In the context of natural history collections, ecologising the museum means accounting for and negotiating with the various violent modes through which “collecting” took place. Such a disposition would necessarily denaturalise the collection and its viviscopic specimens, which vie for visitors' imaginations and investments. It would question the necroaesthetic experience on offer in these institutions and encourage denaturalising the tendency to neutralise the feelings of irretrievable loss and anxiety that accompany any visit. Petting the specimens might not be the most relevant comportment in this creaturely columbarium when we accept the reality that an anthropogenically-effectuated mass extinction is in full effect outside. Rather than helping bury these feelings of loss, the future of the natural history museum, and of “ecologising museums” more broadly, might mean instead the production of exhibitions and programmes that allow visitors to confront the sense of despair that such a violent reality occasions.

Even while acting as its instrument, Wallace was no stranger to the experience of melancholy brought on when considering the violence of the will to science. An awkward estimation of his privileged human, masculine, and colonial techniques of observation stumbles over the recognition of imminent consequences. The passage is remarkable and worth quoting in its entirety:

I thought of the long ages of the past, during which the successive generations of this little creature had run their course – year by year being born, and living and dying amid these dark and gloomy woods with no intelligent eye to gaze upon their loveliness; to all appearance such a wanton waste of beauty. Such ideas excite a feeling of melancholy. It seems sad that on the one hand such exquisite creatures should live out their lives and exhibit their charms only in these wild, inhospitable regions, doomed for ages yet to come to hopeless barbarism; while on the other hand, should civilized man ever reach these distant lands, and bring moral, intellectual and physical light into the recesses of these virgin forests, we may be sure that he will so disturb the nicely-balanced relations of organic and inorganic nature as to cause the disappearance, and finally the extinction, of these very beings whose wonderful structure and beauty he alone is fitted to appreciate and enjoy. (Wallace 1869)