Soren Brothers couldn’t shake off a recurring nightmare. Tornados and storms would lash against a bunker in which he was huddled, at the bottom of a stairwell. Outside, the scene was utter devastation: a climatic apocalypse, with the sky turning unearthly colours. Sometimes even the Grim Reaper would make a cameo. Then Brothers would wake up, aware that he had spent another night in a climate-disaster dream. “It was regular enough that it was a part of my life,” he says.
The nightmares used to haunt Brothers more often when he was a PhD student in Berlin studying the interactions between climate change and lakes. They had become less frequent—receding into memory, though still vivid—by the time he was announced, in November 2021, as the Royal Ontario Museum’s first curator of climate change. It’s a highly visible platform: located in Toronto, the ROM is one of the most visited museums in Canada. Brothers is the face of the museum’s efforts to insert climate change into more of its collection and public events. Yet, those expecting the museum to become an impassioned voice for greater climate action may initially be caught off guard. Much of Brothers’s focus is on the positive and not just the calamitous—on initiatives that are working—even if that’s not the tone some museum goers might expect. Where’s the rallying cry, they may ask. It shows the challenge the ROM and other museums face in finding the words to explain the science to a broad audience and to push for action while not disappointing those wanting to hear a more vociferous outcry.
