Many museums are changing to expose children to new kinds of joy via learning and exploring,

However, I am not taken with the child's idea that "objects have rights"; it seems to be an instance of the childish mistake of personifying everything.

Objects cannot have rights because they are unable to exercise any rights. To do that requires feelings, wishes, preferences, and a way to express them. If we can ever make objects which have those faculties, such as are familiar in science fiction, they might deserve to be considered persons — but they don't exist now.

This is an instance of a gratuitous conceptual rigidity, according to which the only way to conclude that a non-person ought to be protected somehow is to say it has rights. Thus, we can't simply protect a river from pollution, we would have to say the river "has rights."

Experience shows that laws against polluting rivers will do the job, given political will to uphold them. Absent that will, defining that protection as "rights of rivers" won't help much; governments that don't value justice often allow the rights of human beings to be trampled.