Haboucha, Rebecca

English

Apollo (Cambridge)

 July 2017  |   In Sickness and In HealthIn the past decade, the threat of climate change has received increasing atten-tion in official heritage discourse. Holistic studies on the relationship between climate change and heritage are therefore still few and far between. From the vantage point of archaeologists and heritage professionals, David Harvey and Jim Perry’s edited volume, The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adap-tation and Creativity, is an essential read that provides an innovative theoretical framework and applied case studies to fill the knowledge gap in understand-ing this nexus. Rodney Harrison’s (2012) dialogical model of heritage sets the premise for the book; that is, heritage is a dynamic process where cultural and natural processes—or humanity’s impacts on nature and vice versa—are deeply connected and must be understood for successful conservation and reflection of societal values. In this vein, the loss and uncertainty that climate change poses need not be negative, but an element to consider when adapting heritage.Furthermore, the editors argue that effective conservation in the age of the Anthropocene requires an in-depth analysis at both temporal and spatial scales. Their temporal framework strives to be more circular than the often “linear temporal framework…within heritage and climate change studies” that is centred on the present, as a means to consider “the contingency and politics of how past, present and future are woven together in an uncertain future” (page 14). This innovative aim therefore steers away from what most archaeologists are familiar with insofar as established fields of environmen-tal archaeology are concerned. Spatially, the chapters reflect the geograph-The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation and CreativityEdited by David C. Harvey and Jim Perry2015. New York: RoutledgeHbk. 286 pp. 53 B/w illus. ISBN: 978-1-138-78183-2Reviewed by Rebecca HabouchaDepartment of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of CambridgeArchaeological Review from Cambridge   32.1132 |   Book Reviews: The Future of Heritage as Climates Changeical breadth of climate change. Case studies include the United Kingdom, the United States, India, Australia, Italy, South Africa, Colombia, Israel, Turk-menistan and China. Each chapter addresses the power dynamics embedded in the implementation of international and national policies and emphasizes the importance of dismantling the divide between heritage professionals, pol-icymakers and the public to arrive at new heritage decision-making processes. The volume is divided into two parts: the first (Chapters Two–Eight) focuses on different ontologies of climate change and heritage, while the second (Chap-ters Nine–15) relates to varied responses in policy, dynamic processes and ways forward. For the most part, the volume maintains a coherent chronological sequence throughout: the chapters weigh their focus on the historical, present and future approaches, respectively. To start, Chapters Two and Three address the historical contingency of climate change. Rose Ferraby’s case study of the Jurassic Coast in the United Kingdom outlines how one can appreciate future understandings of heritage to include changes to the landscape. Chapter Three provides unique insight into the heritage-climate change nexus by looking at the heritage of perceptions of climate science itself from the nineteenth century to today within Germany. Chapters Four, Five and Six are just a few of the chapters that draw on the prevalence of local knowledge in approach-ing climate change with concerns to heritage. All three chapters purport that going into the future, “local, lay or ‘experiential’ weather is assuming new importance” for understanding perceptions of climate change, in addition to traditionally accepted scientific knowledge (page 73). Chapters Five and Six relay similar messages, but specifically through the lens of Indigenous Ecolog-ical Knowledge in India and Australia, respectively. In comparison, Chapter Eight is tangential to the rest of the volume. While interesting, Cevasco et al.’s case study of chestnut tree landscapes in Liguria, Italy, is not linked explic-itly to historic environmental change, but changing human requirements. The second section includes chapters that are long overdue in challenging the international heritage industry, and mainly UNESCO’s, approach to the climate change issue. The central theme weaving between each chapter is: given that climate change will continue to inflict danger on cultural and natural heritage, how should humanity best mitigate and adapt to such changes? In Chapter Nine, Diane Barthel-Bouchier provides a comprehensive analysis of the opportunities and problems arising from the introduction of the climate change mission to interna- July 2017  |   In Sickness and In Health133Rebecca Haboucha  | tional heritage discourse. While the motives of international heritage frameworks can be discerned by reading between the lines, her novel approach successfully deconstructs the evolution of climate change’s presence in heritage legislation and guidelines, in addition to evolving motives for its inclusion. The conundrum between heritage tourism and climate change is particularly pertinent to today’s climate. Most stirring is her postulation that the notion of ‘sustainable tourism’ is covering up for the ecological cost of tourism, and the politics it involves. Chapter 13 explores built heritage through earth buildings. The unstable and changing nature of these buildings challenges the ‘conserve as found’ model still endemic to the ascription of a World Heritage Site. UNESCO will not ascribe a building to the List of World Heritage if its Outstanding Universal Value is threatened, and Chapter 14 provides insight into the limitations this presents to protecting areas of rapid development, in this case, Hong Kong and China. Arguing that buildings are important for enhancing social interactions and mit-igating climate change, Esther Yung and Edwin Chan propose that the potential threats climate change imposes on a site should be recorded as part of the herit-age designation process, as opposed to discriminating the site from ascription. There are some limitations in geographic scope and dimensional consider-ations of the dialogical process of heritage. With regards to the former, South America is neglected throughout the book. It was also striking to find that there was no reference to locations where climate change is most exacerbated, including the Three Poles—the North Pole, South Pole and the Himalayas. One element ignored in the dialogical process between culture and nature is the Ani-malia Kingdom. There is no allusion to human interactions with animals, and the comparison between endangered species and heritage could have acted as a useful analogy. While Chapters Seven and 12 refer to conserving biodi-versity in manners that maintain faunal and floral diversity, and incur the least amount of stress on essential human economic and sustenance activities such as agriculture, human’s relationality to animals as part of heritage, although crucial in some cases, is not referenced. This shortfall may be symptomatic of the volume’s focus on broad processes of weather and landscape as heritage.On the whole, the volume is largely successful in bringing an impressive number of issues on the new and growing field of the climate change, and heritage to the fore. Setting heritage as a process, it explores the complexities between natural Archaeological Review from Cambridge   32.1134 |   Book Reviews: The Future of Heritage as Climates Changeand cultural processes and heritage sites, in addition to how power dynamics are interwoven into this relationship. The editors conclude that in the age of the Anthropocene, where climate change is a constant threat to humanity and herit-age, effective conservation can only arise through heritage as a malleable concept. Harvey and Perry’s volume is invaluable to Routledge’s Key Issues in Cultural Her-itage series. Their pioneering approach to the heritage-climate change process offers an essential read for archaeologists and heritage professionals alike. References: Harrison, R. 2012. Heritage: Critical Approaches. London: Routledge. 

The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation, and Creativity, edited by David C. Harvey and Jim Perry

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The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation, and Creativity, edited by David C. Harvey and Jim Perry

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