Scientists Urge Museums to Cut Ties With Oil and Gas Industry
By Anna Kuchment
Published: March 25, 2015 3:25 pm
More than 50 scientists have signed an open letter urging science museums to stop accepting donations from fossil fuel companies.
“As members of the scientific community we devote our lives to understanding the world, and sharing this understanding with the public,” states the letter, whose signatories include a grab bag of experts including prominent climate scientists James Hansen of Columbia University and Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University. “We are deeply concerned by the links between museums of science and natural history with those who profit from fossil fuels or fund lobby groups that misrepresent climate science.”
The letter was sent Tuesday to more than 300 science and natural history centers, including Dallas’s Perot Museum of Nature and Science and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, both of which rely on funding from energy companies.
A 2014 investigation by The Dallas Morning News found that science centers face increasing pressure to play down the role of human activity in climate change to avoid alienating visitors, donors and political figures. “The museums say, ‘We can’t not talk about humans, but let’s try to talk about them as little as possible,’” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University in College Station, said at the time.
Much of North Texas’s philanthropic base comes from energy companies and families who made their fortunes in the oil and gas industry.
“We have and will continue to seek donations of all sizes from diverse donors to support or fund the museum, support for which we are always grateful,” wrote Perot Museum spokesperson Krista Villarreal Moore in response to a query about the open letter.
Van Romans, president of the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History, wrote in an email: “The Museum has accepted money from energy companies in the past, and it would be an overreaction to rule out contributions in the future.”
Both the Perot Museum and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History host large halls dedicated to the science behind oil and gas exploration, and both offer scant references to human-induced climate change. Representatives of the Perot Museum told The News last June that studies about climate change emerge too quickly to be included in permanent exhibitions, but that temporary exhibits, speaker series and school programming offer better opportunities to communicate the latest findings.
The Fort Worth Museum of Science and History is in the process of redesigning its energy hall and hopes to present “a broad view of energy that is factually based,” wrote Romans in an email. “The current exhibit was conceived nearly a decade ago, and it’s due for a change.”
The open letter to science museums was organized by The Natural History Museum, a New York City-based non-profit that opened in September, 2014. It was started by Beka Economopoulos, a grassroots organizer who once worked for Greenpeace, and her husband, artist Jason Jones.
“We felt like museums of natural history and science need to be saying more than they’re currently saying about climate change,” said Economopoulos.
An accompanying petition drive calls on New York’s American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. to sever ties with industrialist and billionaire David Koch, who sits on the boards of both institutions. Koch and his family have given money to scientists and organizations that contest the role of humans in climate change.
In a 2010 story in The New Yorker, writer Jane Mayer pointed out that the National Museum of Natural History’s David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins includes language and ideas that “uncannily echo the Koch message.” The exhibit focuses on the idea that humans evolved in response to climate change and will continue to do so. Climate change is presented as “part of a natural continuum,” writes Mayer. The vast majority of scientists agree that recent shifts are unprecedented, that they are caused in large part by human activity, and that they pose a risk to humans.
Economopoulos said that she was at least as concerned about museums’ tendencies to censor themselves as about direct meddling from donors. “I want to push beyond this desire to find a smoking gun,” she said. “It’s the threat of self-censorship that happens: when you don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you.”
The Natural History Museum operates a Web site, a mobile museum bus, and organizes workshops and expeditions. Its mission, according to a press release, is to “model the natural history museum of the future – one that is free from ties to the fossil fuel industry, calls out culprits obstructing action on climate change, and actively champions the just transition to a sustainable and equitable future.”
Photo credit: Perot Museum of Nature and Science
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