Post on 18-Mar-2020
ECOLOGICAL PARADIGMS AND CULTURAL LANDSCAPE CONSERVATION
Cari GoetcheusAssociate Professor of Historic PreservationUniversity of GeorgiaCollege of Environment and DesignAthens, Georgia
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Alois Riegl, Art Historian
The Modern Cult of Monuments (1903) Reaction to increased subjectivity in art history
Started conversation
Absorbed by built environment conservationists as philosophically-based interpretation of the existence of the phenomenon of heritage care
Defined categories of values (as applied to buildings): Commemorative value
Historic value
Artistic value
Age value
Newness (contemporary) value
Use value
Aesthetics without judgment
Focus on individual component
No reference to ecology having an influence on built environment
Heritage Conservation Values
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Cultural Landscape: Artifact?
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
NATURESOCIETY / CULTURE
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Two Cultures Construct: Nature/Culture Dualism
Document Date Terms/ValuesAthens Charter 1931 monuments, sites/historic, aesthetic, scientific, artistic
Impacts of War 1954 Property of great importance, moveable/immoveable property, architecture, art, archeological sites, books, manuscripts, collections/historic, aesthetic, scientific, artistic
Beauty/Character of Landscapes and Sites
1962 Beauty, character, cultural, heritage/aesthetic (natural or man-made), cultural, moral and spiritual regeneration, economic, social
Venice Charter 1964 Historic monument, site, setting/ authenticity (materials/documentation)
World Cultural and Natural Heritage
1972 cultural heritage (monuments, groups of buildings, sites), natural heritage (physical/biological, geological/physiographical, natural sites/natural beauty)/historic, aesthetics, ethnological, anthropological, scientific, conservation
Heritage Conservation Documents
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Document Date Terms/ValuesRole of Historic Areas
1976 Groups of buildings (incl. vernacular), structures, open spaces, urban and rural environments/archaeological, architectural, prehistoric, historic, aesthetic or socio-cultural
Burra Charter 1979 place, cultural significance, inter-generational equity, fabric/ multiple co-existent values (historic, aesthetic, scientific, artistic, social or spiritual for past, present, future generations
Florence Charter 1982 historic garden, historic site, architectural and horticultural composition/historic, artistic
Operational Guidelines
1992 Cultural landscape, defined landscape, organically evolved landscape [relict (fossil) landscape, continuing landscape], associative landscape/outstanding universal value
Heritage Conservation Documents
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
1985 - Biotic Cultural Resources by Ian J.W. Firth(collaborative work by ecologist and landscape architect focusing on history)
• 1992 definition: cultural landscapes are the combined products of the interaction of people and nature
• Clearly Defined Landscape designed and created intentionally by a single person or a group. This embraces garden and parkland landscapes constructed for aesthetic reasons which are often (but not always) associated with religious or other monumental buildings and ensembles.
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
UNESCO Cultural Landscapes
• Organically evolved landscape -developed its present form by association with and in response to its natural environment. Such landscapes reflect that process of evolution in their form and component features. The evolved landscape can be continuing to evolve as a living place or the evolutionary process has ceased and the landscape is in remnant form.
• Relict Landscape or fossil landscapewhere the evolutionary process came to an end at some time in the past, either abruptly or over a period. Its significant distinguishing features are, however, still visible in material form.
• Continuing Landscape is one which retains an active social role in contemporary society closely associated with the traditional way of life, and in which the evolutionary process is still in progress. At the same time it exhibits significant material evidence of its evolution over time.
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
UNESCO Cultural Landscapes
• Associative Cultural Landscape - linked to cultural traditions. The inclusion of such landscapes on the World Heritage List is justifiable by virtue of the powerful religious, artistic or cultural associations of the natural element rather than material cultural evidence, which may be insignificant or even absent. The associative cultural landscape is the physical place where intangible aspects of cultural heritage are embodied.
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
UNESCO Cultural Landscapes
Document Date Terms/Values
Nara Document 1994 Authenticity (qualifying tool of values), information sources/cultural diversity, heritage diversity, tangible and intangible resources, use and tradition
Declaration of San Antonio
1996 cultural integrity, dynamic and static sites, use and function/continuing involvement of communities
Built VernacularHeritage Document
2000 Vernacular heritage, traditional built systems/support of the community, continuing use, maintenance, intergeneration transmission of traditional knowledge
Ferrara - CL conservation
2003 Agricultural change, tourism pressure/partnerships, traditional knowledge, indigenous practices, intangible and spiritual values
Natchitoches Declaration
2004 Biodiversity, cultural diversity/interdisciplinary approach, community-based processes in planning/mgmt. of CL, traditional practices, living traditions
Historic Urban Landscape
2011 Historic Urban Landscape, sustainable development, HUL approach, HUL Toolkit /social, cultural, economic processes in the conservation of urban values, layering of values (cultural and natural), memory, cultural diversity, heritage diversity, creativity
CL Preservation Challenges in the 21st century
2013 cultural landscape approach/ CL concept adaptable (settings, scales, contexts)
Heritage Conservation Documents
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Alexander von Humboldt (1769 – 1859)
Biogeography
Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) Ernst Haeckel (1834 – 1919)
Natural Selection & Soils Ecology
Eugenius Warming (1841 – 1924) Frederic C. Clements (1874 – 1945)
Community Succession
Charles Lyell (1797-1875)
Geology
Plant Ecology
Charles C. Adams (1873 –1955 )
Animal Ecology Ecosystem Ecology
Eugene P. Odum (1913 –2002 ).
