Racializing Conservation: Conservation, Eugenics, and Interpreting White Supremacy in Museums and Parks

• In Event: Extraction, Extremism, and the Environment: Using Land the (Far) Right Way

Abstract

Racializing conservation is a process in which conservationists and eugenicists in both Germany and the US worked together, even during two world wars, to make racial sciences appear “natural” to both nation’s publics through public exhibits. Racial conservationists worked together in natural history museums and parks in order to instruct visiting publics about eugenics and how both conservation and eugenics attempted to save the environment and humans by controlling nature and supporting white supremacy. In this presentation, I illustrate racialized conservation with two case studies. The Second International Exhibition of Eugenics at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921 focused on how evolution and forestry were bridged together, reinterpreting the museum’s display material to educate the non-expert public on eugenic thinking and further eugenic public discourse. For example, one of the largest displays of this was a crosscut of a Giant Sequoia used to display Ellsworth Huntington’s research, “proving” that nonwhite migration to the US and western Europe created negative climate change. My other case study is the 1939 Reichsgartenschau in Stuttgart’s Killesbergpark. The National Socialist Department of Food and Agriculture recreated Killesberg, a former Jewish quarter and cemetery and later quarry and dump, to connect visitors with an image of what a Reichsgarten could accomplish if one followed the principles of Blood and Soil (e.g., German men growing German plants in German soil). The designers also included exhibition halls to host different exhibitions of gardeners, industry and Nazi racial propaganda. Together, these case studies show how institutions created to promulgate knowledge about natural sciences were also used to support white supremacy. The discourses surrounding the interpretation and curation of these sites have long standing consequences that the institutions and environmental efforts still face.

Author

• Nicky Rehnberg, University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB)