cultural heritage: sustainability

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culture: our second nature 1

Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability




Diane Barthel-Bouchier

Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of SuStainability

Walnut Creek CAlifornia



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Left Coast Press, Inc.1630 North Main Street, #400Walnut Creek, CA 94596http://www.LCoastPress.com

Copyright 2013 by Left Coast Press, Inc.All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

isbn 978-1-61132-237-8 hardbackisbn 978-1-61132-238-5 paperbackisbn 978-1-61132-239-2 institutional eBookisbn 978-1-61132-678-9 consumer eBook

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barthel-Bouchier, Diane L., 1949- Cultural heritage and the challenge of sustainability / Diane Barthel-Bouchier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-1-61132-237-8 (hardback : alk. paper) isbn 978-1-61132-238-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn 978-1-61132-239-2 (institutional eBook) isbn 978-1-61132-678-9 (consumer eBook) 1. World heritage areasEnvironmental aspects. 2. Cultural propertyEnvironmental aspects. 3. Sustainability. 4. Cultural landscapes. 5. Heritage tourism. 6. Sustainable tourism. I. Title. g140.5.b33 2012 363.69--dc23 2012020774

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi/niso z39.481992.

Cover design by Jane Burton




COntentS

Acknowledgments

Chapter One

Culture: Our Second Nature 7

Chapter two Is Heritage a Human Right? 27

Chapter three Fighting Climate Change and Achieving Sustainability: Organizational Processes of Mission Change 53

Chapter four Global Cities and Historic Towns: Rising Waters, Threatened Treasures 79

Chapter five

The Loss of Cultural Landscapes: Desertification, Deforestation, and Polar Melting 103

Chapter six Heritage and Energy: The Interaction of Coercive and Normative Pressures 129

Chapter seven Cultural Tourism and the Discourse of Sustainability 153

Chapter eight Conclusion: The Future of Heritage 177

References 197

Index 223

About the Author 235



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Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge all those heritage managers and professionals who took time from their busy schedules to share their views and answer my questions. Research conventions prevent me from mentioning them all by name. However, I can and would like to thank those people who were instru-mental in putting me in touch with others. This list would include Gustavo Araoz, Ned Kaufman, Neil Silberman, Victor Roudometof, and Michael J. K. Walsh. I would also like to thank Neil Silberman and Pamela Jerome for invit-ing me to participate in the Scientific Symposium of the ICOMOS Advisory Committee meeting in Dublin, Ireland, in 2010, and J. L. Putman and Willem Derde for the kind invitation to serve as a plenary speaker for the ENAME Center Conference on Climates of Conservation.

This research, which involved considerable travel, would not have been possible without a sabbatical and subsequent research leave granted by Stony Brook University. Several Stony Brook colleagues, notably Crystal Flem-ing, Daniel Levy, Ian Roxborough, John Shandra, Daniela Flesler, Adrien Perez Melgos, and the late Donny George Youkhanna, either read chapters of the manuscript or otherwise helped me think through some of the issues involved. I also benefitted from the advice of Michelle Berensfeld, Sacha Kagan, Volker Kirchberg, and Haiming Yan. My students in courses on cul-tural sociology and the sociology of the arts served as an important sounding board, as did the students in Peter Mannings Mellon Seminar, presented in association with Stony Brooks Humanities Institute. I am also grateful to Ann Kaplan, the Director of the Institute, for sponsoring a colloquium dedi-cated to heritage and tourism, with myself and Professors Flesler and Perez Melgos as speakers.

It was a pleasure to work with Jennifer Collier, my editor at Left Coast Press, and I am very grateful to her for her efficiency and overall professional-ism. My greatest debt is to my husband, David Bouchier. He shared the travels and the travails, and served as my in-house editor, providing critique and encouragement. The book is dedicated to him; such errors as remain are mine.




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, includ-ing the impressive Venetian Resort Hotela simulacrum of the original World Heritage site of Venice.

Theres irony to be found in the fact that well-heeled delegates, dispro-portionately drawn from distant Europe and North America, added to car-bon emissions through their long-distance flights in order to discuss climate change and to forge a common commitment to sustainability. Run by a pro-fessional 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 pur-pose 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 Organiza-tion (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



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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 com-mensurate 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 his-toric 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 stem-ming from the tasks associated with their workthe very real threats to his-toric sites and landscapesbut 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 solu-tions to global problems of climate change and unsustainable social practices.

However, although the new focus on sustainability solved some prob-lems it created others, as contradictions emerged between this focus and the concurrent alignment of the heritage professionals and managers with tour-ism and development interests. Cultural heritage organizations and agen-cies 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 tourisms impact on cultural sites to the eager embrace of tourism through the formation of partnerships with travel-oriented corporations such as Ameri-can 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 ques-tions 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 heri-tage 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 todays 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



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conservationists in these first decades of the twenty-first century is thus to decide how to position themselves vis--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 con-straints, 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, Philadelphias 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 struc-ture 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 contin-ued 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 fields historic development and a re-evaluation 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, representa-tions, expressions, knowledge, skillsas well as the instruments, objects, artifacts and cultural spaces associated therewiththat 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 globalizations 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 con-cept of culture has such a long and complex history as to render its definition highly problematic.12 In the nineteenth century a nations 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 pat-terns 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 ethno-centric prism of Western values.

In sociology, by contrast, the study of culture took a back seat to a mid-century 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 gen-eration 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 redefin-ing 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



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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 phe-nomena, with history likely to be transformed through updating and upgrad-ing. History explores and explains pasts grown ever more opaque over time, whereas heritage clarifies pasts so as to infuse them with present purposes.15 Although recognizing that conflict is endemic to heritage and that the his-toric representations of one social group frequently exclude other groups through a kind of selective memory, Lowenthal views the whole process of heritage as a creative act, one in which we can learn from each others efforts and experiences: In realizing how we variously affect these linked realms, we learn to relish, rather than resent, our own interventions and even to tolerate those of others . . . .16

However, there is little toleration evident in heritage disputes today, as demonstrated by the controversies over the wearing of the burqa or the erection of minarets, or over interpretations of the Holocaust or the United Statess dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lowenthals presentation errs on the side of normalizing social conflict and social exclu-sion by stating simply that they are part and parcel of what is, in the end, an act of creation in which we can all participate.

The idea that heritage implies a power relationship is more evident in the work of Brian Graham, G. J. Ashworth, and J. E. Tunbridge. They define heritage as almost any sort of intergenerational exchange or relationship, welcome or not, between societies as well as individuals.17 The phrase wel-come or not is a key element of this definition, for it implies that heritage interpretations can be imposed by one social group on another. These schol-ars go on to assert that heritage is not created through the existence of the past as an objective reality, but rather through the present needs of people, who are neither passive receivers nor passive transmitters. However, they then tell us that the present creates the heritage it requires, thereby once again mystifying the human relationships of power that are contained in the present. The present does not create; rather it provides the context in which




real people use heritage for a wide range of social purposes, many of which include furthering group advantage.

