Making Water Knowable: Museums and the Production of Environmental Knowledge in America
2 June 2026 | Written by Ashley E. Smith
Author's Note
Originally developed as a museum studies project in 2022, this paper began as an examination of water education and exhibition design. In revising it, I became increasingly interested in the broader processes through which environmental knowledge is produced, interpreted, and communicated through scientific and cultural institutions.
The questions explored here concerning environmental literacy, museum interpretation, public engagement, and stewardship have since evolved into a larger research interest in natural history, biodiversity, and the history of science. In particular, I am interested in how rivers and other ecological systems become objects of knowledge through fieldwork, collections, museums, and public interpretation.
Viewed retrospectively, this paper represents an early stage in the development of research questions that continue to shape my work on museums, natural history, and environmental knowledge in the American South.
Abstract
As climate change, population growth, and aging infrastructure place increasing pressure on freshwater resources in the United States, public understanding of water systems remains limited. This paper argues that museums are uniquely positioned to address contemporary water challenges by translating complex scientific and environmental knowledge into accessible public experiences.
Drawing on scholarship in museum studies, environmental education, and public engagement, the paper examines the emerging role of museums as institutions of environmental stewardship. Particular attention is given to the Water Museums Global Network and UNESCO's Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme, which advocate for museums as platforms for advancing public awareness of water sustainability. Building on these initiatives, the paper proposes Water: The American Experience, a traveling exhibition model that connects scientific knowledge, environmental history, public policy, and community engagement through regionally adaptive interpretation.
Ultimately, the paper argues that museums can contribute meaningfully to environmental stewardship by fostering ecological literacy, encouraging civic participation, and making otherwise invisible environmental systems visible to diverse audiences.
Introduction
Water is the fundamental condition upon which all life depends, yet for many Americans it remains largely invisible. Hidden behind faucets, reservoirs, treatment plants, and vast networks of infrastructure, water is experienced primarily as a service rather than as an ecological system. This invisibility has contributed to widespread public misunderstanding of the environmental, technological, and political forces that shape access to freshwater across the United States. As water policy scholar Robert Glennon observes, Americans have come to regard water as effectively limitless despite the reality that freshwater resources are finite and increasingly vulnerable to depletion (Glennon). Such assumptions are becoming increasingly untenable in the face of climate change, population growth, aging infrastructure, and expanding demands on water systems throughout the nation (Brown et al.).
The consequences of this disconnect are already apparent. Across the American West, prolonged drought, declining reservoir levels, and increasing competition for water resources threaten both ecological stability and human communities (“As the Climate Dries the American West Faces Power and Water Shortages, Experts Warn”). Similar pressures are emerging elsewhere as changing precipitation patterns, groundwater depletion, and infrastructure failures challenge existing systems of water management. While scientists, policymakers, and industry professionals continue to debate technical solutions, a less frequently discussed obstacle remains: the public’s limited understanding of water itself.
This paper argues that museums are uniquely positioned to address this knowledge gap. As trusted educational institutions situated at the intersection of science, culture, and public engagement, museums possess the capacity to translate complex environmental issues into meaningful visitor experiences. Through immersive exhibitions, interdisciplinary storytelling, and community-centered programming, museums can foster environmental literacy while encouraging civic participation in water stewardship.
To advance this objective, I propose Water: The American Experience, a traveling museum exhibition developed through collaboration among the Water Museums Global Network, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Hydrological Programme (UNESCO-IHP), the American Water Works Association, museum professionals, scientists, and water-industry experts. Rather than treating water solely as a natural resource or scientific subject, the exhibition would examine water as an environmental, cultural, technological, and historical force that shapes everyday life in the United States. By making invisible systems visible and transforming technical information into accessible narratives, the exhibition seeks to cultivate informed public engagement with one of the defining environmental challenges of the twenty-first century.
