Blog | & Ecological: interconnecting nature with climate justice (2025)

When Bristol became the first UK city to declare ecological emergency in 2020, city leaders spoke of being motivated by data on species loss, but also by intergenerational and social injustice.

Pamela Fursman’s reminiscences help bring this interconnection to life. Her vibrant memories of a co-existence with birds accompany her archive recordings of birdsong. They also reference environmental change still impacting people and wildlife today, such as the building of the M32 through her neighbourhood.

Starlings have declined 96% since the 1990s. These tapes give access to a disappearing soundscape and ecological heritage, rooted in place. An opportunity to reflect on how ecological and social harms are entwined and can be addressed together today.

Museums hold many collections with these opportunities. But ecological crisis often plays a secondary role in sector conversations about climate justice. Why?

I wanted to share reflections on this disconnect, and opportunities for re-centring the ecological, drawing on collections practice at Bristol Museums.

Climate & ecological

Ecological crisis is sometimes depicted in sector conversation as a one-way result of climate change. Although climate is a major factor, there are other key drivers of nature loss at a local level. Nature also supports climate mitigation and adaptation.

Disentangling these factors can help museums respond to ecological crisis, and collections themselves offer windows to understanding them.

Bristol’s One City Ecological Emergency strategy categorises goals towards an ecologically resilient, wildlife-rich city as: making space for nature, reducing pollution and pesticides, and considering wider footprints of consumption.

These goals provide themes to explore the museum’s operational impact, and our collections support research, engagement and tools to help deliver them.

For example, our natural science collections reveal where species and habitats once occurred. Like the marsh fritillary butterflies, who lived in Bristol when the river Avon formed damp meadows, and their food plant the devil’s bit scabious could thrive. They give insight to environmental pollutants (and injustice) over time. Or help explore rewilding, such as Ice Age fossils giving a window to locally extinct megaherbivores.

Opportunities for UK-wide natural science collections to contribute to these local and global pictures will increase over the next decade through DiSSCo UK.

Justice & ecological

The structures of many UK museums separate nature and culture, from collection categories to engagement priorities.

Reflecting on how this impacts sector thinking and practice in (dis)connecting justice and ecological crisis can be uncomfortable work, but it is vital in working to not perpetuate colonial harms and can be energising through the new futures it brings.

At Bristol Museums, we have worked for a few years as a cross-disciplinary team in the context of ecological crisis – connecting natural sciences, world cultures, British Empire & Commonwealth collections, and audience specialists.

Our initial focus has been on Bristol’s historic displays of global taxidermy, collected from the 1820s to the 1950s. These have been presented primarily through a Western scientific lens – as with many UK collections until Subhadra Das and Miranda Lowe’s 2017-18 work revealed entanglement with colonial histories and structural racism: Nature Read in Black and White.

We are extending this to ecological contexts. Bristol is a centre for global wildlife storytelling and social justice protest but is also deeply segregated. The colonial legacies in these collections and displays offer points of connection to disrupt discriminatory narratives and consider more just futures.

To give an example, Bristol’s early curators sourced specimens through ships’ captains trading along the coasts of West and Central Africa for the extracted natural resources of palm oil, timber and ivory. This includes the first gorilla skulls brought to Europe in 1847-49, with indigenous marks that were washed off.

This history can support critical reflection, awareness of complexity and language. Who knows and can ‘save’ species? What drives their ‘loss’? Whose voice is not present? What reparative opportunities are present today?

Our project Extinction Silences, in partnership with Rising Arts Agency and young artists from under-represented backgrounds, centres marginalised voices and creative practice in exploring these possibilities. This collective work speaks to the permanent structures of the museum – from its displays to processes or resourcing – towards foundations for more justice-focused future approaches. This complements artist responses, such as recent work by Jessica Ashman.

Ecological justice

It is complex to centre justice for nature themselves in museums, when nature’s presence is as preserved/dead beings, sometimes violently taken and objectified. How does this impact relating to, rights for, and language about ‘nature’?

Voicing these issues is difficult both in acknowledging a complicity and risking stakeholder rejection at a time of stretched resources. But embracing this ethical complexity and reparative responsibility to nature and people, Earth and life, can open new pathways. We can understand collections as both important to scientific understanding, and social and ecological justice – with care and collaboration.

Ecological museums

Ecology has a scientific definition as “the study of relationships between living things and their environment”.Whichever contexts are drawn on, inter-relating ecological with decolonisation and pro-equity practice can look like:

• Reflecting across teams on where nature is being placed in a hierarchy of resourcing or silo of practice.
• Thinking about language, e.g. avoiding globalising terms like ‘humans’ driving extinction; connecting scientific to social, ethical and cultural.
• Recognising a need for slowness amidst urgency and calls to action. Museums have power. Whose voice is centred? Who benefits?
• Taking a whole-organisation approach to sustain challenging but impactful work.

Links

¹ Collection of reminscences via Bristol Archives

8 April 2025