Some of Chicago’s world-class museums are looking a little greener these days, and not just because of their new landscaping. Despite the legacy of the past, the effects of corporate funding, and the demands of show business, Chicago’s familiar lakefront standbys are exhibiting a new environmental awareness, along with all their other treasures. In addition, the new Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, scheduled to open in October, promises to promote ecological intelligence at a new level for a Chicago museum.
The Field Museum’s newest permanent exhibit opened in March. "Underground Adventure," which invites visitors to explore the soil from a "bug’s-eye" perspective, is intended to deepen the public’s familiarity with issues of biodiversity and sustainability, according to senior exhibit developer Francie Muraski-Stotz. "There are complicated choices and tradeoffs to be made [in the relationship of humans to the soil]," she says, and there were "competing ideas in the team" of exhibit developers. But a decision was made to "ground the exhibit in the biodiversity of organisms."
Muraski-Stotz comments more generally on the mission of the Field Museum: "It’s not our job to tell visitors how to behave. We study biodiversity [of plants and animals] and different [human] cultures, and the richness of both. I feel it’s also our job to promote their preservation. We make visitors aware of this issue and show them why it’s important."
While it may not prescribe behaviors, the new exhibit should at the very least get people to think about their behavior and how it relates to soil conservation. Skeptics will point out that Monsanto and ConAgra are listed as principal sponsors of "Underground Adventure," along with the National Science Foundation and other corporations and individuals. Muraski-Stotz states that "exhibit content was not influenced by those corporations, but was decided before they even came on board." It still seems a bit twisted that the two corporations named should be able to associate themselves with a conservation-oriented exhibit; maybe in the future, the organic industry will be affluent enough to sponsor its own museum exhibits. In the meantime, you can go to the Field and check out the balance of the presentation for yourself.
In any case, other, older, exhibits at the Field Museum also promote an appreciation of the enormous diversity of plants and animals and the need to preserve habitat. The "Plants of the World," for example, is a huge display of plant and flower models guaranteed to knock you over with botanic diversity. The exhibit opened in 1983; it could stand an increased emphasis on conservation here and in the world’s threatened regions. Still, it’s a worthy introduction to the topic.
"Messages from the Wilderness" goes further, with signs that develop awareness of the interconnectedness of nature and human beings. So does "Nature Walk." Its dioramas invite visitors to look closer and notice creatures at first unapparent. Children can press a button, hear the sounds of different frogs, and see which species makes which sound. "Birds of North America," "Birds of the World," and "Mammals of the World" display a huge selection from the even vaster collection of specimens held by the museum.
All of these exhibits include stuffed and mounted animals, so the "messages" from nature are mixed in an unsettling way. But according to Muraski-Stotz, these specimens are almost entirely from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and the museum is more conscious these days of the conflict between taking specimens and promoting preservation.
Muraski-Stotz admits that the museum needs to do a better job of talking to the public about its legacy from the past. Perhaps for that reason, children on field trips learn that the museum currently tries to accept only zoo animals and those that have died of natural causes.
Adults should know that exhibits are only a part of the Field’s conservation effort. Both locally and internationally, through their Department of Environment and Conservation Programs, Field scientists are participating in an international inventory of biodiversity in threatened and previously unexamined areas.
Some of the international work has resulted in the designation of national parks in Bolivia and Peru, as well as the publication of reference materials used in their management. As a leading member of the Chicago Wilderness consortium of 76 organizations, researchers from the Field Museum have helped produce an atlas of biodiversity for the Chicago region, worked on a biodiversity recovery plan, and helped attract more than $3 million to the region for investment in conservation projects. The Field also trains teachers and biologists from the United States and other countries in ecology.
In addition, the museum offers a range of lectures, classes, and field trips for adults. The Field is now cooperating with the Morton Arboretum and the Chicago Botanic Garden to offer courses leading to a Naturalist Certificate in a program originated at the arboretum. (In 1994, the arboretum, located in Lisle, reopened its Thornhill Education Center. Currently, the arboretum offers a huge range of classes and programs for children, families, and adults, including a botany degree in cooperation with regional colleges and universities.)
This April, the Field Museum continues a special focus on the environment for a second month as part of Project Millennium. Project Millennium originated with John McCarter, president of the Field Museum, and is touted by Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs as the intellectual component of the city’s millennium celebration. It invites the city’s cultural forces to focus on six different topics for a two-month period each. Please call the museum for information about additional special programming.
Through mid-June in the Searle Lounge, the Field also is profiling 13 women whose work relates to conservation, in "Women in Science: Conversations in Conservation." Excerpts from conversations with these scientists are featured in the Women in Science web site, a new addition to the Field Museum home page (www.fmnh.org).
You’ve Seen the Animals, Now Dine on Them
If an animal rights sensibility makes you queasy in some exhibits at the Field Museum, you may start to feel downright seasick as we leave Stanley Field Hall, cross the new, grassy, tree-lined museum campus created by moving northbound Lake Shore Drive, and head up the steps of the Shedd Aquarium. At the Shedd, the issue of the animal rights is more pressing than it is at the Field: on a good day, the animals here are still alive.