While this project is framed as a proposal for environmental education, it also raises broader questions concerning the production and circulation of environmental knowledge. Water does not become a matter of public concern solely through scientific discovery. Rather, knowledge about water is generated through field observation, research, collection, interpretation, and public communication across a network of institutions that includes museums, universities, government agencies, and scientific organizations. Viewed from this perspective, museums serve not only as sites of education but also as participants in the processes through which environmental knowledge is stabilized, legitimized, and shared.
Museums, Environmental Knowledge, and Public Understanding
At its core, the challenge of contemporary environmental stewardship is also a challenge of knowledge. Environmental crises are rarely caused solely by a lack of scientific information; rather, they emerge from the complex relationship between scientific knowledge, public understanding, political decision-making, and cultural values. Consequently, addressing environmental challenges requires not only the production of new scientific knowledge but also the effective communication, interpretation, and circulation of existing knowledge among diverse publics.
Museums occupy a distinctive position within this process. Unlike universities, which primarily produce knowledge, or governmental agencies, which frequently regulate its application, museums serve as intermediaries between specialized expertise and public understanding. Through exhibitions, collections, educational programming, and public engagement initiatives, museums translate scientific concepts into forms that are accessible, meaningful, and relevant to broad audiences. In doing so, museums participate in what may be understood as the social life of knowledge: the processes through which information is transformed into understanding, understanding into values, and values into action.
This role is particularly significant in relation to environmental issues. Scientific research concerning climate change, biodiversity loss, water management, and ecosystem decline has expanded dramatically over the past several decades. Yet public understanding of these issues often remains fragmented, uneven, or disconnected from everyday experience. Museums offer opportunities to bridge this divide by situating scientific knowledge within historical, cultural, and personal contexts. Rather than presenting environmental information as abstract data, museums can demonstrate how environmental systems shape human lives and how human decisions, in turn, reshape environmental systems.
Museum scholars increasingly recognize that exhibitions do more than communicate information; they actively shape ways of seeing and understanding the world. Decisions regarding what is collected, preserved, interpreted, and displayed influence how visitors understand scientific authority, environmental responsibility, and historical change. Exhibitions are therefore not neutral presentations of facts but curated frameworks through which knowledge is organized and meaning is constructed.
This insight is particularly relevant to water. Modern water infrastructures are designed to remain largely invisible. Reservoirs, treatment plants, pumping stations, underground pipelines, and wastewater facilities function most effectively when they operate unnoticed. As a result, the scientific, technological, and ecological systems that make modern life possible frequently disappear from public consciousness. The apparent simplicity of turning on a faucet obscures an immense network of environmental processes, engineering systems, policy decisions, and historical developments.
Museums possess the capacity to render these invisible systems visible. Through interpretation, visualization, and storytelling, they can illuminate the relationships between watersheds, ecosystems, infrastructure, and communities. Such work extends beyond public education in the narrow sense. It contributes to broader processes through which societies understand environmental relationships and develop collective responses to environmental challenges.
This perspective aligns closely with emerging scholarship in environmental humanities, which emphasizes that environmental problems are simultaneously scientific and cultural in nature. Water scarcity, pollution, habitat degradation, and climate-related disruptions are not merely technical problems awaiting technical solutions. They are also questions of memory, values, governance, historical development, and human relationships with the natural world. Museums are uniquely positioned to address these intersections because they routinely integrate scientific evidence, historical interpretation, material culture, and public experience within a single institutional framework.
The proposed exhibition, Water: The American Experience, therefore serves as more than an educational intervention. It represents an effort to explore how museums participate in the production and circulation of environmental knowledge. By bringing together scientific research, historical narratives, material objects, and public engagement, the exhibition would encourage visitors to consider not only what they know about water, but how that knowledge is created, communicated, and applied.
Viewed from this perspective, water becomes a lens through which broader questions about museums and society emerge. How do museums shape public understandings of environmental systems? How do scientific concepts acquire cultural meaning? What responsibilities do museums bear in an era characterized by environmental uncertainty? And how might museum practice contribute to the development of more informed and engaged publics?