Kenneth Burke was more to the point when he turned his critical atten-tion to what he called societys symbolic bankers. Among different attitudes toward history, Burke detected a set of motives he considered extrinsic: those based on class relations and the need for the ruling class to ritualistically (re-)integrate the disparate world, at the expense of other social classes or races. As Burke argued, A complex symbolism is a kind of spiritual cur-rencyand a group of bankers may arise who manipulate this medium of exchange to their specific benefit.18 Although worker history is now included as part of industrial heritage, and numerous sites are dedicated to the depic-tion of slavery and other forms of oppression, the concepts of symbolic bank-ers and spiritual currency still have value to the extent that specific social groups are holding heritage in trust, as it were, for the benefit of others, who lack either appropriate perspective or professional training or both.19

What exactly these symbolic bankers held in trustthat is, what sorts of things could be and were considered heritagegrew dramatically in scope over the course of the twentieth century. Originally focused largely on major monuments, heritage came to encompass a wide range of sites and cultural landscapes. To such tangible reminders of the past, heritage conservationists also added a proprietary regard for intangible values and practices, including oral traditions; performing arts; rituals and festivities; knowledge practices; and craftsmanship.20

Intangible heritage includes distinctive conceptions of and perceived relationships to nature. Different ethnic cultures have woven nature into a complex web of symbolism; this is a vast topic that extends far beyond what can be discussed here.21 What does concern us, however, is the evident contrast between the concept of a state of nature as originally put forward in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the concept of a new state of nature to describe a different way of imagining the relationship between nature and society.

The (old) state of nature, as elaborated by a number of leading Enlight-enment theorists, was a hypothetical description of what life would be like if people lived without social controls and constraints. For some, notably Thomas Hobbes, the chaos and violence that would result from such a state would lead people to accept the constraints necessary for a peaceful and productive existence. For others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau first and foremost, people in a state of nature lived in peaceful coexistence, but then society inevitably introduced competition, envy, and the other human vices.



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Neither view, whether optimistic or pessimistic regarding human nature, offered profound insights into the nature of nature. Political philosophers were naturally more interested in using this abstract concept as a heuristic device on which to build their theories of state and society. These Enlighten-ment theories represent one of the pillars of Western civilization: a civiliza-tion that was dedicated to the concepts of progress, the generation of wealth, and the triumph of humanity over nature. The term human exemptionalism has been used to describe the deep cultural belief from the Industrial Revolu-tion onward that the human species is not tied to the same natural limits and laws as other animal populations: that because of our cultural creativity and technological ingenuity we can rise above such limits.22

However, it is now increasingly clear that nature is presenting dilemmas to which technology has difficulty responding. The 2010 BP oil platform explosion and subsequent massive leak in the Gulf of Mexico is one example of what can happen when interested parties assume that any problems created by the relentless exploitation of the earths resources can be readily countered by a technological fix. The ongoing processes of climate change, resource exhaustion, and loss of biodiversity create what have been called tests to which state and civil society must respond effectively if they are to maintain the fundamental state of social order with which Hobbes was so concerned.23

In this context, it is worth noting that German social psychologist Harald Welzer has predicted that climate wars will be the dominant form of warfare in the twenty-first century. For Welzer, increasing numbers of people lack critical resources of water and food, and/or find themselves in competi-tion for these resources with other peoples. The present conflicts occurring between nations in South America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia over the resource consequences of actual and proposed dams on populations down-stream are only one example. As climate change and resource depletion make whole areas of the globe uninhabitable, population movements will increase, and the existing distinction between political refugees and climate refugees will become more and more obscured. According to Welzer, the climate wars that will occur and are already occurring when populations are caught in unsustainable situations will cause further degradation of the natural environment, setting in motion a negative spiral of social and environmental interaction.24 The consequences for both natural and cultural heritage will be huge. If heritage is, as its proponents like to say, not about places but about people, then this is something with which they must be concerned.




enVirOnMental SOCiOlOgy anD CliMate CHange

This research contributes to a growing body of sociological literature on envi-ronmental sustainability. Environmental sociology originally emerged out of the ecological movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. As the field developed, it found itself in opposition to key ideas in both society and sociology. In the 1970s, William R. Catton and Riley E. Dunlap proposed an alternative to the theory of human exemptionalism, an approach that they labeled the new ecological paradigm.25 While Catton and Dunlap believed in the power of human creativity to address many problems, they nonetheless argued that humans were still ecologically interdependent with other species and both caused and were affected by various ecological feedback mechanisms. Within their own disciplinary borders, many environmental sociologists found themselves taking issue with sociologists who took a radical constructionist approach. This latter approach denied the independent importance of natu-ral or material facts: for such constructionists everything is based on social processes of interpretation. By contrast, environmental sociologists accepted the material reality and causal force of natural processes and events, but still showed marked interest in how social groups, organizations, and institutions went about defining situations and problems, and how these social processes interact with natural processes.

Over the past decade, environmental sociologists have increasingly turned their attention to both global and local impacts of environmental change. Much of this research relates to the political, social, and economic organization of modern industrial societies. Such work is often highly quan-titative, comparing statistics across a large number of nations, and frequently contains a specific concern with policy formation.26 Other sociologists have taken more of a human ecology approach, one based on understanding the relationship of humans to their natural environment. This approach empha-sizes the sociospatial dynamic of environmental changes while providing opportunities for modeling their causes and consequences. For example, in a 2008 article, Thomas Dietz, Eugene Rosa, and Richard York sought to change the definition of sustainability from one based primarily on national resources and economic processes to one focused on the relationship between human well-being and environmental impacts.27

The extent to which environmental sociology has developed as a field was shown in 2008, when the National Science Foundation held a special



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two-day workshop to which it invited 40 sociological researchers. These dis-tinguished academics were asked to speak to the questions of what we know and what we need to know about the social dimensions of climate change. On that occasion, JoAnn Carmin, a leading scholar of environmental organiza-tions, called for analysis of the activities of nonenvironmental organizations that have adopted climate change as part of their mission.28 This research, which can be seen as a response to this call, in fact began many years earlier. It developed out of my long-running interest in how people interpret their past and how that past becomes integrated into political decision-making processes.29 Thus this analysis also contributes to a very different body of scholarship, namely the sociological literature on collective memories.

Heritage, MeMOry, glObality

The topic of collective memory refers to the relations between history and commemorative symbols on the one hand and, on the other, individual beliefs, sentiments, and judgments of the past.30 For Barry Schwartz, col-lective memory represents both a model of society, a reflection of its needs, problems, fears, mentality, and aspirations, and provides a model for society, a program that defines its experience, articulates its values and goals, and provides cognitive, affective, and moral orientation for realizing them.31

Much of this literature, including Pierre Noras impressive seven-volume collective effort, Les lieux de mmoire, has equated collective memories with national memories.32 Noras work explores the diverse facets of tangible and intangible heritage in France; other examples (among many possibilities) include Jeffrey K. Olick and Jennifer A. Jordans examination of commemo-rative practices in Germany, Yael Zerubavels analysis of the formation of collective memories in Israel, and Anita M. Waterss critique of various heri-tage representations in Port Royal, Jamaica. Sometimes explicit comparisons are drawn between commemorative practices associated with different nations, as Lyn Spillman does for Australia and the United States, and as I did in my earlier book comparing heritage conservation in the United States and Great Britain.33

In contrast to these analyses of national collective memories and forms of commemoration, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue for the existence of cosmopolitan memories, which they view as constituting a process of internal globalization through which global concerns become part of the




local experiences of an increasing number of people.34 Levy and Sznaider raise the questions of how transnational memories are formed and of what they consist. They argue that the Holocaust provides a drama of good and evil that has allowed it to transcend national boundaries, even as the drama assumes a particular narrative form and content in each national setting.35

Cosmopolitan memories of remarkable places can be formed either by direct knowledge, whether as a local or a tourist, or by mediated knowledge. Indeed, Maurice Halbwachs, one of the first theorists of collective memory, drew a distinction between social memories, which are shared by those who directly experience them, and historical memories, which are mediated by education, the mass media, or even hearsay.36 Levy and Sznaider emphasize that the fact of this mediation does not make historical memories in some sense second rate or spurious. They point out that Benedict Anderson, in his well-respected work on nations as imagined communities,37 makes it clear that it was precisely the now-lambasted media that produced the requisite solidarity for nation formation through a constant repetition of images and words.38 For Patrick Hutton, the interplay between repetition and recollec-tion is of key importance in establishing the relationship between history and memory. He defines repetition as the moment of memory through which we bear forward images of the past that continue to shape our present under-standing in unreflective ways.39 These moments of memory are like habits of mind that are readily associated with collective memories. Recollections, by contrast, involve the conscious, selective, reconstruction of the past to suit the needs of the present.

