biodiversity and the sacred: some insights for preserving cultural diversity and heritage

ISSN 1350-0775, no. 218 (vol. 55, no. 2, 2003)museumINTERNATIONAL

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ (UK) and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148 (USA)

Nature has been sacred since the dawn of humanconsciousness – that moment in evolutionary timewhen people first became aware of their ownexistence, when women and men began to wonderabout their place on Earth and in the largercosmos. To know that one is ignorant is thebeginning of wisdom, and if we could pinpoint theinstant when our ancestors began to think beyondthemselves, we would know exactly when ourspecies started to become wise, to become, not justHomo, but Homo sapiens. The mysteries of thenatural world were certainly the initial impetus forhumans to create (or, if you prefer, discover) thesacred. The notion of the sacred has since beenendlessly elaborated in human cultures, producingnot just the religious variety we have today, but abroadening range of spirituality, often interfusedwith the secular, that cannot be easily categorizedas ‘faith’. So we see that the sacred has long been,and continues to be, a bridge between nature andculture.

If sacredness is essentially anacknowledgment of mystery, then there is noquestion that biological diversity – the variety ofgenes, species, and ecosystems on Earth – offers

| Biodiversity and the Sacred:Some Insights for Preserving Cultural Diversity and Heritage

David Harmon is executive director of the George Wright Society, an international professionalassociation advancing the scientific and heritage values of protected natural areas and culturalsites.

by David Harmon

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plenty of scope to be considered sacred. It is repletewith enigmas: nobody knows all the details of howecosystems function, or how genes work, or evenhow many species there are. This should notsurprise us, actually. Fascination with nature maystretch back to time immemorial, but biodiversityas a rigorous concept gained currency only in the1980s. Reflecting on global environmental data thathad never before been available, scientists realizedthat a mass extinction of species, the first evercaused by people, had probably begun. The criticalpoint for our discussion is that despite biodiversity’sscientific credentials, the continuing fervour ofinterest in it is squarely a moral response to a moralquestion: Why should we care about naturalvariety? Surprisingly, the answers that are beingoffered by scientists often make recourse to the ideaof the sacred, though usually not explicitly (seeTakacs 1996: pp. 254–70).

The emerging dialogue on biodiversity andthe sacred offers some valuable insights formuseum and heritage practitioners whose worktraditionally has focused on the more ‘conventional’forms of sacred expression, i.e. objects, buildings,and sites that are consciously designed withreligious or spiritual intent. A brief article such asthis can do no more than touch upon a few of theconnections, which are highlighted below.

The loss of the sacred is profoundly, yetproductively, disturbing. It has been suggested thatthe prospect of widespread extinctions andecosystem destruction is deeply upsetting to manypeople, that the depth of their reaction cannot beexplained solely on materialistic or intellectualgrounds, and that ‘such disturbing responses in thehuman psyche’ are, in truth, ‘signs of hope: an

awakening of our forgotten, but instinctualinterconnections with nature…’ (Golliher, 1999: p.439). Here is something at work that is very muchakin to spiritual conviction, to a belief in a kind ofsacred ultimacy whose object cannot becompromised. Under parallel conditions, a similarprofound reaction can take hold within themuseum and heritage professional community, aswhen the Taliban ignored pleas from around theworld and destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, orwhen the Iraqi national museum in Baghdad waslooted. These acts were quite properly branded asunconscionable desecrations and crimes against allof humanity. The fact that so many reacted sointensely, with a mixture of horror, disgust, andanger, should also be taken as a sign of hope:numerous people regard outstanding examples ofcultural heritage as sacred (or at least surpassinglyvaluable) and will take action to see them protectedor restored.

More and more, the sacred is beingexpressed in a secular context. The boundariesbetween sacred and profane have never been assharp as is often supposed (see, e.g., Eliade, 1969:p. 126), but today one finds the two increasinglymixed. Protected natural areas, which are thecornerstone of any strategy to protect globalbiodiversity, provide examples that are relevant tocultural heritage. ‘In the modern world,’ the ethicistJ. Ronald Engel notes, ‘the most powerful sacredspaces are often “secular” places that implicitlyfunction in ways comparable to the explicitlyreligious places of the past. …. Today, for manypeople the world over, national parks are sacredspaces’ (Engel, 1985: p. 55). This attitude deepens,in a subtle but important way, that which wasexpressed three-quarters of a century ago by John

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C. Merriam, a prominent American scientist, whenhe said that national parks ‘represent opportunitiesfor worship in which one comes to understandmore fully certain of the attributes of nature and itsCreator. They are not objects to be worshipped, butthey are altars over which we may worship’(Merriam, 1926: p. 478). Parks as ‘cathedrals’where we encounter the sacred are becoming sacredin themselves: we may care as much aboutYellowstone, the abstract entity marked by lines ona map, as we do about the biodiversity ofYellowstone and the living ecosystem encompassedby those boundaries. The plethora of non-materialvalues that people encounter in, or assign to,protected areas (see Harmon and Putney 2003)attest to the complexity of our desire to engagenature’s moral import.

