CONSERVATION IN CONTEXT

A few years ago, many voices were heard publicly condemning the Islamic State’s destruction of archaeological artifacts and sites in contemporary Syria and Iraq. Graves have been looted, buildings dynamited, and museum displays demolished, occasionally in front of the eyes of the international community. Many in the mass media suggested that there is an urgent need to protect and preserve this cultural heritage for the future. Behind such calls lies the preservation paradigm of heritage, motivated by a strong conservation ethics.Footnote ¹ According to this logic, the heritage sector has the duty to conserve the most valuable parts of our cultural heritage because it has inherent value and constitutes a non-renewable resource that cannot be substituted and, therefore, must be preserved for the benefit of future generations.

In this vein, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage Convention, for example, speaks of “the duty of ensuring the identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage.”Footnote ² This latter duty is a consequence of the stated observation that “the cultural heritage and the natural heritage are increasingly threatened with destruction” as well as with “the magnitude and gravity of the new dangers threatening them” and the evaluation that the “deterioration or disappearance of any item of the cultural or natural heritage constitutes a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world.”Footnote ³

To see heritage as an irreplaceable resource and in terms of endangerment and the risk of irreversible destruction and, consequently, in need of urgent protection is not, however, self-evident but, rather, culturally and historically situated in a particular context. Since the nineteenth century, Western societies, despite the modern fetishization of innovation, have been almost obsessed with preserving objects of the past as cultural heritage, both through society’s institutions and legislation and through citizens’ own initiatives.Footnote ⁴ Arguably, the lure of conserving heritage now outpaces all other modes of relating to the past, including tradition, memory, myth, memoir, and history.Footnote ⁵ Archaeologist and heritage policymaker Graham Fairclough even adds that

Behind this trend and our deep longing for retaining heritage in the face of a variety of threats of destruction lies what has been described as a general human preference for “loss aversion,” which is further strengthened by a modern “cult” of heritage and a “Noah complex.”Footnote ⁷ Adopting an “endangerment sensibility,” modern societies perceive the future first and foremost in terms of risks and threats to what its members hold dear and prefer to preserve for their own descendants.Footnote ⁸ We are therefore called upon to protect species faced by extinction, to conserve threatened biodiversity, to preserve heritage “at risk,” and, ultimately, to save humanity from ruining its own planet and thus from inescapable doom.

CONSERVATION AS CHANGE

The logic of the preservation paradigm ignores the fact that natural and historic processes of change and transformation are the drivers of human civilization and the origin of heritage on Earth and not their enemy. In his 2017 book Inheritors of the Earth: How Nature Is Thriving in an Age of Extinction, biologist Chris D. Thomas argues heretically that the future of natural heritage may just as well turn out much more brightly than what many of us pessimistically assume. “It is entirely possible,” he concludes, “that the long-term consequence of the evolution of Homo sapiens will be to increase the number of species on the Earth’s land surface.”Footnote ⁹ Thomas suggests that we should embrace immigrant species, hybrid species, and species created by humans, for example, by selective breeding. Time will tell which of these are best adapted to the rapidly changing conditions on Earth, but, to be sure, the number of species in most regions of the world is increasing, not decreasing. Climate change, in particular, will contribute to thriving wildlife because, as Thomas establishes, “on the whole, more species like it hot than cold.”Footnote ¹⁰ The key difference in Thomas’s thinking compared to that of others is that he proposes that we work with the biological and environmental processes that are taking place today, not against them. As he knows, “[l]ife on Earth survives because it changes.”Footnote ¹¹

Along similar lines, human geographer Stephanie Lavau has observed that the nature of conservation and, in particular, strategies to deal with climate change are presently changing.Footnote ¹² The ambition to maintain a timeless continuity of existing forms of life in protective fortresses is giving way to the aim of supporting a more fluid continuity of ecological processes by providing possibilities for future ecosystems. Whereas, for Lavau, “fortress conservation” manifests a nostalgic longing for the past, which often evokes grief and regret about any loss or destruction, “fluid conservation” allows for heritage to prepare legacies for the future as it might be, drawing on human vision and hope. Such living heritage testifies and, at the same time, takes advantage of change over time.

