Below is a fictionalized "About Us" page for the floating natural history museum depicted in Fukushima 2100:
The Fukushima Natural History Museum was established as public space to reckon with living in the epoch of human transformation of the Earth. Our mission is to deepen our collective understanding of our collective impact and our sense of collective responsibility (response-ability) in this, our troubled, time.
The Anthropocene serves as our primary focus not only because our collective impact on the Earth has been so extensive, but also because we lack the space, language, and symbols to deal with the emotional and mental task we are left in its wake. The nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant provides an illustrative example of the tangible objects and intangible systems through which mankind has affected our shared world. The Fukushima Natural History Museum attempts to provide a skeleton on which we can accrete this body of knowledge and relations.
Our collections display representatives of the scientific knowledge on nuclear fallout and the necessity of active, participatory engagement required to gather it. In the spirit of Bruno Latour, we walk a fine line between anthropomorphizing the Earth, that is giving it the shape of something human, and phusimorphizing, that is giving it a shape based on its preceding relationships. Anthropomorphizing serves as a way to give our visitors a vantage to relate to the task at hand but, when followed to a fault, limits our capacity to view beyond a human vector. On the other hand, phusimorphizing takes into consideration the relationships but pre-supposes our capacity to understand the web of causes, objects, and subjects that come from them.
The Fukushima Natural History Museum attempts to transverse the gulf of commonplace thoughtless-ness. In the spirit of Donna Haraway on Hannah Arendt, we strive to make ourselves present to ourselves, present to what is not ourselves, and to what has been missing. As humans, we have lulled ourselves into a thinking that our actions are self-producing, self-defined, and confined within predictable temporal lines. However, we have collectively produced systems that extend beyond our tenuous spatial and temporal grasp and have decentralized control and information. The Fukushima Natural History Museum, for many, will begin a stream of thinking along these channels. For others, it will deepen their understanding. For all, it will provide a harbor to moor in the wake of the Anthropocene.