After an intense, decade-long campaign of protest which has brought together a diverse range of actors, including climate scientists, archaeologists, museums and heritage professionals, lobbying and creative protest groups, and even members of their own board of trustees, the British Museum appears to be coming to the end of its 27-year long sponsorship arrangements with fossil fuel giant BP.
Yet the museum’s apparently grudging responses to the research and campaigning organisation Culture Unstained’s Freedom of Information requests, reported in the Guardian this week, and further statements by the museum subsequently reported in the Art Newspaper and Museums Journal – which appear to be intended to confuse rather than to clarify the situation – show that the museum itself, and sector more broadly, have further to go in understanding their role in the climate emergency and their ethical obligations on action for climate.
The Guardian’s reporting follows months of speculation in which the museum seemed to be in a position where it could neither confirm nor deny its intentions in this regard. Nonetheless, this seems consistent with British Museum chair George Osbourne’s announcement of a billion-pound masterplan to trustees last year, at which time he noted: “Our goal is to be a net zero carbon museum…no longer a destination for climate protest but instead an example of climate solution”.
While this may no doubt be cause for celebration for thousands who have been calling on the museum to do this for many years, its reluctance to decry such arrangements seems politically tone-deaf and says something quite troubling about the inability of some museums to appropriately acknowledge their own institutional histories and, by extension, their implication in the climate crisis.
The British Museum itself must go further and confirm that it will not sign any future partnerships with fossil fuel producers and remove BP’s name from its lecture theatre. And it must seriously and sincerely address calls that relate equally to its colonial and extractivist origins for the repatriation of culturally significant objects and, like many other institutions throughout the UK, consider its ethical obligations in the form of reparations to those communities who have been most directly affected by its activities.
It is only through taking a holistic approach to these questions that museums and other cultural institutions will realise their potential for leadership on action for climatological and social justice.
Rodney Harrison is professor of heritage studies at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, University College London, and co-lead on the Reimagining Museums for Climate Action project