This distinction between repetition and recollection, while of some heu-ristic value, nonetheless has the drawback of naturalizing the social processes through which social memories are formed. By speaking of living traditions and habits of mind that operate in unreflective ways, Hutton downplays the role of agency. By contrast, Olick and Levy provide a more subtle approach in viewing social memories as an ongoing process of negotiation through time, with memories neither totally durable nor malleable, but rather subject to the operation of cultural logics.40 Lowenthal also emphasizes the importance of revising as a process associated with social memories, and allows for its unintentional as well as intentional dimension.41

Here I argue that cosmopolitan memories are formed through the repe-tition of images provided by a number of social agencies, including heritage professionals, politicians, media professionals, advertisers, and tourism rep-resentatives, among others. Heritage sites provide the physical grounding for



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many such memories, and as such form part of the sociology of place.42 Some sites become the habitual televised backdrop for news emanating from a specific nation with, for example the Arc de Triomphe appearing as the back-drop for France, or the Houses of Parliament for England. Indeed, specific sites have become a metonym for nation-states or political offices, as when one speaks of the Kremlin, 10 Downing Street, or the White House. Other sites provide ready associations of travel (Venice, the Pyramids), pub-lic celebration (Times Square, Trafalgar Square), or protest (Tahrir Square, Tiananmen Square). Individual memories may also share a specific backdrop, as tour buses pull up at the exact same spot so that tourists can photograph each other in front of Mont St. Michel or St. Peters Basilica.

Cosmopolitan memories associated with heritage sites help conserva-tionists communicate the ecological risks faced by such sites. When Mount Olympus was threatened by fire in the summer of 2007, people the world over worried about the potential loss. When historic towns in Great Britain such as Oxford were hit by flooding, people in other nations watched the footage on television or read about it, and expressed their concern. Thus both iconic nature (the polar bear, the Antarctic penguins) and iconic culture (the Pyra-mids, Venice, Notre Dame Cathedral) draw attention to widespread threats. If, as Simon Schama has argued, many of our images of nature have acquired a sacred dimension, the same can be said of specific cultural sites.43

Indeed, Victor Turner and Edith Turner claim that a tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist. They continue, Even when people bring themselves in anonymous crowds on beaches, they are seeking an almost sacred, often symbolic mode of communitas, generally unavailable to them in the structured life of the office, the shop floor, or the mine.44 Dean Mac-Cannell develops the parallel by discussing the processes of site sacralization and ritual visitation involved in tourism, and by seeing in the very diversity of sites a certain reflexive contemplation about the human condition.45

Even so, not all socially recognized sites are equally imbued with a spiri-tual dimension. As French historian Franoise Choay writes, The Parthenon, Saint Sophia, Borobudur, and Chartres recall the enchantment of a quest that, in our disenchanted world, is proposed by neither science nor critical analysis.46 But other sites on the World Heritage List, including Swedens Varburg Radio Station or Chiles Sewell Mining Town, might be less likely to evoke spiritual awe or enchantment. Be this as it may, the World Heritage List continues to grow by some 30 sites a year. Having identified the first 12 sites in 1978, by the summer of 2011 the list had expanded to 936 sites considered to be of universal significance to humankind.




Does the presence of these less awe-inspiring sites devalue the World Heritage List as a whole? Or will the listing of lesser-known cultural sites increase public awareness of cultural diversity? More importantly, how will the global heritage community respond to the changing environment of the twenty-first century? After 50 years of dramatic expansion and development as a global organizational field, how will it respond to the cutbacks threatened by governments unwilling to commit scarce resources to the conservation of historic sites and cultural landscapes? These and other questions will be addressed in the chapters that follow.

MetHODOlOgiCal aPPrOaCH

Several scholars working within the sociology of knowledge and intellectuals have called for a greater attention to the role of social experts and to the forms and modes of expert intervention, that is, to the different ways in which knowledge and expertise can be inserted into the public sphere.47 As Karin Knorr Cetina has pointed out, such experts exercise a form of power that remains relatively invisible, compared to the more obvious power exercised by politicians or the media.48 The heritage professionals with whom this book is concerned fit this description of significant shapers whose activities often go unexamined.49 In order to remedy their relative absence from intellectual discourse, I relied on several interlocking methods.

Over the course of three years I have spoken with approximately 50 representatives of heritage organizations who see themselves as engaged in facing the challenge of sustainability, in one way or another. In some cases I contacted organizations directly, asking to speak to someone who could talk to me about the organizations mission and programs. In other cases I worked through a growing list of contacts. Most interviews took place in the experts office. When such personal contact was impossible because of distance or time conflicts, interviews were conducted by telephone or email. Each inter-view was tailored to the particular expertise of the individual and allowed opportunities for the interviewee to raise points that I had not suggested. The typical length of an office interview was one hour. I also attended a dozen conferences where I spoke with delegates who presented papers pertaining to this research, and closely followed discussions at meetings and workshops. Following usual ethnographic practice, I continued interviews and participant and nonparticipant observation at conferences until the information became simple reinforcement of information already gathered. In order to protect the



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anonymity of interviewees while avoiding the awkward s/he construction, I have randomly used the pronouns he or she when presenting interview data. I have also made extensive use of secondary and primary sources on heritage conservation. These sources range from academic analyses and monographs to newspaper articles. Much primary material is also now available online, including organizational and government documents.

Researching the processes through which history is transformed into heritage meant understanding the role and operations of the major non-governmental organizations (NGOs).50 My interest in NGOs is not, how-ever, solely academic. As the founder of an international arts organization, I have direct experience with the issues facing nonprofits, including the need to increase funding and public support. I therefore have great respect for the people who work in these organizations and their dedication to their mission. Such respect has not, however, prevented me from being critical or from asking to what extent these organizations are effective in adapting their principles and programs to fit a changing social and physical environment.

A note on terminology: throughout the discussion that follows I will favor the term heritage conservation over heritage preservation. Preservation is the more frequent term used within the States, whereas conservation is more widely used elsewhere. Since I am taking a global perspective and talking about the interconnections between natural and cultural heritage, conserva-tion seems the more appropriate term.

A more substantive difference may also be drawn between the two terms. According to a distinction found within the Burra Charter, created by the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Australia in 1979 and later revised, preservation means keeping an object or structure in its original state, and thereby avoiding deterioration through maintenance and/or preventive measures. Conservation, by contrast, has more to do with the broader task of safeguarding the cultural significance of a structure or place, with cultural significance defined as the aesthetic, historic, scientific, social or spiritual value for past, present or future generations.51 Not only does the task of conservation recognize the need to incorporate a certain amount of change within sites, it also recognizes that the cultural significance of sites varies for different social groups and in different time periods.52

Thus the term conservation more aptly describes the broader issues to be discussed. These issues are not ones that I or others have imposed on the global heritage community. Rather, they are concerns that this epistemic community has freely and in some cases eagerly embraced as central to its mission. The chapters that follow consider how thoroughly the theme of




sustainability has become integrated with the more traditional mission of heritage conservation.

