The History of Forgetting: Towards Heritage as Ecology

BENJAMIN MORRIS
University of Cambridge, UK

The past decade has seen a sea change in our understanding of the role that cultural heritage plays in our natural world, and the impacts of our natural world on heritage in turn. A flood of recent reports from institutions such as UNESCO, English Heritage and UCL, the Nordic World Heritage Organisation, and the NOAH’S ARK (EU-FP6) consortium have all detailed the effects of a changing global climate on tangible and intangible heritage—relying on site inventories, impact assessments, and other metrics to arrive at their (unanimous) conclusion that adaptation and mitigation of climate change are no longer mere options, they are necessities.

Though the empirical evidence backs up these claims, they often elide a crucial observation: that it is simply not possible to save some of these sites, monuments, landscapes, and traditions, especially those in the most vulnerable biospheres such as coastlines. In this paper, I offer a reinterpretation of heritage sites whose end is assured (in some cases, measurably so) within the ecological framework of species extinction, and suggest that the advantage of this approach is that it does not result in permanent disappearance so much as a reordering of the cultural landscape, as Stearns and McKibben have argued. Drawing on developmental systems work by Oyama and Breglia, I argue that loss does not solely signal an end: that it offers an opportunity for reflection on its cultural construction, its many meanings, and its impacts—on us as heritage managers and researchers.

I conclude the paper by offering a brief meditation on remembrance and forgetting, noting that in the discourse of conservation, the former is often valorised and the latter is often stigmatised. I argue finally that considering loss of heritage in an ecological framework, even when it is greatly accelerated by the process of global climate change, enables us to rewrite the history of forgetting not as a process to be feared but a mode to be understood.