By the same token, the conservation of cultural heritage means to manage and testify to ongoing change, not to prevent it. All human beings have ever done, and do now, is a constitutive part of human history. Although historical change means that things are different today than they were before, as in any period, human actions necessarily contribute to the human legacy rather than risk threatening it. Cultural heritage, just like natural heritage, is a continuously evolving process of becoming, not a comprehensive legacy that theoretically, at any point, including the point of formal designation as heritage, might have been considered more or less complete and thus, in that form, deserves to be preserved for ever as it was then.Footnote ¹³ As a result of rapid global change and a profusion of environmental, technical, social, and cultural transformations in present societies, cultural heritage associated with various ages is changing and growing rapidly, not shrinking, and its diversity is likely to be increasing, not decreasing. Even destruction and loss are not necessarily threatening heritage; in fact, they may make heritage.Footnote ¹⁴ Never have the Bamiyan Buddha statues, the Berlin Wall, the Dodo, and Tyrannosaurus Rex been more emblematic than since they have largely or entirely disappeared from the surface of the planet! Arguably, the very destruction of the Bamiyan Buddha statues by the Taliban in 2001 was one of the political reasons why they were inscribed on the World Heritage List only two years later.Footnote ¹⁵

In the same vein, the unanticipated destruction of a tourist attraction does not have to mean the end of its lifespan or of its capacity to draw visitors. As David Weaver and Laura Lawton have argued, there are various strategies available to managers for maintaining tourist interest. They include capitalization on “residual attraction” that may involve redefinition, reconstruction (in situ or ex situ), or memorialization (mechanical or social).Footnote ¹⁶ There may even be an “appeal of loss” that is attracting tourists, with lost heritage remaining accessible through guiding and storytelling.Footnote ¹⁷ I will not rehearse the argument here that less preservation can actually mean more memory.Footnote ¹⁸ In a nutshell, in the words of archaeologist Rodney Harrison, “[i]f conserved traces can behave as mnemonics, so can the spectres of their absence.”Footnote ¹⁹ In other words, both natural and cultural heritage are dynamic manifestations and media of change over time, not its victims.

In order to connect what is done to heritage in the contemporary world with its possible benefits for future generations, we ought to see heritage in terms of persistence and change, persevering in a process of continuous growth and creative transformation over time.Footnote ²⁰ This approach means to study “uses of heritage” and the politics of “heritage processes” in a historical perspective linking past, present, and future.Footnote ²¹ It is closely linked to the process thinking recently proposed by the Japanese legal scholar and current president of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Toshiyuki Kono.Footnote ²² In the context of resolving the “heritage conservation versus development” conundrum and with the express aim of forming a basis of a new approach for sustainable development, Kono takes a “life-cycle” approach to built heritage, appreciating how new values might be created in the future through the careful management of change. In post-disaster contexts, such management may include reconstruction and the rebuilding of cultural heritage – or it may not if other strategies appear to promise greater benefits.

The future does not only have to be perceived in terms of risks and threats to original and irreplaceable heritage, but it can also be considered as a process of continuing transformation and change that we cannot always steer but to that we can adapt and that holds not only risks but also new opportunities for what we have inherited from the past. Arguably, it is precisely human adaptability and, as part of that, the continuing renewal of values and stories associated with sites and objects in the landscape that makes the continuity of human communities and their cultural heritage sustainable in the long term.Footnote ²³ This logic of continuous heritage transformation has long been apparent for intangible heritage. It applies equally to tangible heritage.

