Elephant in the Room

A visitor to the museum notices small things, caught up in their own interests and the bias this brings. What does this allow to go unaddressed? The elephant in the room, as you may have guessed. There is no bigger problem often ignored than the climate change we are marching toward. Climate issues have become more robust, As diesel, paraffin and petrol combust. Familiar with the feeling of being dismissed, the elephant trumpets: a crisis does exist! She lets out an alarm call to signal the herd, to stampede into the streets out from where they were stirred. She broke out of the Museum of Natural History to protest human behaviour in all its misery. She occupies Wall Street and protests in Times Square, while sirens serenade and flies buzz in the air. The African elephant sounds a deafening drum; “Enough is enough! Surely you aren’t all just dumb.” This matriarch elephant and seven more died, just so the museum could become more alive. The Hall of African Mammals is where they were taken, waiting over a century for a time to awaken. “The Alarm” is the centerpiece where their bodies were staged, frozen in a nightmare as if they were caged. Around the room, other captive subjects stand by within dioramas that are stacked two tiers high. The rhinoceros, gorilla, ostrich, and lion silently protest in a perpetual die-in. The elephant never forgets the source of its scar. “Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.” A celebrated conservationist” with a liking for hunting, is the American president the Elephant was confronting. “The Big Stick” is the rifle President Roosevelt had in hand, as he stalked the elephant’s footprints across open land. His son Kermit joined in on the Africa expedition and shot her small calf taking after the politician. The Elephant twitches to life in the Africa Hall. As if no time has passed, she remembers it all. Her reddish-brown eyes with German glass in their place open to look museumgoers in the face. She devours a book that a companion had written on structures of power and knowledge she did not fit in. The “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” is a violent tale of capitalism, supremacy, and the white human male. With eyes no longer blind she sees what her body can make, the world on her mind that no one can take. She looks around the room and says; “The one thing I know, is that the teddy bear patriarchy will have to go!” The creature denounces the stuffed Teddy and its monsters. She has had quite enough of environmental imposters; The equestrian statue, the plaque honoring David Koch, were swallowed using her trunk shortly after she woke. The mammal’s belly rumbles with resonant demands: to decolonize, divest, and dismantle, she firmly stands. Like a calving iceberg, earthquake, or volcanic eruption, her trumpeting call thunders a long-distance disruption. Her revival starts an autopsy fit for the ages, where tools are used to dissect the museum in stages. Natural History becomes an architectural taxidermy, in a plan to make the most avid climate deniers squirmy. Only the museum’s facade remains in place, to repair the damage to the very last trace. It frames a graveyard where the elephant can finally rest, with the enormous weight she has lifted right off of her chest. In the garden of a damaged planet no collection is held, only the demand for action –that’s why the elephant rebelled! A Climate Countdown 2 Degrees Clock will keep time and enforce the twelve years that remain for us to panic and change course. Each year, one bar of actions counters the change that’s been caused. The clock ticks, the bars tighten, and it cannot be paused. Around the elephant’s graveyard, the margins grow thin until the final alarm sounds, and the endings begin. So down the street we go with the elephant inside, always mustering her grit as our climate action guide. And if somehow you happened to miss her, just take a step back and look at the bigger picture.