I begin in Chapter 2 by examining the traditional basis of legitimacy for cultural heritage, namely that it represents a basic human right, and compare that to more recent assertions that it represents not so much a universal right as a social value that is being spread by the emergence of a World Polity. I question how deeply these values are held, especially if one is speaking not of individuals but of national governments, and propose that their accep-tance in many corners of the globe may be more reflective what has been called the banality of good.53 Having considered the question of values, in Chapter 3 I look at the structure of heritage as an organizational field. I ana-lyze exactly why the theme of sustainability proved so attractive to major non-governmental organizations and intergovernmental entities such as UNESCO and the Council of Europe, and provide a historical summary of some of their major programmatic efforts.

Chapters 4 through 6 deal with the specific, substantive threats to cul-tural heritage posed by climate change and unsustainable social practices. Chapter 4 examines how historic towns and global cities are threatened by the dual phenomena of rising sea levels and incidents of river flooding. I argue that the destruction caused by some of the most dramatic weather events has resulted not simply from the forces of nature but from failures of stewardship. In Chapter 5 I move from towns and cities to examine the sustainability of whole cultural landscapes threatened by processes of desertification, defor-estation, or polar melting. Diverse though these geographical settings may be, they all reveal the difficulties involved when one moves from being con-cerned with the conservation of isolated sites or monuments to that of whole landscapes. We also see how the indigenous population, whether living in the Arctic or the Amazon, become viewed as the exotic Other to heritage pro-fessionals. Chapter 6 reveals how energy conservation has become a veritable battleground between conservationists and governments in some instances, and between conservationists and private owners or developers in others. Here we see revealed how even the most technical controversies concerning energy production and use involve debates over aesthetic and social values. Cultural tourism is implicated in these all these phenomena, and Chapter 7 traces the changing relationship between heritage professionals and the tour-ism industry and how a discourse of sustainability developed to try to resolve the differences between the goals of the two organizational fields.

Finally, in Chapter 8, I review the central argument regarding the ten-sions between competing missions and demonstrate how it relates to the



22 chapter one

current controversy within the global heritage community over its position vis--vis other social actors and organizational fields. I conclude by arguing for a commitment to sustainability broadly defined so as to include social justice, and propose several reasons why heritage can and should be seen as not just responding to societal conundrums, but as helping to resolve them.

notes

1In proposing this concept I am drawing on the work of Anthony King, who describes how members of the same profession in different countries come to resemble each other more than they do other people who presumably share their national cultures. For exam-ple, an architect in the Netherlands may well have more in common with an architect in Japan than she will with a Dutch farmer or floriculturalist. An Argentinian biochemist will resemble his Norwegian counterpart more closely than he does his next-door neighbor. King proposes the term global professional cultures to describe this phenomenon. See Anthony King, Architecture, Capital and the Globalization of Culture, Theory, Culture & Society 7 ( June 1990): 397411.2Peter M. Haas, Introduction: Epistemic Communities and international Policy Coor-dination, International Organizations 46 (1992): 3. I should also emphasize that the global heritage community differs in scope and content from what the Council of Europe has defined as heritage communities, that is, people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations. Unlike the global heritage community, a heritage community can be expected to include not just professionals but also amateurs. It may well also include people lacking in relevant expertise and interested only in local or national heritage mani-festations. The concept is embedded within the Council of Europes Framework Conven-tion on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society, which is available at conventions.coe.int/Treaty/Commun/QueVoulezVous.asp?NT=199&CM=88CL=ENG.3Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999). 4See Sacha Kagan, Art and Sustainability: Connecting Patterns for a Culture of Complexity (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2011). 5See Derek Gillman, The Idea of Cultural Heritage, rev. ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Jukka Jokilehto, A History of Architectural Conservation (Oxford. UK: Elsevier, 1999). 6I say usually, because some of the threats to built heritage that have been associated with climate change are not readily visible including, for example, infestations by new insect populations. 7UNESCO, The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, available online at unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001897/189761e.pdf.8See Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the Worlds Cul-tures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Marilena Alivizatou, Intangible Heritage and Erasure: Rethinking Cultural Preservation and Contemporary Museum




Practice, International Journal of Cultural Property 18 (2011): 3760; and Michael F. Brown, Heritage Trouble: Recent Work on the Protection of Intangible Cultural Prop-erty, International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (2005): 4061. 9This is not to say that environmental decline is unrelated to aspects of globalization. See for example Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007). 10See Ben Wisner, Climate Change and Cultural Diversity, International Social Science Journal 61: 199 (2010): 13140.11Cited in Krishan Kumar, Utopia & Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 32.12Raymond Williams famously called culture one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. He neglected to tell us what the other contenders were. See Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 87.13Matthew Arnold cited in Isaac Reed and Jeffrey Alexander, Culture in Bryan S. Turner (ed.), The Cambridge Dictionary of Sociology (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 2006), 111. 14See Robert Brightman, Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexifica-tion, Cultural Anthropology 10:4 (1995), 50946.15David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), xi. On the general topic of history and heritage see also Margaret Macmillan, Dangerous Games: The Uses and Abuses of History (New York: The Modern Library, 2009) and David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 16Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade, 250.17Brian Graham, G. J. Ashworth and J. E. Tunbridge, A Geography of Heritage. Power, Culture, and Economy (London, Hodder Arnold, 2000). See also J. E. Tunbridge and G. J. Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996).18Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd Edition (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 179.19Pierre Bourdieu made a similar argument when he introduced the concept of cultural capital, which will be discussed in Chapter 3.20See Thomas M. Schmitt, The UNESCO Concept of Safeguarding Intangible Cul-tural Heritage: Its Background and Marrakchi Roots, International Journal of Heritage Studies 14:2 (March, 2008): 95111; Gustavo F. Araoz, World-Heritage Historic Urban Landscapes: Defining and Protecting Authenticity, APT Bulletin 39:2-3 (2008): 3337; and Pamela Jerome, An Introduction to Authenticity in Preservation, APT Bulletin 39:23 (2008): 37. See also What is Intangible Cultural Heritage?, www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?pg=00002 (accessed 9/18/2012).21See for example Shabnam Inanloo Dailoo and Frits Pannekoek, Nature and Culture: A New World Heritage Context, International Journal of Cultural Property 15 (2008): 2547; Giorgos Catsadorakis, The Conservation of Natural and Cultural Heritage