Bruno Latour and Adam Lowe employed an interesting natural metaphor in a recent discussion of the aura of facsimiles.Footnote ²⁴ Adapting and extending their river imagery from the world of art works to that of heritage, I suggest that we should not be looking for linear rivers (of heritage) expected to be flowing from a single spring (its origin) toward the sea, constantly at risk of being stopped by a dam or drying out along the way. Instead, we need to recall that rivers have extensive catchment areas, meanders, rapids, estuaries, and large deltas. Rivers also often join up with other flows of water, possibly polluted, and get rained into. The question is not whether any water in the river system reliably derives from a particular source and makes its way to its destination. The question is rather which waters the river subsumes, where and how the water is carried, and how much fertile ground it can create. In other words, the river should inspire us to judge its waters on the merits of what they do, at any point along the stream, rather than on the likeness of its fluid substance at the points of origin and destination. Surely, a monument like, for example, Stonehenge in England gains some of its aura and significance as heritage from the various interpretations, uses, and interferences that it stimulated and was subjected to during its long history.Footnote ²⁵ The same may happen in future Syria and Afghanistan, as time will have been healing wounds and perceptions of recent events will have changed, which has happened many times previously. Future heritage management in these regions may increasingly appreciate and put weight on what remains of the wars and conflicts during the early twenty-first century. In other words, episodes of what we may call heritage destruction contribute to history and can, thus, contribute to processes of future making too.

As far as the devastating impact of wars and other forms of destruction is concerned, the specific heritage may be changing fast and thoroughly, but it is not as such “at risk.” Ironically, even the destruction of parts of the existing cultural heritage may contribute to future generations’ lives and, in particular, to their relations to the past by effectively creating additional heritage. A changing heritage manifests the upgrading of history to its latest version, as it were.

The most important question of conservation and heritage management is not how much heritage of any one period may or may not survive intact into the future but, rather, what historical legacy, which we construct and leave behind, will come to benefit the most all of our descendants in future societies.Footnote ²⁶ As the future will differ from the present, we should expect that future heritage differs from present heritage. But this expectation is rare, as illustrated by a revealing scene portraying future heritage in the mid-twenty-second century in Christopher Nolan’s science-fiction movie Interstellar (2014). In that scene, time traveller Joseph Cooper returns decades later to his reconstructed childhood home where the family’s history is celebrated, now complete with interpretive video screens and bollards with red velvet rope cordoning off the original furniture and precious artifacts that must not be touched by ordinary visitors so that they will be preserved intact. Understandably, he comments: “I don’t care much for this, pretending we’re back where we started.” The cultural heritage on this space station denies Cooper and his contemporaries an original perspective that is meaningful in their present and, thus, a heritage that is sustainable. He asks: “I want to know where we are, where we’re going,” but the heritage remains mute, looks dull, and is expendable as it has not been sufficiently adapted and lacks upgrades when times have changed.

CONSERVATION AS CHALLENGE

Arguably, cultural heritage, whether tangible or intangible, is sustainable to the extent that it has the capability to adapt to change, and help us to adapt to change, through creative transformation.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, cultural heritage can be understood as the very manifestation of continuous change over time. The “heritage at risk” framework misunderstands that saving heritage from destruction is not the only given response to valuable contemporary heritage that is subjected to processes of transformation but, rather, a specific manifestation of preferred change and transformation itself.Footnote ²⁸

As we move into the future, the challenge posed by endangered heritage or, indeed, by largely destroyed sites like the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan is therefore not that they were deliberately targeted and have lost, or risk losing, cultural significance. The true challenge of sustainable heritage management is how to make heritage during episodes of drastic transformation absorb the changes that occur while maintaining, or even extending, the ability to provide benefits for all of the various human communities that are implicated or interested, now or in the future.Footnote ²⁹ This may involve preservation of the status quo, reconstruction, or creative reinvention.

In his general introduction to the concept of sustainability, political scientist Leslie Thiele put it like this: “Disturbance is not an enemy to be avoided or combated within living systems … [but] a partner in the dance of sustainability,”Footnote ³⁰ because, as he insisted elsewhere in the same work, “[s]ustainability is not a recipe for creating a planetary museum where nothing ever changes” and its “goal is not to achieve a ‘culture of permanence’.”Footnote ³¹

In their book on Managing Built Heritage: The Role of Cultural Significance, Derek Worthing and Stephen Bond define sustainable conservation as “the proper management of use and change in and around historic places and spaces, so as to respect and enhance their value to society.”Footnote ³² This is a useful understanding of conservation in terms of change that links back to my earlier discussion of Lavau, Kono, and others. It also matches former ICOMOS president Gustavo Araoz’s argument that cultural heritage management is about managing change in an effort to protect value and significance rather than about preventing change in a struggle to preserve the existing material fabric.Footnote ³³ Indeed, the core values of heritage are increasingly deemed to reside in the meanings and values that humans invest in heritage objects, not in their physical substance.Footnote ³⁴ But what is often not given sufficient attention in such discussions is how change of heritage can best be managed given that future values of heritage may not, and mostly likely will not, be identical with present ones and are uncertain.Footnote ³⁵