In a similar way, many of the institutionsthat protect cultural heritage have become fused, inthe public’s mind, with the objects of heritagethemselves. The world’s great public museums andmost prominent cultural monuments and sites havebeen ‘lifted up’ (so to speak) out of their immediatecontexts and simultaneously placed within thelarger context of global cultural heritage. Thatstatus, which adds layers of meaning to the site, itsobjects, and the way they are administered, is itselfquasi-sacred in the same sense described above forparks and biodiversity. This is, in fact, the internallogic that holds the World Heritage Conventiontogether, and is reflected in its three categories ofnatural, cultural, and mixed sites – many of whichare also sacred in their own right, of course.

The sacred is impermanent and dynamic.Even in a purely religious context, the sacred isnever fixed in time. Not only does the doctrinal

understanding of the sacred evolve, sacred objectsand sites can be completely desacralized and,sometimes, resacralized. We have already noted anextreme form of desacralization with reference tothe Taliban, but this phenomenon has,unfortunately, been around for thousands of years.For instance, the sacred groves of the old RomanEmpire were systematically destroyed by imperialedict following Christianization in the fourthcentury A.D. (Hughes, 1998: pp. 119–20); no traceof the old worship could be allowed to remain andcompete with the new. Today, there is new impetusto identify such sacred natural sites and give themofficial protected status (Putney, 2003), effectively

| Biodiversity and the SacredDavid Harmon

ISSN 1350-0775, No. 218 (Vol. 55, No. 2, 2003) |museumINTERNATIONAL 65

18. Machu Picchu, an ancient seat of Inca culture,

is an example of how natural and cultural elements

come together to create a sacred site, qualities

recognized today through World Heritage Site status.

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resacralizing them. The recent anointing ofbiodiversity as one of the supreme ‘goods’ ofexistence is essentially an act of sacralization.

So new forms of the sacred are constantlyemerging, often being fashioned out of secularexperience. Now consider the following question,which illustrates a situation many cultural heritagepractitioners will be familiar with: Is the cell at theRobben Island Prison (now a museum) whereNelson Mandela was held for the bulk of hisimprisonment by the apartheid regime a sacredplace? For those who revere courage and the idealsof democracy, it must be something close to that.The symbolism is already taking hold: Mandelahimself helped light a votive candle in that cell tomark the turning of the millennium in 2000. It is adifficult question to answer, for the psychospiritualfooting is very shaky here. On the one hand,Mandela is very much alive and therefore not yeteligible for secular canonization (if we may put itthat way). On the other, there is the strong potentialthat he will posthumously attain such stature, muchas Lincoln or Gandhi have. Adding to thecomplication, such iconization can be reversed, evenafter many years, as has happened with Lenin inRussia. New forms of the sacred are constantly beingcarved out of the secular, but what has beensacralized can be desacralized and then sacralized allover again. The sacred aspires to permanency, but ina culturally dynamic world never truly attains it.

Creating the sacred may haveunintended consequences. Writing of the sacredgroves that were found all over ancient Greece andRome, J. Donald Hughes recognizes an importantunintended consequence of assigning sacredness tospecial places: ‘The practice of setting physical

boundaries for sacred spaces consecrated andprotected what was within, but by implicationunhallowed the land outside. Beyond the bounds,the gods no longer protected the earth, and peoplewere free to use it as they saw fit. Inside the temenos

(Greek: a ‘cut-off’ or demarcated place) there mightbe glimpsed a holy light, but outside shone onlythe ordinary light of day’ (Hughes, 1998: p. 119).Likewise, when we select which objects and sitesfrom our collective cultural heritage to preserve,admitting them to the Pantheon of officialrecognition and protection, do we not run the riskof tacitly consigning the rest to a second-class statuswhere ‘anything goes’ (and usually will)?Considering the changing notions of valuediscussed above, this can be disastrous, though itmay be unavoidable.

Every aspect of diversity is important.What distinguishes biodiversity from a meregeneral concern about nature is that biodiversityassigns importance to every contributor to variety,no matter how inconspicuous, rare, or seeminglyuseless to humans it may be. Biodiversityscientists are just as concerned about unseenmycorrhizal fungi or obscure freshwater musselsas they are about ‘flagship species’ such as thegiant panda. To borrow a term from thevocabulary of religion, biodiversity concern isecumenical. Museum and heritage professionalswould do well to urge a similar attitude towardscultural diversity. In years past, artefacts associatedwith minority cultures were routinely discardedbecause the decision-makers of the day werecertain they had no lasting value – and thecultures that made them were ‘insignificant’anyway. Now we know how foolish suchethnocentric short-sightedness is.



