“Nature as curator” frames natural processes as selective forces that preserve or erase elements of the world much like a museum curator. While this metaphor highlights non-human agency, it risks implying intentionality where none exists, obscuring the chaotic forces that shape ecological outcomes and the human systems that determine what is lost or remembered. Erosion, storms, and fossilization illustrate this curatorial function by removing some features while preserving others, shaping how communities recall and interpret disaster. This connects with Monika Stobiecka’s work on cultural heritage in the Anthropocene, as well as thinkers like Bennett, Latour, and Haraway, who argue that non-human forces—storms, rivers, mold, infrastructures, and objects—actively influence material and symbolic worlds.

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Integrating Actor-Network Theory with world-ecology further shows that agency operates through economic systems such as capitalism, state power, and corporate interests. Jason Moore’s Capitalocene reframes curation as a structural process in which capitalism, rather than humanity in general, organizes which environments and communities are protected or neglected. Hurricane Katrina exemplifies this layered curation: floodwaters, mold, levee failures, federal delays, and economic constraints acted alongside institutional and structural forces to determine what survived, what decayed, and whose stories were preserved or erased. In this sense, curation is simultaneously natural, cultural, and economic, continually reshaping environments and communities.