These questions extend beyond water alone. They speak to the evolving role of museums within contemporary society and to the broader relationship between knowledge, institutions, and environmental stewardship. As environmental challenges become increasingly complex, museums will likely play an expanding role in helping communities understand the interconnected systems upon which human and ecological futures depend.
Museums as Sites of Environmental Education
Despite growing public concern regarding climate change and environmental sustainability, museums have historically devoted limited attention to environmental education as a central institutional mission. Natural history museums, science centers, and maritime museums frequently interpret water through displays focused on biodiversity, aquatic ecosystems, exploration, transportation, or recreation. While these approaches contribute valuable scientific and historical knowledge, they often stop short of addressing the broader social, technological, and political dimensions of contemporary water challenges.
Scholars within museum studies have increasingly argued that this omission represents a missed opportunity. Museums occupy a distinctive position within public life because they possess both cultural authority and educational reach. Unlike formal educational institutions, museums engage visitors voluntarily and across generations, creating opportunities for learning that are exploratory, interdisciplinary, and experiential. As a result, museums are particularly well suited to addressing complex environmental issues that require both scientific understanding and civic engagement.
Recognition of this potential has led to significant international efforts to integrate museums into environmental education initiatives. In 2017, the Water Museums Global Network was established in response to growing concern that public awareness of water-related challenges remained insufficient despite mounting ecological pressures. Working in partnership with UNESCO-IHP, the organization advocates for museums as critical platforms through which societies can develop new cultural relationships with water. Its mission extends beyond information dissemination; rather, it seeks to foster what its founders describe as a new culture of water stewardship capable of addressing the environmental consequences of modern consumer societies (“Mission | Global Network of Water Museums”).
The organization's partnership with UNESCO-IHP reflects a broader recognition that museums can contribute meaningfully to global sustainability efforts. Specifically, the collaboration supports the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 6, which focuses on ensuring sustainable water management and water security. Through exhibitions, public programs, and community engagement initiatives, museums can transform abstract sustainability goals into tangible experiences that resonate with visitors' everyday lives.
Museum scholar Robert Janes similarly argues that museums possess both the opportunity and the responsibility to engage with pressing social and environmental issues. Writing amid increasing concern regarding resource depletion and ecological instability, Janes contends that museums must move beyond traditional models centered primarily on collection stewardship and subject expertise. Instead, he argues that museums should serve as civic institutions capable of providing intellectual resources during periods of profound social and environmental change. Such a vision positions museums not as passive repositories of knowledge but as active participants in shaping public understanding and public action.
Building upon this framework, Lorraine Bell and Darlene Clover emphasize the role of museums as spaces for collective environmental learning. They argue that environmental education must extend beyond the transmission of scientific facts and instead encourage critical reflection on the underlying causes of environmental crises. Museums are uniquely equipped to facilitate such reflection because they communicate through multiple forms of interpretation, including storytelling, visual culture, material objects, artistic expression, and place-based experiences. These interpretive strategies enable visitors to engage with difficult environmental subjects in ways that are intellectually rigorous while remaining emotionally accessible.
This emphasis on meaningful engagement aligns with Sam Ham's influential work on interpretive practice. Ham argues that effective interpretation does not seek merely to transmit information but to provoke thought and establish personally relevant connections between audiences and subject matter. Visitors are more likely to retain information and reconsider existing perspectives when exhibits connect intellectual content to themes that resonate with their own experiences and values. For environmental exhibitions, this approach is particularly important because it transforms abstract ecological concerns into issues that visitors perceive as immediate and relevant to their daily lives (Ham 7–12).
This emphasis on experience is particularly significant. Environmental problems are frequently communicated through statistics, projections, and technical language that can overwhelm audiences and produce feelings of helplessness. Museum environments offer alternative pathways for engagement. By grounding environmental challenges in personal narratives, local histories, and tangible objects, museums can transform abstract problems into human experiences. In doing so, they create opportunities for visitors to develop both understanding and agency.
