Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability

Diane Barthel-Bouchier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315431031
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Archéologie

For cultural and heritage institutions around the world, sustainability is the major challenge of the twenty-first century. In the first major work to analyze this critical issue, Barthel-Bouchier argues that programmatic commitments to sustainability arose both from direct environmental threats to tangible and intangible heritage, and from social and economic contradictions as heritage developed into a truly global organizational field. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews over many years, as well as detailed coverage of primary documents and secondary literature, she examines key international organizations including UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the World Monuments Fund, and national trust organizations of Great Britain, the United States, and Australia, and many others. This wide-ranging study establishes a foundation for critical analysis and programmatic advances as heritage professionals encounter the growing challenge of sustainability.

CHAPTER ONE

Culture: Our Second Nature

In the spring of 2008 heritage conservationists from around the world gathered in the peninsular city of Macao to discuss the global ecological crisis. Macao was an appropriate location, insofar as its historic center has achieved World Heritage status. But it is better known for its casinos, including the impressive Venetian Resort Hotel—a simulacrum of the original World Heritage site of Venice.

There’s irony to be found in the fact that well-heeled delegates, disproportionately drawn from distant Europe and North America, added to carbon emissions through their long-distance flights in order to discuss climate change and to forge a common commitment to sustainability. Run by a professional conference organizer, this forum distributed the usual conference souvenir trinkets and relied on the usual seemingly endless supplies of paper napkins, plastic utensils, cups, and bags. Or, as one disgruntled conference attendee put it, “all this garbage.” The contradictions between the stated purpose of the conference and its actual environmental impact were all too apparent.

As cultural heritage developed as an organizational field in the postwar period, it derived legitimacy from the idea that cultural heritage was a human right among other human rights, such as the right to worship freely or the right not to be tortured. This human right to heritage became embedded in a number of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conventions and declarations. It served to justify the classic tasks associated with the conservation of heritage structures and sites, and to expand the definition of heritage to include not just sites but whole land-scapes. In time, the definition was further expanded to encompass not just tangible heritage but also intangible cultural practices.

Yet the very expansion of the heritage field created its own problems. In brief, it was easier to name sites to a UNESCO World Heritage List than to convince national governments to provide the necessary funds to look after all the sites on the list. It was easier to set up academic programs in historic preservation than to find well-paying positions for all the graduates; easier to identify sites that should be “saved” than to convince the public that it was their human right not simply to save the site, but to pay for the privilege. These challenges added to an underlying sentiment of status inconsistency, as many heritage professionals felt they did not receive recognition commensurate with their contributions when compared, for example, to their counterparts active in nature conservation.

In this book I discuss how heritage organizations have responded to these challenges. I focus in particular on how the theme of sustainability has become an increasingly important consideration in the conservation of historic sites, monuments, and landscapes. Heritage proponents have created a discourse that views cultural heritage as contributing in significant ways to broader efforts to create sustainable societies. To some extent this new emphasis was forced on heritage organizations by governments who viewed historic structures as inherently wasteful of resources and energy inefficient. In large measure, however, the mission of sustainability was freely chosen by heritage conservationists, not only because of material considerations stemming from the tasks associated with their work—the very real threats to historic sites and landscapes—but also in response to the above-mentioned tensions relating to government and public support and to professional status. This new mission was meant to convince decision makers and publics that heritage conservationists were not “woolly-headed idealists” interested only in art and history, but pragmatic experts who could contribute scientific solutions to global problems of climate change and unsustainable social practices.

However, although the new focus on sustainability solved some problems it created others, as contradictions emerged between this focus and the concurrent alignment of the heritage professionals and managers with tourism and development interests. Cultural heritage organizations and agencies had already significantly deviated from their classic mission of heritage conservation by altering their relationship with the tourism industry and by adopting heritage tourism as a major part of their activities. Over the course of the late twentieth century, heritage professionals moved from critiquing tourism’s impact on cultural sites to the eager embrace of tourism through the formation of partnerships with travel-oriented corporations such as American Express, Expedia, and Royal Caribbean cruises. The funds provided by these major corporations shored up many a heritage project and provided career opportunities for many graduates of heritage conservation programs.

It is nonetheless well recognized that global tourism is contributing to climate change and resource depletion, as when tourists from Europe or North America board planes to vacation in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. Heritage conservationists, well aware of the problem, have attempted to resolve such contradictions by promoting the concept of sustainable tourism. Yet, as the physical evidence of the costs of tourism and development to both the historic and the physical environment grows, so too do political tensions and a sense that heritage conservationists have not yet decided exactly how conservation of the past can contribute fully to a sustainable future. The analysis contained in this volume is thus significant both for what it reveals about the current state of heritage conservation and for its implications for other organizational fields embarking upon programs of mission change.

The heritage professionals and others active in what I call the “global heritage community” have positioned themselves at the cutting edge of questions about how much the culture of the past will form part of a future increasingly subject to destructive environmental forces. By the term global heritage community I mean to include those who form part of a professional community dedicated to the values associated with a cosmopolitan approach to heritage conservation.¹,² The global heritage community draws on forms of expertise associated with a range of professions, including architecture, archaeology, history, material science, chemistry, law, urban planning, and public policy, among others.

