A Museum Takes on a Green Mission
Museums are about the past rather than the future, aren't they? Not always, the National Building Museum in Washington, DC shows www.nbm.org. The Museum is an advocate of sustainable design and has created exhibits to educate and inspire people to consider their impact upon the planet and how to lessen the harm we cause through building.
The Green House Exhibit was an actual structure people could walk through and was used to teach sustainable building techniques. The current exhibit Green Community shows how various communities throughout the world (although primarily in the USA) are addressing the challenges of brownfields, transit, land and water conservation, and waste. While few of the featured communities were addressing all these issues, each was achieving success in at least one aspect.
The displays for each featured community include large photographs of before and after the "green" intervention. Each display also used floor-to-ceiling clear cylinders of perhaps a foot in diameter, filled to a level showing the magnitude of the challenge nationwide and comparing that to the progress made by the community.
After looking through the exhibit, Green Senior Joyce Emery said,
I laud the National Building Museum's proactive stance on the environment and its leadership in educating the public. The Museum could have said its mission was not to foster any particular type of future building but only to document what has been built. Instead, it treated the prevention of environmental degradation from building as a vitally important part of the institutional mission, shaping public concepts towards that goal.
Video on Community Activism
The exhibit included a video of ways that people strive to make their communities better. Three global environmental movements were featured: Guerrilla Gardening featuring UK's Richard Reynolds, Freegans, and Critical Mass. Green Seniors has already posted on Guerrilla Gardening, but what are Freegans and Critical Mass? And what are they doing in a Building Museum display?
Freegans are a form of "dumpster divers:" people scavenging the garbage of groceries, restaurants, and other places for free food. They find a great deal of food that is healthful and enjoyable, though likely past its sale date, and they pool their findings and cook group meals. They also help feed the hungry while highlighting the waste that takes place in society.
Critical Mass are bicyclists who wish to make a statement on behalf of their legitimate rights as roadway users by organizing (hastily and unofficially) a mass grouping for a particular day. By achieving a "critical mass" that authorities are not expecting, they can cause other traffic to yield to them--for a change.
Freegans and Critical Mass are both found in Wikipedia, which paints a more complete picture of them than does the Green Community Exhibit. Since these groups form spontaneously and have no organization beyond the local group, their actions can vary with the locale and range from the heroic to the annoying, depending on your point of view.
The appearance of this video presentation in the Museum Exhibit is remarkable. For one thing, it involves forms of human behavior other than how people build structures, demonstrating the broad embrace of "greening" by this institution. For another, it casts yesterday's radical behavior as today's valued community spirit that will improve the quality of life in communities. (Taking the naughtiness out of it may disappoint some of the guerrilla gardeners, freegans, and cyclists, but they will surely find new challenges to address in unconventional ways.)
The National Building Museum is an example that we can expand the mission of our place of work, or any institution or organization where we have influence, to include consideration for the environment. The planet needs no less.
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