24 chapter one

in Europe and the Mediterranean: A Gordian Knot? International Journal of Heritage Studies 13:4 (2007): 30820; Heather Burke and Claire Smith, Vestiges of Colonialism: Manifestations of the Culture/Nature Divide in Australian Heritage Management, in Cultural Heritage Management: A Global Perspective, ed. Phyllis Mauch Messenger and George S. Smith (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 2137; Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1995); and Simon Pugh (ed.), Reading Land-scape: Country, City, Capital (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). For an analysis of conflicting attitudes toward nature, see Dee Mack Williams, Representations of Nature on the Mongolian Steppe: An Investigation of Scientific Knowledge Construc-tion, American Anthropologist 102:3 (2000): 50319 and Michael Goldsmith, Who Owns Native Nature? Discourses of Rights to Land, Culture, and Knowledge in New Zealand, International Journal of Cultural Property 16 (2009): 32539. 22William R. Catton, Jr., and Riley E. Dunlap, Environmental Sociology: A New Para-digm, The American Sociologist 13(1978): 449. 23See Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thvenot, Les conomies de la grandeur (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987) and also their 1991 volume, On Justification: Economics of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, N J: Princeton University Press, 1991). 24See Harald Welzer, Les guerres du climat. Pourquoi on tue au XXIe sicle, trans. Bernard Lortholary (Paris: Gallimard, 2009). See also Christian Parenti, Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence (New York: Nation Books, 2011).25Catton and Dunlap, Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm, 1978, ob. cit. 26For an overview of the specific literature on global warming, see Constance Lever-Tracy, Global Warming and Sociology, Current Sociology 56:3 (2008): 44567. See also Steven R. Brechin, Ostriches and Change: A Response to Global Warming and Sociology, 46774; and Terry Leahy, Discussion of Global Warming and Sociology, 475484 in the same volume. For an examination of the relationship of different nations to ecological resources, see Andrew K. Jorgenson, The Sociology of Unequal Exchange in Ecological Context: A Panel Study of Lower-Income Countries, 19752000, Sociologi-cal Forum 24:1 (March 2009): 2245. 27Thomas Dietz, Eugene Rosa, and Richard York, Environmentally Efficient Well-Being: Rethinking Sustainability as the Relationship between Human Well-being and Environmental Impacts, Human Ecology Review 16 (2008): 11322. See also Richard York, Eugene Rosa, and Thomas Dietz, Footprints on the Earth: The Environmental Conse-quences of Modernity, American Sociological Review 68 (2003): 279300, and Richard York and Philip Mancus, Critical Human Ecology: Historical Materialism and Natural Laws, Sociological Theory 27:2 (2009): 12249.28JoAnn Carmin, Governance for Achieving Urban Climate Adaptation, in Workshop on Sociological Perspectives on Global Climate Change, May 3031, 2008, ed. Joane Nagel, Thomas Dietz, and Jeffrey Broadbent (Washington, D.C.: Sociology Program, Director-ate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; National Science Foundation; and American Sociological Association, 2010), 5962. 29See for example my volume, Amana: From Pietist Sect to American Community (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1984) and also my comparative study of conservation




themes in the United States and the United Kingdom, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historic Identity (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 30Barry Schwartz, Kazuya Fukuoka, and Sachiko Takita-Ishii, Collective Memory: Why Culture Matters, in Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (eds.), The Black-well Companion to the Sociology of Culture (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), 254.31Barry Schwartz, Memory as a Cultural System: Abraham Lincoln in World War II, American Sociological Review 61 (1996): 910. See also Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007).32This series was published between 1981 and 1992. Each volume had a different set of coauthors. 33Jeffrey K. Olick, In the House of the Hangman. The Agonies of German Defeat, 19431949 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Anita M. Waters, Planning the Past: Heritage Tourism and Post-Colonial Poli-tics at Port Royal (New York: Lexington Books, 2006); Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Diane Barthel, Historic Preservation: Collective Memory and Historic Identity (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996); and Lyn Spillman, Nation and Commemoration: Creating National Identities in the United States and Australia (Cam-bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997). For an overview of the field see Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitsky-Seroussi and Daniel Levy, The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). 34Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, Memory Unbound: The Holocaust and the Forma-tion of Cosmopolitan Memory, European Journal of Social Theory 5 (2002): 87. For how global memories can be incorporated with national memories, see Brad West, Enchant-ing Pasts: The Role of International Civil Religious Pilgrimage in Reimagining National Collective Memory, Sociological Theory 26:3 (September 2008): 258270.35No specific claims are made, however, that the event must have significance in all national settings. Nor is it to be misconstrued as an apologia for negationism. See Levy and Sznaider, Memory Unbound, 87. Also, Griswold provides a model that helps account for different national patterns of cultural reception. See Wendy Griswold, The Fabrication of Meaning: Literary Interpretation in the United States, Great Britain, and the West Indies, American Journal of Sociology 92 (1987): 10771117.36Maurice Halbwachs, Les cadres sociaux de la mmoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires Franaises, 1952). 37Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).38Levy and Sznaider, Memory Unbound, 91.39Patrick Hutton, History as an Art of Memory (Hanover VT: University Press of New England, 1993), xx.40Jeffrey Olick and Daniel Levy, Collective Memory and Cultural Constraint: Holo-caust Myth and Rationality in German Politics, American Sociological Review 62 (1997): 92136.



26 chapter one

41David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1985), 206210.42For an overview of the field, see Thomas F. Gieryn, A Space for Place in Sociology, Annual Review of Sociology 26 (2000): 46396. See also Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1991); John A. Agnew and James S. Duncan, eds., The Power of Place: Bringing Together Geographical and Socio-logical Imaginations (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); John Urry, Consuming Places (New York: Routledge, 1995), and Rob Shields, Places on the Margin: Alternate Geographies of Modernity (London and New York: Routledge, 1991).43Schama, Landscape and Memory, 1995. 44Victor W. Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthro-pological Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 20. 45Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, Schocken, 1976).46Franoise Choay, LAllgorie du patrimoine, rev. Ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 185. 47Gil Eyal and Larissa Buchholz, From the Sociology of Intellectuals to the Sociology of Interventions, Annual Review of Sociology 36 (2010): 117. See also Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 48Karin Knorr Cetina, Culture in Global Knowledge Societies: Knowledge Cultures and Epistemic Cultures, in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, ed. Mark D. Jacobs and Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2005), 6579.49There are, of course, exceptions. Britains National Trust and English Heritage have received a comparably high level of attention, perhaps because of the extent of the Trusts holdings and English Heritages pivotal and powerful role as a quasi-governmental agency whose approval is needed for many projects. See Chapter 3 for more discussion of their significance.50Diane Barthel, The Role of Fictions in the Redefinition of Mission, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 26 (1997): 399420. 51Michael Balston, Conservation versus Preservation, Europa Nostra Cultural Heritage Review 1 (2003): 915. 52This distinction reflects developments in other disciplines. See Kagan, Art and Sus-tainability, 2011.53Ulrich Beck, The Cosmopolitan Perspective: The Sociology of the Second Age of Modernity, British Journal of Sociology 51 (2000): 79105.



index 223

index

AAbbott, Andrew, 18990aboriginal ceremonial landscapes, tourism

and, 167Aboriginal people of Australia, 107Adaminaby, New South Wales, Australia, 106Adlie penguins, Cape Adare, 119aesthetic pollution, wind farms and, 131aesthetic quality of historic structures, 142Africa, 7172, 78n64, 105, 11214, 149n24Aga Khan Foundation, 76n46agriculture, 104, 106, 109, 113, 121n8agrotourism, Cyprus, 123n29airport expansions, 186Akamas Peninsula, Cyprus, 111Alexandria, Egypt, 95Allen, Barbara, 92Allianoi, proposed dam project, 66, 76n44, 110Altai Mountains, 117Amazon, 1034, 114American Express, 157, 16566Antarctica, 64, 11920Antarctic Treaty System and Protocols

(Madrid Protocol), 126n61anthropologists, definition and study of

culture, 11APT Bulletin, 70Araoz, Gustavo, 18187archaeological research funding, 114Arctic, the, 1034, 11519, 170Arctic Circumpolar Route, 11718Arendt, Hannah, 41Argentina, 59Ashworth, G. J., 1213Asia, 29, 7172, 105. See also names of individual

