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When Brothers took me on the climate tour of the museum, he stressed the importance of individual fixes which alone won’t solve the crisis but are steps that must be taken the kind of “imperfect victories,” as Gergis calls them, that edge us further along. Brothers points to Ontario’s phasing out of coal-fired electricity as an example of targeting specific goals: one step and then another. Still, Brothers doesn’t like being labelled an optimist. He hears that as a value judgment. Nevertheless, “I think that there are rational reasons to not just focus right now, at this time, on the worst-case scenarios,” he says, “because I think it’s really helpful to get people to see all of the positive changes that are happening.”

Those involved in climate science and policy, who have spent their lives warning of the crisis, might be stunned to find themselves now the voice of pragmatism, fighting the feeling of helplessness in others. “It started shifting the way I looked at it too,” Brothers says. Yet, while the empowering talk of climate initiatives tells part of the story, the visceral and physical wrenching of environmental destruction tells us the rest. As Greta Thunberg said to the New York Times, “For me, living in a bubble of activists, it may seem like people know where we’re heading, people know what’s happening, people care. But when I move outside that bubble into the real world, then it strikes me every time that people are really living in denial.”

This seems to lead back to the sense of action getting mired in the shortcomings of language, the difficulty of finding a vocabulary that will click with everyone. In his 2019 book, Underland, nature writer Robert Macfarlane notes how environmental destruction can induce a loss for words: “It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss of species, places and people for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope.” In a virtual ROM event, environmental scientist Katharine Hayhoe noted that we can’t wait for another David Suzuki to arrive with the right words to galvanize opinion, but that climate change is a justice issue that affects every person on the planet. Author and activist Rebecca Solnit, writing in Not Too Late, hears this as a call for a greater sense of community. She notes that when fellow writer and environmentalist Bill McKibben is asked what’s the one thing that people can do to fight climate change, his answer is simple: “Stop being an individual; join something.”

The Carnegie museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh takes a similar approach with its sense of community. It involves what Nicole Heller, associate curator of Anthropocene studies, describes as museums shifting away from a “didactic, one-way, let-me-tell-you-what-to-think” style. Instead, the aim is to create more of a two-way dialogue with people in the community, to hear about their experiences and attitudes, and to understand better what motivates them. As Brothers notes, museums may in fact be among the best institutions to accomplish this, given that they tend to be more trusted by the public. “In the last couple of years, there has been this whole change of tone of everyone realizing that they really need to use every single element they can of their collections and their staff to really push for cultural change as trusted cultural institutions,” says Brothers, relaying a point made by the ROM’s chief executive, Josh Basseches.

The question remains whether museums can adapt quickly enough to the immediacy of worsening climate news and the intense pace of new research. As Brothers is careful to note, “In science, every time you answer one question, you get two more thrown back at you.” He also sees another phenomenon emerging: social tipping points. Brothers feels that climate change communication has focused so much on how bad things can be rather than on what we can do. We also need “positive reinforcement,” he says. “This is what we’ve done. . . . Now let’s do more.”