The Future of Heritage as Climates Change

Loss, Adaptation and Creativity

David Harvey, Jim Perry, David Harvey, Jim Perry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317530121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

Climate change is a critical issue for heritage studies. Sites, objects and ways of life all are coming under threat, requiring alternative management, or requiring specific climate change adaptation. Heritage is key to interpreting the societal significance of climate change; notions (and images) of the past are crucial to our understanding of the present, and are used to prompt actions that help society define and achieve a specific and desired future.

Relatively little attention has been paid to the critical intersections between heritage and climate change. The Future of Heritage as Climates Change frames the intellectual context within which heritage and climate change can be examined, presenting cases and sub-fields in which the heritage-climate change nexus is being examined and provides synthetic analyses through five overarching themes:

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• The heritage of change among coastal communities: liminality and the politics of engagement

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• Dwelling materials: processes and possibilities;

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• Environmental heritage: meanings of the past – prospects for the future;

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• Blurring the boundaries of nature and culture: the politics of anticipation;

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• Climate change and heritage practice: adaptation and resilience.

The Future of Heritage as Climates Change provides scholars, managers, policy makers and students with a much needed examination of heritage and climate change to help make critical decisions in the next several decades.

Part I
Blurring the boundaries of heritage and climate change

Creative ontologies and consequences

Chapter 2
Narratives of change on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site

Rose Ferraby

The stones had stories to tell.

(Lorimer 2012: 95)

Figure 2.1 A long, grey band of cliff runs west from the cobbled beach beyond the Cobb. Its progress is marked by the percussive interruptions of the soil and stone, which run dirtydown its face at intervals, to gather in great sodden piles at its feet. Between them, the cliff reveals its structure in clear layers that tip and vanish round the far point, to continue their journey out of sight.

The terms ‘heritage’ and ‘climate change’ around which this volume is focused come laden with an intellectual baggage that has grown significantly in the last couple of decades. They are both terms that envelop a wide frame of enquiry across many disciplines, and as such, trying to think through how they relate or cause friction with each other can seem a daunting task. This chapter is an attempt to deal with these huge topics by coming at them from a ground-up approach – by starting from the stone itself, and working out into the wider landscape and the people who are part of it, to appreciate a changing landscape in all its many facets and with a perspective governed by time.

This chapter focuses on the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site in the southwest of England. The site is rare among World Heritage Sites because its heritage value is actually based upon the process and results of change itself – in the past, present and into the future. It, therefore, offers an interesting opportunity to reflect upon how we perceive, record and attend to changing environments and how we can think through these issues more broadly. Focusing specifically on a stretch of coast to the west of Lyme Regis where the Blue Lias is – as Jacquetta Hawkes said, ‘like the smoke of memory’ (2012: 99) – this chapter explores how a landscape-based approach can be used to explore narratives of change at a human and environmental scale. It also discusses the ways in which recording this landscape through photography can weave stories across space and time to give different perspectives of change. The intent is for the reader to gain a different perspective to take to other sites and landscapes, as well as help inform new approaches to climate change and heritage more broadly.

Big issues: thinking through heritage and climate change

As the years go on and we are witness to more and more extreme weather events, debates around climate change gather pace and have increasing impact on planning for the future in a whole range of spheres. The cause of these changing weather patterns is something I will not get embroiled in here: the key point is that our climate is changing at a rapid pace and in unpredictable ways. And it is now that we need to begin to think about the impact of this and how we might adapt to it.

When it comes to thinking about heritage and climate change, the way forward feels complex and challenging. Heritage is about inheritance and legacy – the preservation or recognition of things which need to be taken into the future as part of our culture and history – as part of who we are: ‘It is widely viewed as a precious and irreplaceable resource, essential to personal and collective identity and necessary for self-respect’ (Lowenthal 2005: 81). As such, the very notion of heritage is dependent on subjective decisions about what we deem to be important, relevant to a certain time, space and context. In thinking about heritage and climate change, we are considering a cultural vision of physical change, and that opens myriad ways of thinking about the changing environment – ways that go beyond just preservation, adaptation or loss.