Asian countriesAssociation of Preservation Technology, 70Athens Charter (1931), 35Australia

Aboriginal people, 107agricultural production decline, 106carbon tax, proposed, 122n18, 122n20

desertification, 105 Great Barrier Reef, 170 greenhouse gas emissions, 1078 National Trust organization, 78n64 soil structure, 1067 solar power, 13637 wind farm industry, 13435Australian Council of National Trusts, 135Avila, Italy, 66Ayutthaya, Thailand, 95

bBaltonea, Turkey, 122n10Bamiyan Buddhas, destruction by Taliban, 38banality of good, the, 28, 4143Bangkok, Thailand, 95Barragan house and studio, Mexico, 45BATAN project, France, 143Beck, Ulrich, 28, 4143Belvedere Strategy, 99n12Berenfeld, Michelle, 64Bermuda, National Trust organization, 78n64Bern Convention on the Conservation of

European Wildlife and Natural Habitats (Council of Europe), 162

best practices, 53, 55Binette, Michael, 129biodiversity, risks to, 114, 131, 163birds, wind turbines and, 131Birol, Faith, 129Borchgrevnik, Carsten, 119, 127n62Bourdieu, Pierre, 182, 183Bourges cathedral, France, 44BP oil platform explosion, 14Branagh, Kenneth, 119branding concept, 50n47Brint, Steven, 58Brooks, Graham, 15960building reuse, LEED system and, 14142Bulgaria, 77n49Bundheemschut, 82, 99n13Burke, Kenneth, 13



224 index

Burkina Faso, 113Burra Charter (ICOMOS, 1979), 20, 36

cCalimani, Riccardo, 89Cambodia, 114Canada, 6465, 70, 11617, 126n39carbon costs of tourism, 163Carmin, JoAnn, 16Carraro, Carlo, 90Cassar, May, 68, 103Catton, William R., 1516Causse Mjan, 109Cedars of Lebanon, Qadisha Valley, 109Centre for Sustainable Heritage, University

College of London, 77n52, 78n63Cetina, Karin Knorr, 19Cevennes and Causses region, France, 109CFS Venise (Le Comit franaise pour la

sauvegarde de Venise), 85change tolerance, controversy over, 18187Charter on Cultural Tourism (ICOMOS),

15860charters, declarations, and resolutions on

cultural heritage conservation, ICOMOS, 3536

Chartres cathedral, France, 44China, 78n65, 104, 121n6Chinguetti Mosque, Mauritania, 64, 112Christoff, Peter, 108Cinque Terre, Italy, 97City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt, 188climate change in the Arctic, 11617 effect on heritage sites in urban areas, 111 efforts to fight, in Europe, 6569 environmental sociology and, 1516 frequency of extreme weather events

and, 97, 106 global and local impacts of, 15 global tourism as contributor to, 89 heritage professionals and theme of,

6164, 17980 heritage work materially affected by, 57 human suffering due to, 95, 18788 indigenous people in discussion on, 118

Inuit petition to Inter-American Com- mission on Human Rights, 120

lack of political will to take effective measures against, 1078

population movements in response to, 14 women as pioneers on, 72n6Climate Change and Cultural Heritage,

Oslo, 67Climate for Culture project (European

Union), 66climate refugees, 14, 105, 18788climate tourists, 170climate wars, 14coastal erosion, and destruction of coastal

villages, 116coercive pressure on heritage organizations,

5455, 129collective memory, 16competition, in heritage organizational field,

39, 18283conservation. See cultural heritage conservationConti, Alfredo, 59Convention for the Protection of Cultural

Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (UN), 3031

conventions on cultural heritage conservation, UNESCO, 3032

Copenhagen Climate Conference (2009), 39, 42, 71

corporate funding for heritage conservation, 114, 164

corporations, tourism-related, 180cosmopolitanism, 4142, 154, 190cosmopolitan memories, 1618, 18Council of Europe, 35, 162CRATerre-EAG, University of Grenoble, 112Croatia, 165cruise ships, 87, 166, 174n34Cultural Emergency Response program, 66cultural heritage authenticity of, 36 and barriers to adaptation, 113 destruction of, during World War II, 30 global dimension in ways of seeing, 2728 as human right, 7, 2934, 46 as living history, 9 and world polity, 3441



index 225

cultural heritage conservationchallenges in early 21st century, 10contradictions in field of, 178, 18687extent of international acceptance, 3739as global organizational field, 7, 5455, 6165, 177heritage preservation vs., 20moral component in early movement, 5859political context, 36private sponsorship of, 17879professionalization of, 53, 5758, 61role in world risk society, 9

Cultural & Heritage Tourism Alliance, 158cultural landscapes, 103, 11012, 146, 185cultural sustainability, 145cultural tourism, 8, 32, 15760, 16869, 18081culture, concept of, 1112, 29Culzean Castle, Scotland, 133Cyprus, 11011, 123n29Cyrene, Greek ruins of, 153

ddam projects, proposed, 66, 76n44, 110, 121n6,

125n45Davenport, Iowa, 96deforestation threats, 11315Delhi, India, 166Denmark, 134Desertec Industrial Initiative, 149n24desertification threats to cultural heritage, 62,

1046, 112, 121n4development initiatives, heritage organizations

and, 16264, 18485. See also sustainable development

Dietz, Thomas, 15Die Wies church, Germany, 44DiMaggio, Paul J., 5455disasters, tourism and, 169discourse, defined, 156Djenn, Mali, 189Dramatse Lhakhang monasteries, 76n45drought, 1089, 112, 122n10dryland ecosystems, vulnerability of, 104Dublin Declaration (INTO), 71Dunlap, Riley E., 1516

eEarthcraft Historic program, 142earthen architecture, 70, 112, 124n31Easter Island, Chile, 16162eastern Europe, protection for cultural

heritage in, 67, 77n49economic development, and cultural heritage

conservation, 16263, 18485, 189economic recession, and restoration of exist-

ing housing stock, 144economic sustainability, 145Egypt, 95, 134, 188Eifler, John, 144El Salvador, 95embodied energy of historic vs. new struc-

tures, 13839Emerging Green Builders, U.S. Green Building

Council, 93energy, sustainable, 12931, 137energy conservation, 13745, 146energy efficiency in historic structures, 57,

13745English Heritage, UK energy efficiency of historic buildings

and, 13940 Hearth and Home project, 143 role of, 26n49 sustainability and, 6768 Wind Energy and the Historic

Environment, 148n9 wind farms and, 13032Enlightenment philosophers, 1314, 29, 154environmental sociology, climate change and,

1516environmental sustainability, 145, 180Europa Nostra, 66, 76n44, 16364Europe efforts to fight climate change and achieve

sustainability, 6569, 77n49 focus on sustainable tourism and

development, 35, 162 grand tour compared to mass tourism,

15356 retreat of glaciers, 105 See also names of individual European

nationsEuropean Commission, 173n22



226 index

European Union, 6567, 138extinction threats due to climate change, 95extreme weather events, 97, 106

fFamagusta, Cyprus, 111farming, 104, 106, 109, 113, 121n8Faro Convention (Framework Convention

on the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society), 77n49, 162

Fedden, Robin, 59federal investment tax credits, 57Finland, 11819flood control, in Netherlands, 8081flooding, 6263, 7980, 84, 9698, 186Florence, Italy, 84Forest of the Cedars of God, 109, 123n23forestry, 109, 113France BATAN project, 143 Bourges and Chartres cathedrals, 44 budget for culture, 185 Cevennes and Causses region, 109 and cultural heritage, 33 efforts to safeguard Venice, 85 G8, 76n47 leadership on sustainability, 6667 Paris, 79 threats to cultural landscapes, 18586 Vaison la Romaine, 96Friends of the Earth Cyprus, 111Fulbe people, Burkina Faso, 113

gGalapagos, impact of tourism on, 169Gardening in the Global Greenhouse project,

68, 77n54gaze, power of the, 32gender, and issues of climate change and

sustainability, 72n6Georgia Trust, 14243Germany, 41, 67, 77n54, 13334, 138, 148n14Getty Conservation Institute, 7071, 78n63Gibson Mill, Yorkshire, England, 143global cities facing threat of flooding, 7980,