Yun-Ciao Wang and Shang-Chia Chiou extend this argument by emphasizing museums' capacity to cultivate values alongside knowledge. Effective environmental education, they argue, should encourage visitors to consider questions of social responsibility, collective welfare, and long-term sustainability. The ultimate objective is not merely the acquisition of information but the development of perspectives and behaviors capable of supporting sustainable futures.
Importantly, successful environmental education does not require large institutions with substantial resources. Katrina Korfmacher and Valerie Garrison demonstrate this through their Healthy Home Museum project, a modest community-based initiative that successfully increased environmental awareness and promoted behavioral change among visitors. The project's success illustrates that meaningful environmental engagement depends less on institutional scale than on thoughtful interpretation, community partnerships, and accessible educational design. Moreover, the project's ability to travel into schools, hospitals, and community spaces highlights the potential for museum-based environmental education to reach audiences beyond traditional museum walls.
Taken together, these scholarly perspectives reveal a growing consensus: museums possess extraordinary potential as sites of environmental education. Their ability to combine scientific knowledge, cultural interpretation, public trust, and experiential learning makes them uniquely suited to addressing contemporary environmental challenges. Water, perhaps more than any other resource, demands such an approach. Because water intersects with ecology, technology, public health, economics, politics, and culture, understanding it requires interdisciplinary forms of interpretation that museums are particularly well equipped to provide.
Consequently, a museum exhibition dedicated to water literacy represents more than an educational initiative. It represents an opportunity to reshape public relationships with one of humanity's most essential resources. By fostering understanding, reflection, and engagement, museums can help cultivate the environmental literacy necessary to confront the water challenges of the present century.
Designing Water: The American Experience: Interpretation, Regional Knowledge, and Public Engagement
While museums possess significant potential as sites of environmental education, successful environmental exhibitions require more than the presentation of scientific information. Research in museum studies consistently demonstrates that visitors rarely retain large quantities of technical content from exhibits. Instead, visitors are more likely to remember compelling narratives, emotionally resonant experiences, and opportunities to connect new information to their own lives. Consequently, Water: The American Experience would be designed not merely as an exhibition about water, but as an interpretive framework through which visitors can understand their personal relationship to water systems and their role in shaping sustainable futures.
The exhibition would be organized around a central premise: water is not simply a natural resource but an interconnected system linking ecology, technology, infrastructure, culture, economics, and human survival. Every visitor, regardless of geographic location, participates in this system daily. Yet because most water infrastructures remain hidden from public view, these relationships often go unnoticed. The exhibition would therefore seek to make visible the networks, decisions, and histories that connect individuals to broader water systems.
To accomplish this objective, Water: The American Experience would combine scientific interpretation with approaches drawn from public history, environmental humanities, and museum education. Rather than presenting water solely through scientific data and technical explanations, the exhibition would integrate personal narratives, historical case studies, material culture, contemporary environmental challenges, and future scenarios. Such an approach recognizes that environmental understanding emerges not only through scientific literacy but also through cultural and historical awareness.
The visitor experience would begin with a foundational gallery introducing the water cycle, freshwater availability, and the history of water infrastructure in the United States. This introductory section would establish a shared baseline of knowledge while challenging common assumptions regarding water abundance and accessibility. Interactive visualizations would illustrate the movement of water through watersheds, reservoirs, treatment facilities, agricultural systems, and domestic consumption networks. Visitors would be encouraged to consider where their water originates, how it reaches their homes, and what ecological and technological systems sustain its availability.
From this common foundation, the exhibition would transition into regionally adapted content. One of the central challenges facing water education in the United States is the immense diversity of water-related issues across geographic regions. Water scarcity in the Colorado River Basin differs substantially from groundwater depletion in the High Plains, aging infrastructure in northeastern cities, agricultural runoff in the Midwest, or wetland loss along the Gulf Coast. Consequently, a single national narrative risks obscuring local realities.
To address this challenge, Water: The American Experience would employ a modular exhibition design. Core interpretive themes would remain consistent across all venues, while secondary galleries would be tailored to the specific environmental, historical, and cultural concerns of each host region. Such flexibility would allow visitors to engage simultaneously with national water issues and the particular challenges affecting their local communities.
