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A green museum is a museum that incorporates concepts of sustainability into its operations and programming. Green museums use their collections to produce exhibitions, events, classes, and other programming to educate the public about the natural environment. Many, but not all, green museums reside in a building featuring sustainable architecture and technology. Green museums interpret their own sustainable practices and green design to present a model of behavior.

Green museums strive to help people to become more conscious of their world, its limitations, and how their actions affect it. The goal is to create positive change by encouraging people to make sustainable choices in their daily lives. They use their position as community-centered institutions to create a culture of sustainability.

Definitions

Museum

Museums make a "unique contribution to the public by collecting, preserving, and interpreting the things of this world," according to the American Association of Museums’ Code of Ethics. There are many types of museums that specialize in various fields, including anthropology, art, history, natural history, science, and can have living collections such as public aquarium, botanical gardens, nature centers, and zoos, or no collections like planetarium, and children's museums.

Museums are stewards of natural heritage and cultural heritage by preserving objects of importance to mankind on the community and global level. Museums communicate and contribute to knowledge. They are mission-driven, serve the public, and usually have nonprofit legal status.

Green

In the concept of green museums, the word green means sustainable. While "sustainability" and "green" have different definitions, they are often used interchangeably. Green and sustainability are buzzwords that have been used to refer to a wide range of meanings. Their definitions are often determined by the context in which they are used. One definition of sustainability frequently sited and used in various contexts was developed by the United Nations (1987): "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of the future generations to meet their own needs."

Sustainability reflects a complex system where components are closely linked and do not exist in isolation from one another. A sustainable system affects and is affected by the individual and collective behaviors of its members. Sustainability therefore recognizes the human impact on the environment, and aims to mitigate negative affects.

Culture of sustainability

Green museums promote a culture of sustainability. Culture forms and holds humanity’s deepest values, attitudes, and actions. Sustainability asks people to adapt at a cultural level, changing their beliefs and behavior (Worts, 2006). Museums are in a unique role to establish and promote a culture of sustainability. "In their role as places of authority and keepers of culture, museums have unequaled power and responsibility to model and to teach the methods of preserving ourselves, our planet and our cultural resources" (45).

History

Green museums are a relatively new phenomena. Discussions within museums circles about environmental sustainability began in the 1990s and have continued to grow in momentum to the present day. Currently green museums are receiving a lot of attention from academia and the mass media. Some scholars believe that a focus on sustainability is a way for museums to be relevant in the 21st century (Brophy & Wylie, 2006). However, most conventional museums are not engaged in sustainable practices.

The green museum movement began in science and children’s museums. Science museums found that environmental advocacy and education fit easily within their missions and programming. Children’s museums saw that using green design in their inside environments created a healthy playground for their young visitors. Once sustainability became a topic of discussion in museum circles, zoos and aquariums realized that their existing missions and programming of species conservation was in essence sustainable education. Recently, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums revised its accreditation standards to include a requirement of environmental advocacy.

Now all types of museums of all sizes are becoming green. In the last decade, over 20 American museums have constructed a new green building or have renovated an existing building with sustainable features. Many others have developed green operations or programming. Some scholars believe that environmental sustainability will become a professional expectation for all museums in the future (Wylie & Brohpy, 2008).

Issues

Mission

Some scholars suggest that sustainability and green design are a natural extension of a museum's mission statement. Some museums choose to make sustainability a central part of their identity, writing their commitment to being green in their mission statements. Sustainability can be seen as relating to three aspects included in most museum missions: field of research, purpose of public service, and the mandate for education. Museums that model green behavior enhance their missions and support their communities.

Not all green museums feel sustainability directly aligns with their missions. For example, an art museum that resides in green building and does not interpret its sustainable practices can be considered a green museum.

Education

As informal education centers that serve the public, museums are in a position to teach about sustainability to a large audience in meaningful ways. Through a combination of motivation and information, green museums try to initiate changes in behavior in people’s everyday lives. Green museums lead by example by explaining to visitors what sustainable activities they are doing and why through signage, programming, and websites. The goal is that visitors will learn about sustainable practices at the museum and then be able to implement them at home.

Social Responsibility

In recent years, calls for museums to become sustainable institutions have come from within the museum field as a way for museums to achieve social responsibility and civic engagement. Sustainability is an opportunity for thoughtful, proactive museum work. "Museums can play a critical role in moving the communities they serve towards a more sustainable future. Aligning their missions and programs with sustainability principles... ...will recalibrate their own daily practices as well as awaken their community to the array of choices perhaps otherwise invisible to them" (183).

External Links

• [Green Museum Wiki] An online forum for green museums
• [greenexhibits.org] The Madison Children's Museum offers a guide for green museum exhibits