9798

global climate change. See climate changeglobal heritage community, 9, 22n2, 4647,

7172, 113Global Heritage Fund, 65Global Heritage Network, 65globalization, protection against homo-

genizing forces of, 3233global South, 9495global warming. See climate changeGoldman, Michael, 184Grafton, Illinois, 96Graham, Brian, 1213Grand Mosque restoration, Djenn, Mali, 189Great Barrier Reef, Australia, 106Great Mosque, Djenn, Mali, 112Great Wall of China, 44Green Building Rating, 141greenhouse gas emissions, 77n54, 1078, 155Green Lab (NTHP), 145Green Lines Institute for Sustainable Develop-

ment (Portugal), 67groundwater, diminishing, 105, 121n8Gulf of Mexico, BP oil platform explosion, 14Guyana, 95

hHabana Vieja, Havana, Cuba, 165Hague Convention (UN), 3031Haiti, 76n45, 18889, 194n35, 194n37Halbwachs, Maurice, 17, 29Hall, Stuart, 156Hari, Johann, 164Hearth and Home project, 143heritage and culture, 1114 expansion in scope of, 13 implied power relationship, 1213 intangible, 1011, 13, 32, 48n20, 109, 177 as justification for ethnic conflicts and

ethnocentrism, 46 memory, globality, and, 1619 See also cultural heritageHeritage Canada Foundation, 70heritage conservation. See cultural heritage

conservationHeritage Council, Republic of Ireland, 69



index 227

Heritage in Peril program, 66heritage organizational field, 78, 39, 130,

17879, 18283heritage professionals and organizations

climate change theme and, 17980development initiatives and, 16364partnerships with protourism corporations, 16566pressure toward isomorphism, 5455, 129scientific expertise, 5961, 179social activism, 65social activism by, 5354sustainability interest, 9ties to for-profit organizations, 163tourism and, 164, 16768

heritage sites, cosmopolitan memories and, 17, 18. See also World Heritage List

heritage tourism, 8, 32, 153, 15760, 16869, 18081

Herschel Island, Yukon Territory, Canada, 6465, 116

heteronomy, tension between autonomy and, 182, 185

Himalayan glaciers, 1056Historic Green, 9293historic neighborhoods, destruction of, 186Historic Route 66, 166historic structures

green building movement and, 129preservation of, as ultimate recycling, 13839retrofitting, Green Lab and, 145solar panels and, 13536

historic urban landscapes, 181history, as phenomenon separate from

heritage, 12Hobbes, Thomas, 1314Holocaust, 17, 29Home Again! program, 9293Hooper, John, 89Hui, Ming Min, 43human exemptionalism, 1415human loss, climate change and, 95human rights

concept of, 27to cultural heritage, 7, 28, 31, 33

particularistic cultures and, 29 universalism within discourse on, 59Hurricane Katrina (2005), 9194, 100n27Hutton, Patrick, 17

iICCROM. See International Center for the

Study of Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM)

ICOMOS. See International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)

ICOMOS Bulgaria, 77n49ICOMOS Canada, 70IGOs. See International Government Organi-

zations (IGOs)India, 44, 64, 1045, 166indigenous peoples, 1034, 107, 11719, 167Indonesia, 76n45, 114Indus Waters Treaty, 1045inequality issues, 111, 172, 172n5, 18789INGOs. See International nongovernmental

organizations (INGOs)intangible heritage, 1011, 13, 32, 48n20, 109, 177Inter-American Commission on Human

Rights, 126n39international aviation, expansion of, 154International Center for the Study of Preserva-

tion and Restoration of Cultural Property (ICCROM), 6364, 7475n27, 162

international cooperation, state sovereignty and strength through, 4142

International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)

Burra Charter (1979), 20, 36 change-oriented theme at Malta (2009),

182 charters, declarations, and resolutions on

cultural heritage conservation, 3536 earthen architecture of Timbuktu, Mali,

112 on ecological risks to Venice lagoon and

town, 90 engagement with issue of climate change,

6364 International Polar Heritage Committee,

11518 objectives of, 75n32



228 index

participation in, 177relationship between cultural conservation and tourism, 162Scientific Committee on Cultural Tourism, 15860sustainability mission, 55UNESCO World Heritage Center and, 74n27World Bank and, 184

international government organizations (IGOs), 3435

international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), 3435, 39, 125n45

International Polar Heritage Committee, ICOMOS, 11518

International Style architecture, 140INTO (International National Trusts Organi-

zation), 7172Inuit Circumpolar Council, 118, 120, 126n39Inupiat villages, destruction of, 116Ireland, 69Irish Georgian Society, 69isomorphism, 5455, 56, 72, 130Istanbul, Turkey, 122n10, 186Italia Nostra, 66, 87Italy, 6667, 84, 90, 97, 134. See also Venice,

ItalyIUCN (World Conservation Union), 74n27,

75n35

jJapan, 79Jenkins, Sir Simon, 120Jordan, 1089Jordan River, 123n22

kKalahari, effects of tourism, 165Kanyaka, South Australia, 107Karak, Jordan, 1089Kaufman, Ned, 53Kay, Sir John, 88Khadafi, Saif al-Islam, 153King, Sir David, 88Kivalina, Alaska, 116Kyoto Protocol, 107

lLake District, England, 13031Lake Eucumbene, Australia, 106Landrieu, Mitch, 9394Laona Foundation, 11011Latin America, 7172, 165Lebanon, 109Lee, Antoinette, 57, 58, 61LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environ-

mental Design), 69, 14142Leh, India, 64Leniaud, Jean-Michel, 186Levy, Daniel, 1617Liberia, 115Les lieux de mmoire (Nora), 16Life Beyond Tourism, 155life cycle analysis of existing vs. new buildings,

139, 149n31Lifu, Meun, 167Lincolns Cottage, Washington, D.C., 150n43List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of

Urgent Safeguarding, 48n20List of World Heritage in Danger, 37Liverpool, England, 4445local residents alliances with INGOs, 125n45 development interests and, 185 heritage tourism and, 165 impact of preservation guidelines on,

Djenn, Mali, 189 Rimaiibe people, Burkina Faso, 113 as stakeholders and resource for

conservation, 190London, 143, 166Louisiana Landmarks Society, 91Louisiana Trust for Historic Preservation, 91Low Energy Victorian House project,

London, 143Lowenthal, David, 12, 61low-income housing, historic structure

renovation for, 8687Luang Prabang, Laos, 16869Lynge, Aqqaluk, 118Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 156Lyveden New Bield, 131



index 229

mMacao conference on global ecological crisis

(2008), 7, 167MacCannell, Dean, 18MacDonald, Christine, 164Madrid Protocol, 126n61Maheu, Ren, 84Mak, Geert, 94Make It Right Foundation, 100n34Maldives, 94Marrakech Task Force on Sustainable

