Piloting Earthlings with the Fitzwilliam Museum

Using medieval manuscripts to reimagine the fenlands

We are excited to share that we are underway in a pilot of the Earthlings approach partnering with the Fitzwilliam Museum and Soham Village College. The project explores how museum collections—especially illuminated manuscripts from the medieval period—can facilitate more imaginative and impactful conversations about our collective response to climate change.

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The relevance of Earthlings to East Cambridgeshire

Earthlings is an initiative dedicated to using cultural heritage as a tool for deepening public engagement with the climate crisis and fostering new ways of thinking about resilience, adaptation, and future possibilities. Museums hold our cultural stories of who we are and where we came from and we think uncovering shared local histories can unlock new possibilities for climate action.

The Cambridgeshire fenlands were once underwater, and since their drainage in the 18th and 19th centuries, they have gone from being a carbon sink to, in 2019, releasing 23.1 million tonnes of carbon emissions, increasing the UK’s total emissions by 3.5%. This figure is set only to increase as the  water table drops, and there is growing discussion strategies to manage and mitigate fenland emissions, some of which include the benefits of returning sections of fens to their flooded states. Fenland management has big implications for the lives of local communities and there is a critical conversation to be had about our enmeshed relationships with land, water, food and energy, as well as how to build community resilience to accelerating climate change.

In collaboration with young in-school researchers from East Cambridgeshire, this project is investigating how fresh interpretations of local history and culture—drawn from local history archives and the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection of medieval manuscripts—can support more ambitious and action-oriented discussions about climate change. If people used to live without fossil fuels, what can we learn from their everyday lives and belief systems that might inform galvanising stories of post anthropocentric ways of living in the fenlands today, and in the future.

With rich historical resources about fenland culture, strong connections into local communities, and diverse relationships with researchers from culture to climate - we couldn't be more excited to be working on this pilot with the Fitzwilliam museum.

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Looking ahead

We’re excited about the possibilities this project offers to not only imagine alternative futures of the fenlands, but to explore how to integrate these into alternative strategies for local community climate action in the area. We’re talking with East Cambridgeshire Climate Action Network, and the Soham Greener Together Initiative, to explore how the outcomes of the project can percolate into local climate planning.

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Stay tuned for updates as the project unfolds, and please reach out if you’d like to learn more.

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