Viewed more broadly, the underlying question of what the role of heritage conservation should be concerns us all. We live in what has been called a “world risk society” where the discourses surrounding possible global catastrophes differ from those relating to earlier, more specific and localized forms of risk.³ It is not simply a question of the survival of “old stuff” and “old ways,” that is, cultural objects and ways of life to which each of us respond with varying degrees of attachment. Heritage professionals would prefer that we see cultural heritage embedded not simply in old objects and practices but rather as living history incorporating social processes of both continuity and change.

The question then becomes whether and in what ways this living history can contribute to the creation of more sustainable societies. This involves an understanding not simply of the work of heritage professionals but of the definition and scope of sustainability. Some people prefer a relatively narrow definition that emphasizes the importance of living within the limits of our natural resources. Others believe the problem is not simply one of the levels of natural resources available but of their distribution. This argument holds that, in today’s world, social inequality is itself unsustainable. Proponents of this latter view hold that any definition of sustainability must extend to cover issues of social justice, including recognition of the claims of disadvantaged populations, however constituted and defined.⁴ The challenge facing heritage conservationists in these first decades of the twenty-first century is thus to decide how to position themselves vis-à-vis the debate on sustainability; they must also decide whether to commit themselves to activities that contribute to possible solutions at the risk of straying further from their classic tasks of restoration, rehabilitation, maintenance, and interpretation, among others.

Within the context of adapting cultural forms to environmental constraints, built heritage is of special interest because of the significant problems it presents. First, when compared to other cultural forms and artifacts, sites such as Machu Picchu, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and Chartres Cathedral are all exposed to the elemental forces of nature and are all highly susceptible to damage. The threats are even greater for earthen architecture or fragile archaeological sites. A second set of problems concerns the relative immobility of built architecture. Much of the cultural significance of a structure is linked to its physical site and therefore to the social groups and/or nations who value it for its role in their history and in their lives. Although a multinational effort in the 1960s and early 1970s did succeed in moving the Nubian temples when the Aswan Dam threatened to flood their site, few people want to contemplate moving whole cities like Amsterdam, New York, or Tokyo because of the risk of flooding. Third, many sites require vast sums for their initial stabilization and/or reconstruction, and then for their continued maintenance and interpretation to the public. Governments, faced with responding to a series of environmental crises, may be unwilling to accept the price tag for their continued conservation. Thus, after a half century of dramatic expansion,⁵ the conservation of cultural heritage may be entering an equally dramatic period of contraction and loss. This transition, I argue, necessitates a reconsideration of the field’s historic development and a reevaluation of its public service mission or missions.

Although damage to the tangible heritage represented by physical sites is usually visible to the naked eye,⁶ intangible heritage is also threatened. UNESCO defines intangible cultural heritage as “the practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, skills—as well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewith—that communities, groups, and in some cases, individuals recognize as part of their cultural heritage.⁷ Whereas UNESCO sees the major threat to intangible heritage as coming from globalization, I would argue, as others have,⁸ that globalization’s impacts on intangible heritage are varied and complex (a subject to be treated in more depth later in this book), and that a more direct impact on communities is that made by environmental pressures,⁹ which threaten not just “practices, representations [and] expressions” but also livelihoods and group survival.¹⁰

To engage fully with these issues, we need first to have a better sense of what we mean by heritage and culture, and of how nature is both natural and cultural.

HERITAGE AND CULTURE

Nietzsche argued, “only that which has no history can be defined.”¹¹ The concept of culture has such a long and complex history as to render its definition highly problematic.¹² In the nineteenth century a nation’s culture was seen as comprising its highest artistic and intellectual achievements: what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said.”¹³ It was largely taken for granted that culture was the elevated product of rational thought, and that Western culture was superior to all other cultures. In response to the racism inherent in this widespread assumption, anthropologists active in the early twentieth century developed an alternative definition. This new definition viewed culture as the total way of life of a people, encompassing their patterns of thought and behavior, values and beliefs, and social institutions: in short, everything that is socially learned rather than biologically inherited. This definition meant that all societies had cultures and that these cultures must be studied on their own terms rather than viewed through the ethnocentric prism of Western values.

In sociology, by contrast, the study of culture took a back seat to a midcentury focus on social structures. Culture became largely limited to the idea of a dominant set of values and norms that served to create social consensus and legitimate social institutions. But by the 1970s and 1980s, a younger generation of sociologists rebelled against this restricted definition. They argued that in addition to representing grounds for consensus, culture could provide tools for group conflict or for individual creativity. Culture was seen as an integral part of everyday practice as well as providing much of the form and content of social rituals.

Ironically, even as younger sociologists were rediscovering and redefining the culture concept, their counterparts in anthropology were questioning whether it served any analytic purpose whatsoever. Anthropological critics saw it as a holistic, overly generalized term that explained everything and nothing. Yet since it would be hard to imagine any society without culture, they, like the sociologists, looked for other ways to define culture and to study cultures. They turned to the analysis of discourse and to examine the tensions between global and local cultures.¹⁴ In both disciplines, culture came to be seen as something that could be analyzed in terms of its symbolic complexity and as having causal force, that is, as capable of creating social change. At the same time, culture could be a tool wielded by individuals or social groups to attain specific ends. This multifaceted quality is now an implicit part of our understanding of the concept of culture and of any discussion of particular cultures.

Cultures are intimately interwoven with and shaped by local and national history. History, however, is not the same as heritage. For cultural historian David Lowenthal, history and heritage are linked but separate phenomena, with history likely to be transformed through updating and upgrading. History “explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time,” whereas heritage “...