The literary scholar Stefan Willer observed in this context that any prescription of heritage and its value to future generations, supposedly in their own best interest, is the exact opposite of a socially sustainable management of heritage that must solve the dilemma of how to prepare today for a future society that will not be as we imagine it today.Footnote ³⁶ In other words, what does responsible and sustainable conservation mean when we anticipate uncertain change? How do you conserve something the values of which you cannot entirely grasp as many of them lie in the future? Clearly, it is inadequate and not sustainable to simply ignore these challenges and assume that such evolution will not happen, although the history of heritage illustrates how values have changed many times in the past. It will be best to start facing these challenges head on, now.

CONSERVATION AS CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION FOR THE FUTURE

If future values are difficult to manage in the present, can and should heritage be preserved at all? My reply to this question is, yes, selected heritage can and should be preserved today because it may not only be expected to provide a maximum of benefits for people enjoying it today, but the same also ought to be attempted concerning people in the future. Despite all of the difficulties, there is reason to believe that this expectation and ambition can, at least to some extent, be achieved.

A basic approach to managing heritage for the future is that to the same extent that a past heritage that has been continuously changing manifests a repeated upgrading of history, as I argued earlier, it should also be expected that heritage will be upgraded regularly in the future, as a consequence of changing contemporary circumstances and evolving needs for anticipated futures. The substance and values of heritage have changed repeatedly and will keep changing over time—so should our responses and strategies toward the heritage of the future. Future historical development will affect conservation and heritage management, leading to gradual changes in their approaches, aims, and priorities as we move forward in time.

In considering the future of any specific heritage, we are well advised to consider thoroughly the potential of various other modes of relating to the past besides preservation, reconstruction, or, indeed, reimagination.Footnote ³⁷ Today, too, the preservation of heritage covers only a small section of the multiple ways in which the past is evoked, used, and gains significance in contemporary societies.Footnote ³⁸ Ruined buildings and damaged heritage can be a very powerful force in society, and not all destroyed heritage needs to be restored to retain or enhance its values and meanings. At the same time, we are beginning to understand that entirely reconstructed and reimagined heritage can have significant benefits in society and make an important contribution to the quality of life, perhaps especially in periods of transformation.Footnote ³⁹ Crucially, to the extent that they directly involve relevant communities, the very practices needed in any efforts of preservation, restoration, reinvention, reconstruction, presentation, and interpretation of heritage may also be helpful in social recovery processes.Footnote ⁴⁰ In that sense, the practices of heritage can be even more valuable than what they are directed at.

In all of this work, the very uncertainty of the future does not have to be a problem to be overcome but, rather, can be an opportunity to be embraced.Footnote ⁴¹ Geographers David Harvey and Jim Perry recently argued that the uncertainty of heritage futures might best be considered as “a space of creativity” to be explored so as best to realize the potential of heritage.Footnote ⁴² Maintaining an open mind and the ability to see opportunities in changing conditions, based on a new understanding, can get heritage management far in preparing for the future. There is no need to engage in wide-ranging speculation about the future.

We can nevertheless discern some major demographic, technological, economic, social, and environmental trends for the next couple of decades, if not longer, that we may as well prepare for. Even for the heritage sector, it makes a lot of sense to think that “to correctly conserve the past we need to anticipate the future.”Footnote ⁴³ Anticipation of the future lies within the realm of future studies, which has come a long way over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Although future studies address visible trends, much of the field is concerned with critically understanding and developing perceptions and imaginations of the future in the present.Footnote ⁴⁴ Scholars in future studies generally agree that the future is not something that is simply going to happen but, rather, something we perceive, imagine, and, indeed, to some extent, “make” in various ways today. This applies in relation to heritage too: we should not expect that the future values and benefits of heritage are simply going to happen but recognize that they are something we perceive, imagine, and, to some extent, “make” today.