For example, exhibitions hosted in the American West might focus on drought, reservoir management, interstate water allocation, and the future of the Colorado River. Installations in the Midwest could emphasize agricultural systems, nutrient runoff, and watershed restoration. Along the Gulf Coast, interpretation might examine hurricanes, wetland loss, coastal resilience, and the relationship between freshwater systems and marine environments. In the Southeast, exhibitions could explore river biodiversity, watershed conservation, environmental justice, and the historical role of waterways in shaping settlement and economic development.
This regional framework reflects an important principle within contemporary museum practice: visitors engage most deeply with content that connects directly to their lived experiences. By linking national environmental challenges to local landscapes, communities, and histories, the exhibition would encourage visitors to view water issues not as distant problems but as immediate concerns requiring informed participation.
The exhibition would further emphasize the relationship between natural and human histories. Water has shaped settlement patterns, industrial development, transportation networks, agricultural systems, public health initiatives, and environmental policy throughout American history. Understanding contemporary water challenges therefore requires historical perspective. Historical objects, archival materials, maps, engineering plans, photographs, and oral histories would be integrated throughout the exhibition to demonstrate how past decisions continue to influence present conditions.
Such an approach aligns with growing scholarship emphasizing the importance of environmental history within museum interpretation. Environmental challenges are often presented as contemporary crises detached from historical context. Yet water systems are products of centuries of environmental modification, technological innovation, political negotiation, and cultural belief. By tracing these histories, museums can help visitors understand that current water challenges did not emerge suddenly but developed through complex interactions between human societies and natural systems over time.
This emphasis on participation reflects broader shifts within contemporary museum practice. Nina Simon argues that museums increasingly function as participatory institutions in which visitors contribute meaningfully to the creation of knowledge and interpretation rather than merely consuming information. Participatory approaches encourage visitors to share experiences, perspectives, and local expertise, thereby transforming museums into spaces of dialogue and collaborative learning. Within the context of environmental education, such participation can strengthen visitors' sense of personal investment and responsibility toward environmental issues by positioning them as contributors to conversations about stewardship rather than passive observers (Simon 1–3).
Contemporary museum theory increasingly recognizes visitors as active contributors to knowledge-making rather than merely recipients of information. Opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and collaborative problem-solving would therefore be integrated throughout the exhibition. Visitors might contribute local water stories, share observations regarding environmental change within their communities, or participate in interactive simulations exploring policy decisions and resource management strategies. These participatory elements serve an important educational purpose. Environmental issues can often appear overwhelming, particularly when presented through narratives of crisis and decline. By involving visitors in conversations about potential solutions, museums can foster a sense of agency alongside awareness. The objective is not to prescribe specific political positions but rather to encourage informed engagement and civic participation.
Digital technologies would further expand the exhibition's reach beyond museum walls. Building upon the example established by Korfmacher and Garrison's Healthy Home Museum, exhibition resources would remain accessible through digital platforms, allowing educators, community organizations, and visitors to continue engaging with content after their museum experience. Virtual exhibitions, educational toolkits, oral history collections, and region-specific resource guides could extend the exhibition's impact while supporting broader environmental literacy initiatives.
Ultimately, the success of Water: The American Experience would not be measured solely by attendance figures or visitor satisfaction surveys. Rather, its success would depend upon its ability to transform public understanding of water itself. The exhibition seeks to move visitors beyond viewing water as an invisible utility and toward recognizing it as a dynamic environmental, cultural, and historical system. In doing so, it positions museums not simply as sites of information dissemination but as institutions capable of fostering environmental citizenship and long-term stewardship.
By connecting scientific knowledge with personal experience, historical understanding, and civic engagement, Water: The American Experience offers a model for how museums can contribute meaningfully to public responses to environmental challenges. In an era defined by increasing uncertainty surrounding water resources, such efforts represent not only an educational opportunity but a public responsibility.
