Museums and the Implicit Anthropocene: Witnessing in the Science Museum’s Energy Hall

While the term and concept of the Anthropocene, our new geological epoch, has gained currency in academic discourse and the discourse of highbrow media publications, public understanding of the environment tends to focus on climate change (measured in extreme weather events), pollution, toxicity, species extinction and wildfire in the present. What is less understood are the long and myriad histories of human impact on the planet that created the conditions for the current catastrophes (no matter how indirectly). These are histories that encompass colonialism in the Americas and the institution of slavery, extractive capitalism, and globalisation; the Industrial Revolution; and the inauguration of the nuclear age and the Great Acceleration of oil consumption. These histories of conjoined social and environmental harms (and their terraforming effects) are often implicitly captured by British encyclopaedic and natural history and science museums that were founded in the Victorian era, the natural-historical and ethnographic collections of which are often rooted in British imperialism; the display of the history of science, technology and industry represents industrial revolution, extractive, fossil-fuelled capitalism, and signals the nuclear age; and Earth-science exhibits introduce the concept of deep time needed to measure epochal change, and their measurements of previous extinctions presage future loss. British museums have certainly pivoted towards environmental catastrophe over the last five to ten years, often through the installation of the visual and plastic arts, and major Anthropocene exhibitions are in the planning stages, but this proposed essay focuses instead on the implicit rather than curated presence of our new geological epoch. Using a selection of exhibits at London’s Science Museum, this essay reframes, reaccentuates and re-narrates a number of artefacts and objects to elicit their implication in the Anthropocene, along with the legacies of empire, race, and nation-building that such museums house. Unmoored from seemingly innocuous histories of the natural world, and technological and industrial progress, of which the museum visitor is often positioned as the beneficiary, these objects and artefacts will be positioned as witness to an unfolding catastrophe, a catastrophe to which British museums have only belatedly begun to testify. Moreover, this essay’s methodology disrupts the logic of museum planning in which the explicit turn to the Anthropocene can be exculpatory – in that representation of the environmental present and future supplants institutional implication in the origins of catastrophe.