Ecological thought evolution . . . . .
Classic Model of Ecological Succession
The climax community is assumed to be: • stable • in equilibrium• self-perpetuating
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Contemporary succession thinking
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Sub-fields of Ecology• Community Ecology — 1890s
• Population Ecology — 1920s
• Evolutionary Ecology — 1930s
• Systems Ecology — 1950s
• Landscape Ecology — 1980s
• Historical Ecology – 1980s
• Restoration Ecology - 1990sWhat does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Systems Ecology
Energy Flow
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Landscape Ecology• Patch
• Corridor
• Matrix
• Mosaic = agriculture
(forest, savannah, wetland, and prairie communities = patches or corridors within agriculture mosaic)
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Ecological Communities•Composition – what species are present.
•Structure – sizes and proportions of species relative to one another.
•Distribution – arrangement of species on the land
Ecological Processes•Disturbance – evidence of events that “reset” the succession.
•Succession – more or less orderly sequence of ecological communities.
•Climax – equilibrium state
Historical Ecology(Using Ecology to “Read” the History of a Landscape)
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Restoration Ecology
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Restoration Ecology (conceptual/philosophical theories)suite of scientific practices of an emerging subdiscipline
Ecological Restoration (applied)ensemble of practices that constitute entire field of restoration (restoration ecology, human and natural sciences, politics, technologies, economic factors, cultural dimensions)
. . begrudging humility to recognize humans choose the starting point, and a hopeful end point of ecological restoration . . .
An ecosystem “reference condition” represents some target, benchmark, standard, model or template from which or to which another ecosystem can be compared
Highly variable number and character (resolution, accuracy, precision) of parameters can be chosen
Qualitative, quantitative, biotic, abiotic, cultural?
Ecosystem Reference Concepts
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Transdisciplinary Ecological and Cultural Restoration
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
MountainGorilla
MS-DOSE. Coligenome
ArnoldArboretum
Henry GreenePrairie
PeregrineFalcon
Tae, Borneo
Trinity Church,Boston
Mona Lisa Harvard Yard
Yellowstone
Culture and Nature?
Robert E. Cook. 1996. “Is Landscape Preservation an Oxymoron?”, George Wright Forum 13 (1), 42-53.
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
NATURE / CULTURE DIALECTIC
NATURESOCIETY / CULTURE
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
CURRENT AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Resilience Thinking
Adaptive Management
People, Governance, Scale Goals: social responsibility, ecological integrity, historical reliability
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Concepts:1. We all live and operate in social systems that are inextricably
linked with the ecological systems in which they are embedded.
2. Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems. They have the potential to exist in more than one kind of regime (alternate stable states).
3. Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance; to undergo change and still retain essentially the same structure, function and feedbacks.
Resilience thinking is systems thinking . . . .
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Though social-ecological systems are affected by many variables, they are usually driven by only a handful of key controlling and often slow-moving variables.
Along each of these key variables are thresholds; if the system moves beyond a threshold it behaves in a different way, often with undesirable and unforeseen surprises.
Once a threshold has been crossed it is usually difficult and in some cases impossible to cross back.
A system’s resilience can be measured by its distance from these thresholds. The closer you are to a threshold, the less it takes to be pushed over.
Sustainability is all about knowing if and where thresholds exist and having the capacity to manage the system in relation to these thresholds.
Key points of resilience thinking . . .
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
How can we understand the trajectory of the system? Know the drivers that cause the system to cross thresholds
between alternate regimes.
Know where the thresholds might lie.
Enhance aspects of the system that enable it to maintain its resilience. Move the threshold
Move the current state of the system away from a threshold
Make the threshold more difficult to reach
. . . thinking about trajectory of a system. . . .
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Adaptive management is a systematic process for continually improving management policies and practices by learning from the outcomes of operational programs. Its most effective form – “ACTIVE” adaptive management –
employs management programs that are designed to experimentally compare selected policies or practices by evaluating alternative hypotheses about the system being managed.
Adaptive Management
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
The central tenet of adaptive management involves a continual learning process that can not conveniently be separated into functions such as research and ongoing regulatory activities and probably never converges to a state of blissful equilibrium involving full knowledge and optimum productivity.
Adaptive Management
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
• Knowledge will never be adequate to completely understand any ecosystem;
• Many of the questions managers ask can only be answered by experience and experiment;
• Knowledge does not accumulate, it gets discarded;• Analyses get simplified;• Nothing is certain;• Much of what we know about ecosystems is wrong, we just
don’t know what.
