Cultural Heritage and Climate Change: The Social Dimension

DIANE BARTHEL-BOUCHIER
Stony Brook University, Stony Brook NY

In recent years, international heritage organizations and intergovernmental agencies have encouraged a greater awareness of and responsiveness to climate change. This new ecological mandate can be seen as representing both a danger and an opportunity to the Global Heritage Community. It is a danger insofar as it may lead heritage organizations to venture onto terrain where they have little professional expertise while also separating them from their customary bases of social and financial support. It is an opportunity insofar as it can demonstrate that heritage organizations are not stuck in the past and that they can respond to new challenges. In the process they can be expected to achieve greater public awareness and support. Whether dangers or opportunities prevail will depend in large measure on whether the organizational response resembles a simple bandwagon effect, or whether heritage organizations base their actions on a more sophisticated awareness of how both natural and cultural heritage are socially embedded. Drawing on classic and contemporary social theory, I show how two key dimensions of the social, namely relations between governments and individuals on the one hand, and relations of sameness and difference among individuals on the other, can serve as criteria for evaluating governmental and nongovernmental responses to ecological crises that have affected cultural heritage in a variety of settings. Finally, I suggest specific arguments for the importance of cultural heritage in creating a sustainable and shared future.