Can there be conservation after eco-collapse?
Averting ecological disaster has long been an interest of anarchists, and other radicals, although it was frequently dismissed. However, the world we live in today seems to have turned, and now the vatican has officially declared pollution a sin, and even right wing politicians are starting to agree that it is an issue that needs to be solved. Increasingly it seems ecological concerns are becoming present in the conservation literature, and despite an article in the New York Times that had many conservators discussing the issue this year, to be honest I really didn’t realize that much had been written in the conservation literature concerning such issues, that was until I read this bibliography being put together by Rose Daly for what looks like an interesting research project.
I have been wanting to read something on these issues for sometime, and I had been hoping the British Museum conference papers from “Going Green: towards sustainability in conservation” will be published online soon, however, reading the bibliography led me to follow a couple of links and see some other very interesting publications, I’d like to highlight. I’d also recommend looking through the bibliography for much more useful information.
The two links I’d like to point to are, firstly, a 90 minute video from a panel discussion at the Getty entitled “Climate change and preserving cultural heritage in the 21st Century”, and secondly an online publication from IIC, which has the title: “Climate Change and Museum Collections.” The publication was the result of a roundtable discussion. I actually plugged this previously on this blog, but, it’s a significant publication worth plugging again. One idea I really liked from the Getty video is the idea of preserving examples of “what not to do” ecologically speaking, this idea was raised by Ted Bardacke in relation to architecture, however, I raised the concept on twitter and @emeryshores replied with a link to an altogether different example of this concept: ‘ducktown basin’, which I think is a wonderful example of this concept in action, in this case preserving the result of pollution and the destructive nature of resource extraction.
In recent years conservators have had to come to terms with financial collapse and are beginning to consider means of surviving in such conditions, it seems to me that the conservation profession are also increasingly seeing the significance of the issue of climate change, and that we will soon we will have to come to terms with other issues such as peak oil, and the rising world issue of food shortages. In short it’s great to see that conservation as a profession, and especially emerging professionals in the field of conservation, are increasingly seeing the need to develop a profession that is sustainable, and responsible – both socially and ecologically. The one major factor that perhaps we don’t take into account enough is the ecological and social impacts of the ‘heritage industry’ itself.