Museums, Civic Responsibility, and the Future of Environmental Stewardship
The environmental challenges of the twenty-first century have prompted museums to reconsider their roles within society. Traditionally viewed as institutions dedicated to collecting, preserving, and interpreting material culture, museums increasingly find themselves confronting questions that extend beyond stewardship of the past. Climate change, biodiversity loss, environmental degradation, and resource scarcity have challenged museums to consider how their collections, exhibitions, and educational programs might contribute to public understanding of contemporary issues. In this context, environmental education represents not a departure from museum practice but an extension of museums' longstanding commitment to public knowledge.
This shift reflects broader transformations within museum studies. During much of the twentieth century, museums frequently prioritized collections, expertise, and disciplinary authority. While these functions remain essential, contemporary scholarship has increasingly emphasized the social responsibilities of museums as public institutions. Rather than serving solely as repositories of knowledge, museums are now understood as active participants in civic life, capable of fostering dialogue, encouraging critical reflection, and facilitating public engagement with pressing social concerns.
Recent museum scholarship has further challenged assumptions regarding institutional neutrality. Robert Janes and Richard Sandell argue that museums possess both the capacity and the ethical obligation to engage with issues of social and environmental significance. Rather than compromising scholarly integrity, such engagement can reinforce museums' public value by connecting collections, expertise, and interpretation to contemporary challenges. Environmental sustainability, climate change, and resource management therefore represent not peripheral concerns but central opportunities for museums to demonstrate civic relevance and public service (Janes and Sandell 3–7).
Gail Anderson characterizes this transition as part of an ongoing reimagining of museum purpose, in which institutions seek to become more responsive to the needs and concerns of their communities. Within this framework, museums are not neutral spaces detached from contemporary realities. Rather, they are sites where knowledge is interpreted, values are negotiated, and public understanding is shaped. Such a perspective carries significant implications for environmental topics, which frequently require interdisciplinary approaches and broad public participation.
Water represents an especially compelling subject through which to examine this evolving museum role. Unlike many environmental issues, water intersects directly with nearly every aspect of human life. It influences public health, food production, economic development, transportation, recreation, biodiversity, and cultural identity. Yet despite its ubiquity, water often remains conceptually invisible. The systems that provide clean water and manage wastewater are largely hidden from public view, while the ecological processes that sustain freshwater resources frequently remain poorly understood. As a result, water occupies a paradoxical position: it is both indispensable and overlooked.
Museums possess unique capacities to address this paradox. Through exhibitions, collections, and public programming, they can reveal relationships that are otherwise difficult to perceive. Objects, specimens, photographs, maps, oral histories, scientific data, and artistic interpretations can be brought together to illustrate the interconnected histories of people and water. Such interpretive work allows museums to make visible the infrastructures, ecosystems, and cultural values that shape everyday experiences of water.
Importantly, this process involves more than communicating scientific information. Effective environmental interpretation must also cultivate what environmental scholars often describe as ecological literacy: the ability to understand the relationships between human actions and environmental systems. Ecological literacy requires historical awareness, cultural understanding, and ethical reflection alongside scientific knowledge. Museums are particularly well positioned to foster these forms of learning because they routinely integrate diverse modes of interpretation and multiple forms of evidence.
The proposed exhibition, Water: The American Experience, seeks to embody this broader educational mission. While grounded in contemporary concerns regarding water sustainability, its ultimate objective extends beyond awareness of a single environmental issue. Rather, the exhibition aims to encourage visitors to think critically about the systems that sustain human life and the responsibilities that accompany participation in those systems. By connecting individual experiences to larger environmental processes, the exhibition invites visitors to recognize themselves as stakeholders in the future of water stewardship.
This approach reflects a growing recognition that environmental problems cannot be addressed solely through technological innovation or policy reform. Scientific expertise remains indispensable, yet long-term environmental solutions also require informed publics capable of understanding and supporting sustainable practices. Museums contribute to this process by providing spaces where scientific knowledge can be translated into forms that are accessible, meaningful, and relevant to everyday life.