Both ‘heritage’ and ‘climate change’ come laden with intellectual history and debate, at a scale which is almost impossible to summarise. They cover huge spans of time and space and elements of uncertainty which create a ‘challenge for those involved in day-to-day decision making or long-term planning’ (English Heritage 2008: 14). Due to the sheer scale of the issues heritage organisations face when thinking about future climate change, much of the work in this sector has sought to ‘improve knowledge and understanding of the impacts of ongoing and future climate change... through monitoring and research’ (Royal Society of Edinburgh 2004: 1).

How we deal with different elements of heritage varies, with perhaps the largest difference being between so-called ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ heritage. It is somewhat easier to define, value and, therefore, preserve something like an archaeological monument. But how do we give equal attention to our environment – to soils, plants or a layer of stone that may run under our feet, invisible? It becomes more difficult to find ways of defining these and to create awareness of their importance or relationship to our human geographies. Because the human and the natural are intertwined, the stories, histories and meaning of these less legible environments need to be drawn out to encourage a more ground-up way of thinking about the effects of climate change upon them and our relationship with them. Lowenthal states that ‘heritages of nature and of culture continue to arouse quite different expectations’ (2005: 90). I argue here that by thinking through stone in the landscape, we can start to think about changes in the environment and how we react to them, in a way which shows how narratives can be drawn as much from the cliff or beach, as a monument or building. By ‘storying’ the landscape (DeSilvey 2012: 34) and giving it a sense of biography, we can develop another way of coping with change. This may go some way to reveal more suitable ways of managing and preparing for the future.

By thinking in terms of landscape rather than ‘nature’ or ‘culture’, the interactions between can be followed. ‘One of the reasons why landscape studies are so interesting, variable and often cutting-edge is that, invoking both time and place, past and present, being always in process and in tension, they make a mockery of the oppositions that we create between time (history) and space (geography), or between nature (science) and culture (anthropology)’ (Bender 2006: 304). By approaching the ideas of heritage and climate change through landscape, we can draw out narratives that can be taken forward into the future – narratives that connect different temporalities, people and places, materials and processes: a ground-up, dynamic approach to change. By thinking more broadly through landscape, we can ‘make space for the voices that are often lost in grand narratives’ (Edmonds 2006: 185–6), and which are often less visible when it comes to heritage management. It becomes possible to link stories across time and space and thereby encounter a ‘larger temporal and spatial field of relationships’ (Bender 2001: 84).

Narratives in the landscape are not set out neatly, nor do they necessarily adhere to any sense of linearity. Instead, they are part of what Massey aptly describes as ‘intertwined simultaneities of ongoing, unfinished stories’ (2006: 46). In any landscape we are all pulling out meaning which relates to our own life histories and biographical connections – our own personal heritages building on, or reanimating, a sense of a future existence. As Lorimer (2006: 515) notes, ‘landscapes told as a distribution of stories and dramatic episodes, or as repertoires of lived practice, can be creatively recut, embroidered, and still sustain original narratological integrity’. By approaching landscape and landscape change with sensitivity, it is possible to gain new insight that can help understand how change is perceived and communicated more widely. We can reframe and readdress our approaches to heritage and change (Daniels and Endfield 2009). In this way, stories can be seen as ‘world-making vehicles’ (Price 2010: 207); powerful tools in thinking through and communicating landscape change, ‘drawing connections between past dynamism and future process’ (DeSilvey 2012: 34).

It is important to see that these stories and narratives of people and nature can be drawn as much from what is gone as what remains; absent spaces in the environment form and emphasise histories in the living, physical traces. Absence stimulates the imagination (Morris 2013: 1), creating desire to fill the gaps with stories, memories and the element of discovery, where the process of unravelling of stories is as exciting as the objects or landscapes themselves (Hauser 2007: 21). Thinking of absence and the process of disappearance in this way, opens up a more positive way of thinking about those elements of climate change which erode, cover or erase. It also highlights that ‘heritage is, first and foremost, a process’ (Harvey 2001: 335). The process of change is a collection of stories in the making – some beginning and some ending, others colliding and becoming something new. Our work as geologists and archaeologists, as Hawkes eloquently puts it, is a form of ‘reawakening the memory of the world’ (2012: 19), and this ‘reawakening’ is, in itself, heritage. The process of researching, recording and communicating landscape change in all its many facets becomes its own heritage, enveloping those people and places into new narratives that unfold in real time, through the landscape itself.