Tourism, 161Matelly, Sylvie, 108Mauritania, 64, 112McIntyre, Susan, 167Mediterranean basin, 105, 10811, 123n23memories, historical, 17metanarratives, defined, 156methodological approach, 1922Mexico, 105Mexico City, 166Meyer, John W., 34mimetic processes, 130mining industry, heritage attitude toward, 167mission change, logic of, 5561Mississippi, 92mitigation, defined, 149n26Moe, Richard, 69Monneti, Jean, 177Monogaga coastal forest, Ivory Coast, 11415moral pressures, on heritage organizations,

5455Mouton, Benjamin, 27Murray Darling river basin, Australia, 107Musitelli, Jean, 40, 183Myanmar, 39

nNkkljrvi, Juvv Lemet-Klemetti, 118Nantucket Sound, 131Nasheed, Moahammed, 94National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, 157National Council for Preservation Education,

58National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 157

National Historic Preservation Act (1966), 5758

National Park Service (NPS), 57, 70, 136, 166National Service for Archaeology, Cultural

Landscape, and Built Heritage (RACM), Netherlands, 8182

National Trust, UK, 26n49, 6769, 77n53, 13032, 143, 177

National Trust for Historic Preservation (NTHP)

campaign to fight sprawl, 14445 Green Lab, 145 Hurricane Katrina and, 9293 LEED certification and, 150n43 reason for founding of, 178 sustainability issue and, 5556, 6970 wind farms and, 132National Trust for Scotland, 133National Trust organizations, 78n64natural environment, 1314, 107nature conservation, divisions within field, 131Nauru, 9495Nazi Germany, and banality of evil, 41NEA (National Endowment for the Arts), 157Netherlands coastal flooding (1953), 79, 80 flood control, 8081 heritage conservation, 8182, 99n13 Newer Orleans symposium, 100n27 New Orleans compared to, 91 state of denial in, 94 sustainability issues and, 8284 wind farm industry, 134Newer Orleans symposium, Netherlands,

100n27New Guinea, 39New Orleans, Louisiana, 80, 9194New Zealand, 95NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations

(NGOs)Nicosia Master Plan, 111Noahs Ark initiative (European Union),

6566, 138nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) authors interest in, 20 international (INGOs), 3435, 39, 125n45



230 index

involvement in sustainability issues, 66and rebuilding of New Orleans, 91, 9293world polity theory and, 34See also names of specific NGOs

Nora, Pierre, 16normative pressures, on heritage organiza-

tions, 5455North America, 6971Norway, 116, 11819Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage

(NIKU), 67NPS (National Park Service), 57, 70, 136, 166NTHP. See National Trust for Historic

Preservation (NTHP)

oOgallala Aquifer, 105, 121n8Olick, Jeffrey K., 16, 17olive trees, 1089, 123n24Olynyk, Douglas, 11516, 117organizational fields career advancement in, 171 concept, 183, 192n14 defined, 54 global, 7, 5455, 6165, 177 heritage, 78, 39, 130, 17879, 18283Organization of World Heritage Cities, 97,

1012n50ORourke, Eileen, 109

pParis, 79partners in preservation, discourse and

practice, 16467Partners in Preservation Program, American

Express and, 16566Passive House (Passivhaus) movement,

Germany, 150n41Patrimoines program, 185Pearson, Michael, 1067permafrost changes, 117Perth, Australia, 136Petzet, Michael, 181, 182phosphate mining, Nauru, 9495Phuket, Thailand, 169Pickens, T. Boone, 105

place attachments, and mental health, 93Plan of Implementation of the World Summit

on Sustainable Development (UN), 160plants, Mediterranean basin, 108polar heritage, 11516political instability, tourism and, 169political refugees, 14population movements, in response to climate

change and resource depletion, 14Portugal, 67poverty, and heritage preservation, 169poverty tourism, 175n39Powell, Walter W., 5455power generation, 143Preservation Resource Center, 91Preservation Trades Network, 9293Pretoria Recommendations (ICOMOS,

2007), 63Prince Albert Foundation, 66Prince Charles Foundation, 66Prince Claus Fund, 66professional cultures, global, 22n1professionalization, use of term, 73n10public opinion, cultural heritage and, 28

rrace, 92, 1034, 107, 11719, 167RACM (National Service for Archaeology,

Cultural Landscape, and Built Heritage), Netherlands, 8182

Rapa Nui National Park, 161regime, defined, 29Representative List of the Intangible Cultural

Heritage of Humanity, 32resource conservation, technological fixes

vs., 146resource depletion, and cultural disintegra-

tion, 115responsible tourism, 17071restoration development, 151n48reuse of old buildings and, 69, 144Rimaiibe people, Burkina Faso, 113Risk Preparedness: A Management Manual

for World Cultural Heritage (ICCROM, 1998), 63

Roman Colosseum, 17879, 185, 193n23



index 231

Rosa, Eugene, 15Rosetta, Egypt, 95Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., 166Royal Geographical Society debate, London,

88Rykwert, Joseph, 88

sSaami people and cultural heritage, 11819Sahara desert, proposed solar panel

construction, 137Saint Louis, Senegal, 95Sams island, Denmark, 134Save Venice, 86, 89Saving Our Vanishing Heritage (GHF), 65Scandinavia, 67. See also names of individual

Scandinavian nationsScarpaci, Joseph, 165Schama, Simon, 18, 81Schwartz, Barry, 16science, heritage professionals and, 5961, 179Scientific Committee on Cultural Tourism,

ICOMOS, 15860Scotland, 6869, 133Scotts Hut, Antarctica, 64Scythian burial mounds (kurgans), Altai

Mountains, 117sea ice, loss of, 11517sea level rise, 8889, 95Seth Peterson Cottage, Lake Dalton, 144Shetland Islands, 133Shishmaref, Alaska, 116Smithsonian Institution, 39social activism, by heritage professionals,

5354social class and access to water, 111 connoisseurship and, 154 cultural tourism and, 32 distinction between locals and

occupational cosmopolitans, 190 and human suffering from climate

change, 18788 inequalities in benefits and costs of

tourism, 172n5

urban renewal and, 145social engineering, 181social justice, sustainability and, 9social memories, 17social sustainability, 145sociology, and study of culture, 11, 15soils, 95, 1067, 117, 122n13solar power, 13537, 149n24Sonargaon-Panam City, Bangladesh, 64Soviet Union, former, 105Spain, 17475n36spiritual currency, heritage and, 13Spring Greening, 93Sri Lanka, 169Standards for Rehabilitation of Historic

Structures (U.S. Department of the Interior), 35

status signaling, 156Stephen, Marcus, 9495stewardship failures, and exacerbation of

flooding, 80, 96St. Marks Square, Venice, 17879Strtkuhl, Beate, 59St. Pauls Cathedral, London, 166sustainability broadening definition of, 141, 145, 188 definition and scope in heritage work, 9 European efforts to achieve, 6569 gender, and issues of, 72n6 heritage organizations and, 5354, 6670,

17980 hope for, as new metanarrative, 15657 impact of tourism in discourse of, 167 Netherlands and, 8284 projects, 143 as question of justice, 118 as theme in cultural heritage conserva-

tion, 8, 55, 5658, 61, 159sustainable development, 153sustainable energy, 12931, 137sustainable farming, 124n40sustainable tourism Akamas villages, 111 concept promotion by heritage conserva-

tionists, 9 defined, 160


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