A good example is climate change whose consequences we already anticipate. But how are we going to take advantage of heritage in this context? Often, climate change is discussed by heritage managers in terms of a need to physically preserve the fabric that will be most affected and of the risks to be damaged or lost.Footnote ⁴⁵ But what may be most relevant in the future is not whether we will be able to conserve all of the heritage we value, which we probably cannot,Footnote ⁴⁶ but, rather, whether coming generations will have heritage that they will benefit from and, thus, value. One way forward in that direction is to ask how people in the past adapted (or failed to adapt) to phases of climate change and environmental transformation and, thus, to try and learn from the past for our own present and future.Footnote ⁴⁷ But, as the anthropologist Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels has argued, we should not ignore that “climate change is as much a social and political issue as it is an environmental one, and heritage researchers and practitioners miss a large part of the problem if the social impacts of climate change on cultural heritage are ignored.”Footnote ⁴⁸ We should therefore also start to develop scenarios of the social consequences of climate change resulting from modified land use, shifting patterns of subsistence, population movements, and emerging social conflicts related to such processes. All such developments have an impact on, and are impacted by, cultural heritage that defines not only specific traditions and memories but also entire ways of life and collective identities. Even though we cannot know today if, or when exactly, such processes related to climate change will occur at significant scales, they can be expected to occur within decades and probably well before the end of the twenty-first century—that is, during the lives of our own children and grand-children.

I am effectively calling for creative discussions of how cultural heritage, and, indeed, which cultural heritage, will be able to provide values and benefits in anticipated futures and thus help future people and societies solve problems to improve human lives, while adapting to realities they cannot control. To the extent that there are different scenarios of the future mirroring the fact that the future will take turns nobody now can fully anticipate, we ought to design and critically discuss general approaches and specific strategies of action that could work under different circumstances.

One way of rendering the entire process of heritage management more “future proof” is by actively integrating future change in heritage management and thus accept the temporality of specific heritage discourses. This could be done, for example, by letting more of our decisions expire at specific points in the future. As Rodney Harrison puts it succinctly, “if we are to maintain that heritage is not universal, as seems to be agreed by many contemporary heritage practitioners, then it requires regular revision and review to see if it continues to meet the needs of contemporary and future societies.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Or, in the words of tourism researcher Catherine Cameron, “[i]t is logical to project that heritage and its manufacture may wane or change as new social and cultural conditions unfold in the future.”Footnote ⁵⁰ But current regimes of heritage preservation, such as the World Heritage Convention, do not envisage much in the way of regular revision of the benefits of heritage to human societies and rather evoke notions of eternity and timelessness in relation to the “outstanding universal value” of inscribed world heritage.Footnote ⁵¹

Perhaps the only present perception of the future about which we can be firmly certain that it will not come to be is a distant future that will largely resemble the present—and, yet, that kind of presentism is precisely what heritage managers in practice usually assume. Very few heritage specialists have given much concern to the question which future they actually work for and what the exact benefits of heritage in that future may consist of.Footnote ⁵²

CONCLUSIONS ABOUT CONSERVATION

Finding appropriate responses to contemporary episodes of destructive change—for example, in Afghanistan and in Syria—challenges and transforms established notions of conservation and questions the familiar “heritage at risk” framework of preservation. Intriguingly, considering the future of heritage means thinking about a time in which heritage as we know it may no longer exist but has been transformed into something else.Footnote ⁵³ Contemporary preferences for using and indeed altering cultural heritage, deriving from how many living people today prefer to relate and give value and meaning to the remains of the past, go well beyond traditional approaches to conservation and are highly variable, perhaps increasingly so.Footnote ⁵⁴ We may be at the beginning of a process of change that will fundamentally transform the way in which we value and manage heritage, as several observers recently have suspected.Footnote ⁵⁵

I have argued in this article that to perceive heritage primarily as an irreplaceable legacy of the past and at risk of falling victim to present-day events does not help in recognizing and, indeed, in realizing the potential of a changing heritage to contribute creatively to improving people’s lives in future societies. We need to make sure that the heritage sector, now and over the coming decades, keeps upgrading the principles and practices of managing cultural heritage with the best outcomes for future generations as possible.