According to the Shedd’s official information sources, the aquarium, too, is involved in conservation efforts, specifically "Species Survival Plans that call for the institutional breeding of [three] endangered animals": the Tahitian land snail, the bluehead iguana, and the African cichlid fish. Furthermore, the Shedd has sheltered sea otters rescued as pups from the Valdez oil spill, and "over the past 15 years, has nurtured, rehabilitated, and released more than fifty stranded or confiscated sea turtles, including greens, loggerheads, hawksbills and Pacific ridleys.
The aquarium has "established a growing coral collection to circumvent the need (sic) to collect coral from its natural habitat." It’s also involved in Project Seahorse, "a collective of scientists and social scientists created in 1996 in response to seahorse population declines due to global trade, destructive fishing practices, and degradation of seahorses’ inshore habitats."
At the moment, says Roger Klocek, director of conservation for the Shedd, neither this conservation work, nor the Shedd’s work on restoration breeding of the local river mussel, is displayed in exhibits seen by the public. However, the Shedd is scheduled to start construction this spring on an underground wing focussing on the Philippines, the entrance to which will be flanked by redesigned exhibits on the Amazon. Says Klocek, "There will be a strong conservation message, including information about how forest destruction affects water habitat." When the new wing and the reworked Amazon exhibits are completed in 2002, the Shedd plans to move on to yet another new wing, this one featuring conservation efforts surrounding Lake Michigan, the Illinois River, and the Mississippi.
Animal Rights Mobilization director Kay Sievers is unimpressed, dismissing these conservation initiatives as "a smokescreen." Noting that the Shedd serves seafood in its restaurant, she suggests that if the Shedd were really committed to conservation it would divest itself from companies which may be linked to marine habitat destruction.
More urgent than that, perhaps, is Siever’s objection to the Oceanarium, the addition to the Shedd opened in 1991. "It’s a completely artificial environment, where animals are taught to do stupid tricks for food. The beluga whales are kept in what, for them, is the equivalent of a bath tub. Furthermore, seven cetaceans have died in captivity, and 80 percent of the penguin population died."
Klocek questions that last percentage, but confirms the deaths of whales and dolphins. He believes there is an unbridgeable divide between the animal rights perspective and the scientific one. Sievers feels that the Shedd’s dolphin show, no matter how the aquarium splices in references to animal behavior and conservation, really teaches children a lesson in the extortionate power of humans over other animals.
There’s a Hole? What Hole?
The Adler Planetarium, with its new addition, might take another cue from its aquatic neighbor, and develop its own environmental consciousness. Though the planetarium was a pioneer in providing classes to the general public, as of now, its exhibits include nothing I would call "green," in the sense of "caring about and acting in favor of the earth’s environment." The exhibits at the Adler don’t talk about the hole in the ozone, debris in space, or questions of "terra-forming" other planets. A down-to-earth environmental awareness would complement the planetarium’s focus on the origins of the universe and the birth of stars. With all its new space, the Adler is a mass of potential for environmental education. When will it stage its own big bang?
The Really Big Show
Sensibilities may differ about the Oceanarium, but there seems little dispute that the dolphin show and the beluga whales are responsible for those long weekend lines on the Shedd’s long steps. Just as the Museum of Science and Industry was for years synonymous with its simulated coal mine, the Shedd is now known for its simulated bit of the Pacific Northwest, and the people just keep coming. In fact, they pack the aquarium with over two million visitors a year.
This is the show-business side of museums, from which even such highbrow venues as the Art Institute are far from immune. This line of fiscal concern says, "You want people to come? You’ve got to have something big," whether it’s a Cassatt show, the Oceanarium, or the Adler Planetarium’s new Sky Rider theater, which houses a virtual reality show designed to offer an interactive visit to outer space.
Perhaps a trendsetter in the really big museum draws, the Museum of Science and Industry has not rested on its coal mine. It’s also managed to put a passenger jet in one of its halls, built an Omnimax theater, and, recently, installed the Pioneer Zephyr locomotive train as part of its project to put its front parking lot underground. Still, the museum plans to expand both east and west.
It’s hard to believe that any museum could really need more space than the museum already contains in its gargantuan building. Erma Tranter, executive director of Friends of the Parks asks, "Why don’t they build a satellite building instead, in some other part of the city that could really use the tourists it would draw?"
In any case, amidst all its tourist draws, where is the environmental science at the Museum of Science and Industry? Well, it may be dwarfed by all the other industrial-size attractions, but it is there — on the balcony overlooking the coal mine. In an exhibit called "Reuseable City," the museum directs visitors’ attention to four urban environmental problems: ozone, drinking water, garbage, and brownfields. The exhibit, which opened last summer, includes a learning lab in which, according to exhibit developer Julie Blue, "A museum facilitator takes middle school groups through a scenario in which a community is seeing weird [environmental] things. The students trace the problem back to its source." The source of the problem, it seems, can vary depending on the choice of the facilitator. The schoolteachers attend a Saturday class themselves before bringing a group and receive a guide on the environment. An internet extension of the exhibit is in the works. This exhibit is classified as "permanent" which, at the MSI, means it has at least a ten-year lifespan.