Of particular interest here is the forms these unfolding landscape stories take into the future, and that focuses our attention on some of the physical objects which surround these narratives – photographs, drawings, found objects, writing. In this chapter I am particularly interested in the role of photography. In many discussions photographs are described as ‘snapshots’ – objects which capture a split moment in time and hold them there (Wells 2003). In this way, they reflect many interesting aspects of temporality, both within the landscape and the resulting artefacts, and this is particularly pertinent when considering ideas of change and heritage(Cerney 2010).

The process of photography can also be understood as a slow learning of the landscape – a way of building up layers of knowledge as each photograph is framed, assessed and taken. The images captured are then pored over, compared and reviewed over time, with each new image affecting understanding of those that went before and those that come after. The process, therefore, is as valuable to the photographer for observing the landscape as the finished image is. The changing landscape and photography of it become a series of layered and linked temporalities of materials, sites and people.

The photographs themselves capture both intended and unintended marks that become etched upon their surface, immediately becoming a record of how something was. As Hauser (2007: 59) argues, ‘Photography cannot help but represent the world archaeologically, since it cannot help but record its objects and landscapes in a temporal context, the traces of the past scattered across their surfaces.’ Like an archaeological site, photographs become layered with information, people and details. In this way they are able to allow multiple readings, or bring out subtle ideas: ‘Photographs record surface perceptions in a detailed manner which allows that which might be known through the optical unconscious, but not previously articulated, to become explicit’ (Wells 2003: 16). In terms of recording landscape change, this raises a vital point: not only are photographs recording the physical change apparent in the frame, they also encourage reflection upon what is absent from the image. This includes the photographer themselves, inviting curiosity as to why the photograph was taken, the relationship of the photographer with the land, and the context of the work. The photograph can thereby become a lens into a wider field of thought and knowledge, opening a wider dialogue and interpretation on the nature of change in the landscape and the individuals with which it is associated.

These narratives can be opened up and explored in different ways. In the work of John Berger, we see an exploration of people and landscape communicated in the way photographs are woven into text, allowing a depth and breadth of reading which can only be achieved by the use of such keen authorial illustration. Lorimer (2006: 503) describes Berger’s work as ‘an approach to narration of events once witnessed that rests somewhere between the recovery of historical truths and the careful formulation of imaginative truths’. Berger is interested in ‘reanimating, creatively, the embroidered relationships between individual and environment’ (504). Allowing this freedom of reading images allows the photographs to be different things to different people.

To explore further these ideas of landscape change and photography, I will explore a particular section of stone on the Jurassic Coast, a site where these questions of heritage and climate change are particularly visible and relevant. From one section of cliff we explore the complexities of our relationships with changing landscape, ideas of evolving heritage and the role of photography in our understanding of these ideas. The site offers the opportunity to see how people are connected over time through materials and how ‘social and physical contours overlap’ (Lorimer 2006: 503), giving a glimpse of just how many stories are waiting to be told on this ever-changing coast.

Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site

Figure 2.2

World Heritage Sites are designated for their ‘outstanding universal value’ representing ‘irreplaceable sources of life and inspiration’ (UNESCO website). These are big statements, beset with questions and complications. UNESCO have the difficult task of trying to preserve sites worldwide for ‘all humanity’, a big ask, which itself invites a certain degree of critique, not least that it may result in the flattening of complexity in an attempt to create models or categories that encompass the many kinds of ‘heritage’ across the world. In order to designate and manage the range of sites, they have divided them into two broad categories: natural and cultural. I would argue that by separating nature from culture, UNESCO are creating a dichotomy that risks ignoring some of the most interesting and valuabl...