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There can be perils in trying to explainthe sacred. The secular desire to clear up all oflife’s mysteries can be self-defeating when it pursuesunderstanding of the sacred. For example, naturalsites that are sacred to various peoples exist all overthe world. These range from striking geologicalfeatures carrying obvious emotional impact, such asprominent mountains, to rather nondescript placesthat an unschooled observer would never classify asspecial. The pitfall is this: ‘Once explainedscientifically, the apparently arbitrary existence ofnatural sacred sites as objects of veneration maybecome ‘visible’ for interpretation byconservationists yet such an interpretability maynot in fact be desirable in terms of the culturalintegrity of local and indigenous people’ (Hay-Edieand Hadley, 1998: p. 65). This observationencapsulates two key points that bear on ourdiscussion. First, for many people the sacred isprecisely that which cannot (or should not) beexplicated, and attempts to do so are ill-advised atbest, and sacrilegious – or even dangerous – atworst. This presents a problem to Western secularsocieties, where a particular group’s desire toexclude ‘outsiders’ from sacred sites and sacredknowledge may well seem an affront to basicdemocratic principles, such as the people’s ‘right toknow’ (principles which themselves are practicallysacred to those who hold them). Here, sacrednessas traditionally conceived seems almost likesomething from another epoch, in that it isfundamentally at odds with modernity and itssearch for universal codes of conduct.Understanding it, therefore, calls for exceptionalsensitivity and the ability to set aside professionalpredilections for openness. Readers of this journalwill recognize parallels here with contentious issuesfacing museums, such as repatriation of human

remains and burial goods, whether to keep anddisplay accessions whose function was meant to besecret, and the proper handling of sacred items ingeneral.

Second, Hay-Edie and Hadley correctlyidentify what is ultimately at stake: culturalintegrity. The related notions of integrity andauthenticity provide another parallel betweenbiodiversity conservation and cultural heritagework. Part of the intrinsic value of biodiversity is itsauthenticity, the fact that it evolved withoutoverarching human direction. To be sure, peoplehave greatly influenced the course of biologicalevolution, and through domestication of plants andanimals have augmented natural biodiversity withvarieties and breeds whose importance to oursurvival is unquestionable. But most of the millionsof species on the planet have evolved with little orno intentional direct influence from humans.Continuing the course of unmediated, authenticevolution – rather than relying on the prospect ofgenetic engineering being able to manufacturereplacements for extinct species – is the major



19. At a workshop held in February 2003,

in Kunming (China), participants discussed how

to get wider recognition of the biodiversity-conserving

qualities of sacred natural sites.

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concern of biodiversity scientists. The best way todo that is to preserve functional ecosystems thatretain a high degree of ecological integrity. Thesame principles apply to cultural diversity andcultural heritage preservation. Ensuring theauthenticity of objects under its care is obviouslythe foundation of any museum, but the institution’smission is immeasurably enhanced when it is alsoconnected to field activities that support theintegrity of living cultural traditions. Authenticityand integrity thus combine to support thecontinued evolution of cultural diversity.

Diversity, the expression of life’sfundamental creativity, is good. As theenvironmental philosopher Holmes Rolston IIIobserves, biology and theology have many basicdisagreements, but one conviction they share is thatthe Earth is prolific, and that this creativity is good(Rolston, 1993: pp. 45–6). Biologists call thecreative process speciation while theologians call itgenesis, and they have very different explanationsfor it, but both have agreed that it is eminentlyvaluable. This does not mean that every result ofthe process is good – the organisms that causevirulent infectious diseases are an obvious exampleto the contrary. But such cases are so small inproportion to the whole that we can say withconfidence that biodiversity is good. The same istrue for cultural diversity. Saturation news coverage,with its penchant for the sensational, can make itseem as though the world is populated exclusivelyby zealots and their repugnant ideals. The reality isthat the creative process of cultural evolution hasgiven us a wealth of world-views – animated bylanguages, art forms, and other means of expression– whose very existence is a cornerstone of ourhumanity. Our species could no doubt survive in a

world with far less biological and cultural diversity,and we might even be more ‘secure,’ but it wouldnot be a world with enough breadth to let usexplore the possibilities of positive civilization.

These are just a few of the points ofcongruence between biodiversity and culturalheritage as linked by the idea of the sacred. Wheremight these insights lead us? One importantconclusion to be drawn is that the sacred still has arole to play in the human experience, one whosefocus increasingly is on existence here and nowrather than on an otherworldly afterlife. Natureitself can be conceived of as both religiouslyultimate, without God, gods, or animating spirits ofany kind, and metaphysically ultimate, requiring noexplanation of its cause. In this view, earthly natureis that which is given, the ‘first thing’ out of whicheverything else (including human culture) hascome, and the proper object of our reverence(Crosby, 2002; see also Ehrenfeld, 1988). Moves inthis direction do not necessarily mean that theintensity of the sacred experience is diminishing,though it certainly is broadening to include newobjects, places, and forms of veneration. Anyexplanation of the sacred as it is conceived of todaymust, at a minimum, account for the biological andcultural diversity of life on Earth – what I haveelsewhere called ‘the biocultural presence’(Harmon, 2002). To do even that much will be anintellectual and spiritual odyssey worthy of the bestthat humankind can muster.



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biodiversity and the sacred: some insights for preserving cultural diversity and heritage

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