The significance of this role will likely increase in coming decades. Climate change is expected to intensify many existing water-related challenges, including drought, flooding, infrastructure stress, ecosystem degradation, and competition for freshwater resources. Addressing these challenges will require not only scientific and technological responses but also cultural shifts in how societies understand and value water. Museums, as institutions dedicated to the interpretation of knowledge and experience, have an important part to play in facilitating such shifts.
Ultimately, the future relevance of museums may depend upon their willingness to engage with issues that matter profoundly to the communities they serve. Environmental challenges present opportunities for museums to demonstrate the continuing value of public scholarship and public education. By helping visitors understand complex environmental systems and their own relationships to those systems, museums contribute to the development of more informed, reflective, and engaged communities.
The case of water illustrates this potential particularly well. Water is simultaneously a scientific subject, a cultural resource, a political concern, and a historical force. Interpreting it effectively requires the integration of natural history, environmental history, public policy, technological development, and lived experience. Museums are among the few institutions capable of bringing these perspectives together within a single interpretive framework.
As environmental pressures continue to reshape the twenty-first century, museums face an important question: what responsibilities accompany their authority as educational institutions? This paper suggests that one answer lies in environmental stewardship. By fostering environmental literacy, encouraging civic engagement, and making complex systems accessible to diverse audiences, museums can help societies navigate the challenges ahead. In doing so, they fulfill not only their educational mission but also their broader civic obligation to contribute meaningfully to the public good.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the significance of this project extends beyond water alone. It raises broader questions about how environmental knowledge is produced, communicated, and acted upon within society. Museums occupy a critical position within these processes, serving as intermediaries between scientific expertise and public understanding. As pressures on freshwater systems intensify, the need for institutions capable of connecting knowledge to public engagement will only grow. Museums cannot solve environmental challenges on their own, but they can help cultivate the informed publics upon which durable solutions depend. In doing so, they affirm their continuing relevance not only as educational institutions, but as participants in the ongoing stewardship of environmental knowledge.
Epilogue: Water, Natural History, and the Production of Environmental Knowledge
While this paper has focused on water as a contemporary environmental concern and museums as sites of public engagement, the project ultimately points toward a broader set of questions concerning the production of environmental knowledge itself. Water is not simply a resource to be managed or a subject to be interpreted. It is also a medium through which scientific understanding of the natural world has been generated, organized, and communicated. Examining water through a museum lens therefore invites consideration of the historical processes through which environments become objects of scientific knowledge.
The challenges addressed throughout this paper—water scarcity, environmental stewardship, public understanding, and sustainability—are often framed as problems requiring improved communication between scientific experts and broader publics. Yet such framing risks obscuring a more fundamental question: how does environmental knowledge come into existence in the first place? Before water can be interpreted in museums, debated in policy arenas, or incorporated into conservation initiatives, it must first be observed, measured, recorded, classified, and transformed into forms of knowledge that can circulate through institutions. The history of water is therefore also a history of knowledge-making.
Throughout American history, rivers, wetlands, lakes, and coastal environments have served as important sites of scientific inquiry. Naturalists, surveyors, geologists, biologists, engineers, and conservationists have relied upon waterways as locations for observation, specimen collection, mapping, experimentation, and ecological study. Through these activities, landscapes were transformed into data, observations into records, and local phenomena into scientific knowledge. Rivers functioned not merely as subjects of investigation but as laboratories in which new understandings of biodiversity, geology, hydrology, and ecological relationships emerged.
These investigations did not occur in isolation. Scientific knowledge has always depended upon infrastructures capable of preserving, organizing, and transmitting information across time and space. Museums, universities, scientific societies, government agencies, archives, and botanical gardens all participated in this process. Together, these institutions formed networks through which environmental observations were stabilized and made durable. Specimens, field notes, maps, photographs, reports, and collections allowed knowledge produced in particular places to travel beyond the field and enter broader scientific and public discourse.
