes, she wants to build a similar, but far bigger and more ambitious, museum in Manhattan. As if. It will never happen.

Photo

Miranda Massie, executive director of the Climate Museum Launch Project.

PR Photo Credit: Courtesy of Miranda Massie

“There’s allegedly some research somewhere but I cannot give you the link right now which currently shows the more people learn about climate, the more they tend to emotionally shut down and disengage,” Massie told the NYT. “Not everybody, but most people. Because it’s distressing and because it’s very clear that just changing the light bulbs in your own home doesn’t matter. So you have to make it clear that you’re part of a broader set of efforts and those broader efforts can succeed.”

The Hong Kong museum occupies one floor of a high-rise building on a university campus. The museum’s goal, according to its program director, Dr. Cecilia Lam, is to raise awareness of climate change in Hong Kong, especially among children. It's for kids. Doesn't really tackle the big issues.

“The major difference between our project and Miranda’s — it seems to me that they focus on the whole world,” Lam said. “Our main group of targets is people in Hong Kong.”

Massie, in her late 40s, who worked for years as a public-interest lawyer, is looking for donors. Money. From rich donors. She hopes to set up an interim museum, bigger than the one in Hong Kong, in an office building or even on a barge in New York in the next two years, with a permanent site in Manhattan (or possibly Brooklyn) by 2020. As if.

Massie’s goal is ambitious. The New York museum would aim to attract at least a million visitors a year and seek to influence the world, including political leaders in the United States. At the end of the tour, visitors would be encouraged to volunteer their time to help groups that are trying to address climate change: doing anything from making calls on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council to volunteering to help elect a candidate who is determined to reduce carbon emissions.

“We want to be a hub for the world for climate solutions,” Massie said. “We want to be a beacon for the world.”

“I came to see climate change specifically is going to determine our fate as a species in a way that none of these other things is capable of doing,” she said.

Poppycock, Miranda. All the fawning New Yorker pieces by Carolyn Kormann -- which read more like paid PR pieces than real journalism -- and equally fawning Sinoblogs by Michael Forsythe of the New York Times -- which also read like paid PR pieces rather than real journalism -- will not make the poppycock any more meaningful.

Sure you'll get a lot of press. Sure, some rich liberals will give you money. Sure you will get some blueprints done up. But you will never break ground on this dream project. Pursuing this silly pipedream will only break you.

Think about it.