ABSTRACT
Agriculture connects everyone “in the most vital, constant, and concrete way to the natural world” wrote environmental historian Donald Worster.2 As the global climate warms and shifts, ever more extreme weather events are beginning to undermine the viability of agricultural systems that emerged during the relatively stable climatic regime of the Holocene. Perhaps the great cultural challenge of climate change to the modern, industrial mind is an assertion in storm and flood and drought and fire that the realm of people and culture, including agri-culture, is now and always has been inextricably intertwined with the material and ecological realm of nature. The destruction of crops and livestock by drought and extreme cold challenges us to acknowledge and attend to our intimate, bodily ties to the rest of nature, those material bonds that modern, industrial modes of agriculture and thought have for so long denied and obscured. Such threatening events invite a deeper application of
ecological thinking to the material realities of gardening and farming, to honor and strengthen ties that instill resilience and productivity within dynamic terrain. And they reveal a need to abandon industrial frameworks of the imagination that drive the application of technologies and poisons to master farmland and suppress the agency and expression of natural forces and other species. What calls do the increasing number of ever more destructive climatic events-a fright-
ening trend driven by the relentless operation of industrial culture-make on cultural institutions? Can museums redirect their core functions in ways that help people grapple with the monumental emotional, cultural and physical challenges posed by climate change and faltering food systems? Might the practical and theoretical skills of museum practitioners that allow the emergence of meaning and understanding through bodily engagement with material things offer ways to navigate our era of escalating ecological and social crisis? In this chapter, I explore two projects underway at the National Museum of Australia that attempt to apply museological skills and capacities in ways that allow constructive responses to climate change and its varied challenges.
