Toxic Heritage
About a new(ish) publication called Toxic Heritage, which includes a case study about Climate Museum UK and ways we tackle extractivism, put an eco lens on heritage collections and aim to create a culture of repair.
I was invited by Sarah May and Elizabeth Kryder-Reid to contribute to Toxic Heritage — a volume that addresses the heritage value of contamination and toxic sites and provides the first in-depth examination of toxic heritage as a global issue.
Bringing together case studies, visual essays, and substantive chapters written by leading scholars worldwide, the volume provides a critical framing of the globally expanding field of toxic heritage. Authors from several disciplinary perspectives and methodologies examine toxic heritage as both a material phenomenon and a concept. Organized into five thematic sections, the book explores the meaning and significance of toxic heritage, politics, narratives, affected communities, and activist approaches and interventions. It identifies critical issues and highlights areas of emerging research on the intersections of environmental harm with formal and informal memory practices, while also highlighting the resilience, advocacy, and creativity of communities, scholars, and heritage professionals in responding to the current environmental crises.
My piece is Case Study 8 — Climate Museum UK: Practices in Response to the Traumasphere.
What’s the Traumasphere? Eco-psychologist Zhiwa Woodbury has proposed that Earth’s systems can presently be understood as the Traumasphere. Over centuries, ecocidal activities have created traumatised, toxic localities and a global condition of biosphere trauma. In particular, burning fossil fuels has generated climate trauma, the biggest recent wounding of the biosphere, with worse impacts to come. (In response to the increasing use of terms ‘metacrisis’ and ‘polycrisis’, I’ve started using the term Earth Crisis for this.)
Climate Museum UK is a collective coming together in a shared endeavour, aiming to detoxify and regenerate Culture by curating and gathering responses to the Earth crisis and designing trauma-sensitive ‘activations’.
Do read our case study alongside the other pieces. The whole volume offers an original and interdisciplinary take on heritage, with lenses that combine ecology and social justice.
Also, do read my piece An Eco Lens on Heritage if you’re interested in how we might shift towards a more regenerative, less toxic and extractive, way of framing Culture and heritage.