Adaptive Management Basic Assumptions
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
1. Acknowledgement of uncertainty about what policy or practice is “best” for the particular management issue;
2. Thoughtful selection of the policies of practices to be applied;
3. Careful implementation of a plan of action designed to reveal the critical knowledge that is currently lacking;
4. Monitoring of key response indicators;5. Analysis of the management outcomes in consideration of
the original objectives; and 6. Incorporation of the results into future decisions.www.for.gov.bc.ca
Adaptive Management:differentiating characteristics
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
• “Adaptive management is learning to manage by managing to learn…
Bormann, et. al., 1994
• “Adaptive management embodies a simple imperative: policies are experiments; learn from them.”
Kai Lee, 1993
Adaptive Management Quotes
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Shared sense of place as foundation for a common vision,
Integrating heritage and ecological conservation with other community goals,
Entreprenurial in capitalizing on current social trends to re-vitalize economies and guide change
Larger scale can be beneficial
Cooperation across sectors
Cooperative governance through partnership networks
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
People, Governance, Scale
Focus less on one-time repair and more on cyclical replacement and management
Cocreative restoration - historic and ecologic?
Choosing to restore natural and human relationships
Good restoration means including local involvement as part of decision making to provide mixture of habitats and promotes biodiversity, wild nature and culturally meaningful landscapes.
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada
Site Application
Allison, Stuart K. “You can’t not choose: Embracing the role of Choice in Ecological Restoration.” Restoration Ecology, December 2007, Vol 15, No 4, pp. 601-605
Beresford, Michael and Adrian Phillips. 2000. Protected landscapes: A Conservation Model for the 21st Century. The George Wright Society 17(1): 15-26.
Bond, Stanley, Jr. and Richard Gmirkin. “Restoring a Part of Hawaii’s Past: Kaloko Fishpond restoration.” Ecological Restoration December 2003, 21:4, pp. 284-289.
Burgner, Gerald S. and Rodney Swink. 2015. Ecology in Historic Landscape Preservation, unpublished manuscript.
Burke, Sarah M. and Neil Mitchell. “People as Ecological Participants in Ecological Restoration.” Restoration Ecology, June 2007, Vol 15, No 2, pp348-350.
Cevasco, Roberta, Diego Moreno, and Robert Hearn. “Biodiversification as an historicl process: an appeakl for the application of historic ecology to biocultural diversity research” Biodiversity Conservation, 2015, 24:3167-3183 McGinnis, Michael Vincent. “Re-wilding Imagination: Mimesis and Ecological Restoration.” Ecological Restoration, Winter 1999, 17:4, pp. 219-226.
Goetcheus, Cari and Nora Mitchell. “The Venice Charter and Cultural Landscapes: Evolution of Heritage Concepts and Conservation Over Time.” Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment, University of Pennsylvania Press, Volume 4, No.2, Fall 2014, p. 338-357.
Higgs, Eric. “The Two-Culture Problem: Ecological Restoration and the Integration of Knowledge.” Restoration Ecology, March 2005, Vol 13, No 1, pp159-164.
ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Cultural landscapes website (http://ip51.icomos.org/landscapes/)
International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) website (http://www.iucn.org/).
Jeffery, Laura Rebecca. “Ecological restoration ina cultural landscape: conservationist and Chagossian approaches to controlling the ‘coconut chaos’ on the ChagosArchipeligo.” Human Ecology, 2014, 42:999-1006.
Kerle, Anne and Alison Fleming. “Ecological management in a cultural landscape.” Ecological Management & Restoration, May 2012, Vol 13, No 2, pp 110-111.
Lyver, Phillip O., Janet M. Wilsmhurst, Jamie R. Wood, Christopher J. Jones, Mairie Fromont, Peter J. Bellingham, Clive Stone, Michael Sheehan, and Henrik Moller. “Looking back for the Future: Local knowledge and Palaeoecology inform Biocultural restoration of Coastal ecosystems in New Zealnad.” Human Ecology, 2015 43:681-695.
Naveh, Zev. “Epilogue: Toward a Transdisciplinary Science of Ecological and Cultural Landscape Restoration.” Restoration Ecology, March 2005, Vol 13, No 1, pp228-234.
Ryan, Sadie J. and Joel Harter. “Beyond Ecological Success of Corridors: Integrating Land Use History and Demographic Change to provide a whole landscape perspective.” Ecological Restoration, December 2012 30:4, pp 320-328.
Swart, Jacques A.A., van der Windt, Henny J., and Jozef Keulartz. “Valuation of Nature in Conservation and Restoration.” Ecological Restoration, June 2007, Vol 9, No 2, pp. 230-238.
Yozzo, David J., Robin Clark, Niel Curwen, Michael R. Graybill, Phillipa Reid, Karen Rogal, Julia Scanes and Cathy Tilbrook. “Managed Retreat: Assessing the Role of Human Community in Habitat Restoration Projects in the United Kingdom.” Ecological Restoration, Winter 2000, 18:4, pp. 234-242.
Zweig, Christa L. and Wiley M. Kitchens. “The Semiglades: The Collision of restoration, Social Values and the Ecosystem Concept.” Restoration Ecology, March 2010, Vol 18, No 2, pp. 138-142.
References
What does Heritage Change? ▪ Association of Critical Heritage Studies ▪ June 3-8, 2016 ▪ Montreal, Canada