Museums occupy a distinctive position within these networks. They are often understood primarily as institutions that communicate knowledge to public audiences. Yet museums have also played a critical role in the production of knowledge itself. Decisions regarding what is collected, preserved, classified, exhibited, and interpreted shape how the natural world is understood. Collections do not merely document scientific knowledge; they help constitute it.
Natural history museums provide particularly powerful examples of this process. Collections of plants, animals, fossils, minerals, and environmental specimens are frequently viewed as records of nature. They are equally records of human inquiry. Every specimen embodies a history of observation, collection, identification, classification, interpretation, and institutional stewardship. As a result, museum collections function simultaneously as archives of biodiversity and archives of scientific practice.
This dual significance has become increasingly apparent in the twenty-first century. Many specimens collected decades or centuries ago now serve purposes unforeseen by their original collectors. Historical collections are routinely employed in contemporary research concerning climate change, habitat transformation, invasive species, environmental contaminants, and biodiversity loss. Specimens once gathered to document species distributions or support taxonomic research have become historical records against which ecological change can be measured. Collections assembled in the past therefore continue to generate new scientific knowledge in the present.
Water systems offer a particularly compelling illustration of these dynamics. Rivers and wetlands support extraordinary biological diversity while simultaneously recording environmental change. Freshwater mussels, fish, aquatic plants, insects, and other organisms preserved in museum collections provide evidence through which scientists can reconstruct ecological histories and evaluate long-term transformations in aquatic ecosystems. Such specimens connect contemporary research to observations made by earlier generations, creating forms of continuity that span decades or even centuries.
Viewed from this perspective, museums do not simply disseminate environmental knowledge after it has been produced elsewhere. Rather, they participate in the processes through which knowledge is generated, stabilized, preserved, and circulated. They serve as intermediaries between field observation and public understanding, between scientific investigation and cultural meaning, and between past environments and present concerns. Their collections, exhibitions, and interpretive practices shape both what societies know about the natural world and how that knowledge is understood.
The proposed exhibition, Water: The American Experience, can therefore be understood as more than an exercise in environmental education. It also offers an opportunity to illuminate the often-invisible infrastructures through which environmental knowledge travels. Visitors encounter not only scientific conclusions about water but also the networks of observation, research, collection, interpretation, and institutional stewardship that make those conclusions possible. In doing so, the exhibition encourages reflection not only on water itself but on the processes through which environmental understanding is constructed.
Such questions lie at the intersection of museum studies, environmental history, and the history of science. Increasingly, scholars in these fields have emphasized that scientific knowledge does not emerge fully formed from nature. Rather, it is produced through interactions among people, places, institutions, technologies, and material objects. Questions concerning who collects specimens, how environments are classified, what forms of evidence are preserved, and how knowledge is communicated are simultaneously historical, scientific, and cultural questions. They shape both the development of scientific authority and the ways societies understand environmental change.
For the American South, these questions are particularly significant. The region's rivers, wetlands, forests, and coastal environments have long been sites of biological richness, scientific investigation, and environmental transformation. They have generated extensive traditions of natural history research while simultaneously serving as locations where questions of conservation, resource use, economic development, and environmental justice continue to unfold. Examining how knowledge about these environments has been produced and circulated offers opportunities to better understand both the history of science and the ecological challenges of the present.
Ultimately, water serves as a useful point of entry into these broader concerns. Its movement connects landscapes, species, institutions, and communities. Following those connections reveals the networks through which environmental knowledge is produced and sustained—from rivers and field sites to laboratories, collections, museums, and public audiences. Understanding these processes may prove increasingly important as museums seek to address contemporary environmental challenges while preserving the historical records upon which future scientific understanding depends.
Viewed in this light, water stewardship and natural history are not separate endeavors. Both involve efforts to understand, document, preserve, and communicate relationships between human societies and the environments upon which they depend. Museums stand at the intersection of these activities, serving simultaneously as archives of biodiversity, centers of public interpretation, and participants in the ongoing production of environmental knowledge. Their significance lies not only in what they preserve from the past, but also in their capacity to shape how future generations understand and engage with the natural world.
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