Water, Water Everywhere
"Water: H20 = Life," a luminous exhibition that opens November 3 at the American Museum of Natural History, is the museum's latest look at an environmental concern. The museum has previously devoted its attention to global warming, endangered species, and biodiversity, and, taken together, these exhibitions form a genre at which the institution excels.
The formula, according to the curator, the director for the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, Eleanor J. Sterling, is to provide information about a precious resource, the environmental concern posed by its degradation, and actions people can take to help preserve it.
"The global warming exhibit in the early 1990s might have been a little early, but people really respond now," Ms. Sterling said of the conservation-themed exhibits. Indeed, interspersed with ominous wall texts — one notes that more than 1 billion people around the world live without reliable access to safe drinking water — are artistically stunning installations. In the introductory section, visitors walk through a fog screen resembling a waterfall with the word "water" projected onto it in different languages. A 68-inch globe displays composite satellite images of Earth. And there is a towering, walk-through reconstruction of a water-carved slot canyon.
But the real message coursing through this diorama is that nothing is more essential than water, and that very little vacillates as fluidly between form, function, and symbol.
Today, fresh water makes up only 3% of Earth's water, and much of that is locked in ice caps, sea ice, and glaciers, or deep underground. And the tiny fraction readily available to humans is not evenly distributed around the world, creating conflicting demands, both among people and between humans and other life on earth.
The exhibit's most riveting displays are those that depict how people, plants, and animals have evolved to cope with water scarcity, abundance, or temperature extremes.
A display of artifacts, including both ancient and modern water vessels from around the world, shows how water is transported into water-poor areas. In an interactive element depicting the relationship between water scarcity and gender equity, visitors can attempt to lift and carry full water jugs — something millions of women and young girls in developing countries must do every day.
Finally, a sari from India, used to filter out the microorganism that causes cholera, helps illustrate one of the simple ways people have been able to improve health in places where clean water is not readily available.
The show eventually segues into "Water Everywhere," a section exploring some of the wettest and iciest places in the world. Here, a huge polar bear hovers over a precarious ice floe, and a computer screen describes life in the Arctic. Nearby, an expansive diorama, including a giant catfish, re-creates life on Cambodia's Tonle Sap, a freshwater lake on the Mekong River where life is governed by the seasonal pulse of monsoon floods. But the giant creatures are less interesting than a display of tiny geological specimens. A piece of the Murichison meteorite, which landed in Australia in 1969, and a piece of 3.8-billion-year-old Isua schist help present the story of water's origin and age on Earth.
Included in the show is a short video in a sit-down theater where Ms. Sterling and the museum's ichthyologist, Melanie Stiassny, speak passionately about the need to rethink the ways we obtain and use water.
In the exhibition's final gallery, a wall is lined with portraits of New York "water heroes," such as a conservationist working to restore the Bronx River, who have made a commitment to protect water resources in inspiring ways.
According to Ms. Sterling, these efforts are of vital importance. "We can dry underground aquifers to the extent they no longer recharge at a rate to support our lifestyles," she said. "At some point, we're going to run out of sources for fresh, clean water."
