Books: Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability

If you think some of the decisions museums have to make are hard, spare a thought for world heritage sites.

They are the main places considered in this fascinating book, which explores the uneasy relationships between the global heritage industry, the environment and local communities.

When museums attract CO2-emitting tourists, they’re usually doing so as part of a city’s range of attractions, so they share responsibility for the carbon emissions with other nearby attractions. But many world heritage sites are isolated and so are arguably solely responsible for their visitors’ contribution to global warming.

Tourist visits to museums are generally benign, bringing economic benefit to local communities and businesses. In contrast, many world heritage sites are in less developed places and their visitors can cause significant social harm.

Consider Easter Island, theoretically the beneficiary of a sustainable ecotourism initiative supported by Unesco and the Chilean government (the island is part of Chile). Sure, the 60,000 visitors a year spend money locally and help fund preservation.

But local residents aren’t convinced of the benefits. In a government-organised referendum, more than 90% of them voted to limit the numbers of mainland Chileans who move to the island to work in tourism businesses there.

Colonial project

International heritage conservation and development is a somewhat colonial project. Experts from the rich countries of the global north make a nice living by advising and conserving heritage sites in the poorer countries of the south.

Heritage and tourism professionals “parachute in from elsewhere [and] tend to drown out the voices of the local residents”.

Even when local people play a part, a thriving tourism industry can damage the very heritage that attracted visitors in the first place. Luang Prabang is a remote world heritage site in Laos. To cater for the desires of tourists, people’s homes are being converted into guesthouses, restaurants, shops and massage parlours.

The problem is perhaps not tourism per se, but the tourism industry, which can bring untold problems. In addition to carbon emissions and heritage degradation, it can threaten biodiversity, deplete precious water supplies, and introduce invasive “alien” plant species.

Heritage conservation can worsen inequality too: residents of Djenné in Mali resent the fact that only a few families benefit from heritage tourism. Worse, preservation guidelines prohibit any substantial alterations to people’s homes because of their heritage. People therefore live in unmodernised mud-brick houses.

Built heritage

This is a paradox because, as in museums, there is an increasing understanding that built heritage should contribute to social justice and improve people’s lives.

There are other resonances with museums. In the interests of perfect preservation, some museums refuse to allow fluctuations in relative humidity and temperature and so waste vast amounts of energy.

In the interests of perfect preservation, historic building conservators don’t want to install double-glazing and insulation and so waste vast amounts of energy.

Some museum staff seem more interested in the “integrity” of the past than in the needs of the present and future. And some building conservators have been accused of aiming to “freeze buildings in time”.

The book ends by reminding us of the importance of cultural heritage when it is done right, pointing to the “sense of social solidarity that allows people to live and work together on common goals. If scientific predictions about our ecological future are correct, then this sense of social solidarity may be the most essential luxury of the unfolding 21st century.”

What is the answer to heritage’s uneasy relationship with sustainability?

The book hints at this on the penultimate page, praising the “squadrons” of local people who “work on a daily basis with communities to conserve, maintain and interpret historic structures and cultural landscapes… Their degree of effectiveness depends not just on their level of expertise, but also on their skill in listening and responding to the views of people from every walk of life.”

As with museums, the key to sustainability is likely to be building strong and diverse relationships with local people.

Maurice Davies is the head of policy and communications at the Museums Association