Once again, the issue of corporate funding rears its head, since, along with the Illinois EPA, Waste Management was a major funder of "Reuseable City." Blue admits that sometimes funders get very involved in determining content, but she says that in this case, they were "more hands off."
But where are the exhibits on the industry of the future, encouraging all those schoolchildren to think about sustainable ventures and a cleaner, healthier environment? Apparently, we’re not there yet. According to exhibit projects manager Lyn Gazley, the new business exhibit called "Enterprise," doesn’t feature green business, although she says there are aspects of the exhibit that "take the environment into consideration."
In the past, the Chicago Children’s Museum has taken up some of the slack; for many years, the museum featured an exhibit called "The Stinking Truth about Garbage," and part of its lesson was "reduce, reuse, recycle." Unfortunately, this exhibit has closed, "to make space for other exhibits," according to public relations manager Elizabeth Lach. At the moment, no exhibit at the Children’s Museum is really doing the environmental job.
Maybe, someday, the Chicago Historical Society will mount a show about the history of the environmental movement in the Chicago area. For now, the society limits its involvement with the environment to cosponsoring a week-long summer camp called "Where the Buffalo Roam," focusing "on the animals, people and plants of the prairie." It also did some advisory work on the opening of the new Nature Museum.
The Great Beige Hope
Chicago’s newest museum is also its oldest. The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, opening in October, is the new home of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, founded in 1857 as Chicago’s first museum. Colored like sand, with lines inspired by the long slopes and sheer drops of one our region’s distinctive natural features, the sand dune, the new structure is striking. Its site has good vibes, not only because it sits on what was once the foredune of Lake Michigan, but also because it’s across Fullerton Parkway from one of Chicago’s most natural-feeling artificial structures: the Lincoln Park Zoo’s rookery.
Stepping into the building, you are allowed the sensation of still being out under the park’s cottonwoods, or on the bank of its North Pond, which borders the west side of the building, because of the huge expanse of glass. This is intentional; the focus of the museum is on the ecology of its own site, as well as on the ecology of the Midwest, from the Great Lakes to the prairies. After replacing the current hulking concrete casting pier with a friendlier wooden one, the museum plans to work with community residents to restore North Pond and its surrounding area to its native flora and fauna.
Once inside, visitors will be able to walk amid hundreds of Midwest species of butterflies in "Butterfly Haven," a huge, glassed, pool- and plant-filled space that seems destined to be this museum’s big draw. In "City Science," they can meet the creatures that inhabit every city home. They will also learn, according to President Lewis Crampton, that "They can’t throw anything away, because there is no‘away’."
In "Environmental Central," visitors can participate in computerized, interactive, problem-solving simulations based on probable environmental issues. In "Water Lab," they can learn the impact of rivers and lakes on daily life. And in "Wilderness Walk," they can explore the biodiversity of the Midwest. The Nature Museum also will feature a kid-friendly "Children’s Gallery" designed to teach children aged three to eight about the environment.
The Nature Museum is not only a tourist draw, however. Real work is getting done. "Butterfly Haven," for example, provides a setting in which research biochemist Doug Taron can learn enough about breeding large numbers of butterflies so that, within a year or so, the academy can begin to play a role in the reestablishment of butterfly populations on restored habitat in our region.
The museum will continue its role as a leader in environmental education through its work in the public schools and with the Girl Scouts of America. The new president is very positive, and palpably excited, about the ability of the Nature Museum to complement and in some cases catalyze the environmental work of Chicago’s other museums.
With millions of tourists and hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren attending museums each year, their exhibit content is no small matter. So it’s promising to see signs of spring in the greening of our museums. Maybe the new Nature Museum, though it opens in the fall, will in fact accelerate the trend so that our cultural institutions will lead the way to greening our future.
Resources
Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum, 312-922-star
Chicago Academy of Sciences, The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, 773-549-0606
Chicago Botanic Garden, 847-835-5440
Chicago Children’s Museum, 312-527-1000
Chicago Historical Society, 312-642-4600
Field Museum of Natural History, 312-922-9410
Morton Arboretum, 630-719-2400
Museum of Science and Industry, 773-684-1414
Shedd Aquarium, 312-939-2426
Note on Admissions and Transportation: If you want to conserve your own resources as well as the earth’s, museum membership can be a doubly good investment, helping the institution while saving you money. Also, Chicago residents with a public library card can check out a pass good for two weeks at one of any of the museums mentioned in this article. Trains and buses can take you to these museums; a good idea, since there are fewer and fewer free or metered spots nearby. Parking lots, though expensive and less environmentally friendly than public transportation, are fairly abundant. Free trolleys run from some off-site free or metered parking areas. Call the museum or the CTA for schedules.