Parks Stewardship Forum Features Living Landscapes
November 29, 2024
To provide observations and information on the emerging fields of landscape scale conservation, heritage preservation, and sustainable community development.
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Government development projects, really any large infrastructure projects, have the potential to damage the environment, which includes its cultural heritage aspect. While most nations have put in place a process to assess such impacts, as applied to cultural resources the process seems formulaic, does not address impacts to the broader cultural landscape, and ignores or discounts what the communities value as their heritage and what is important for their living traditions.
It is easy to acknowledge our current state in UNESCO’s international Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program, but neglect to see how we got to this point. As one of the pioneers in large landscape conservation, biosphere reserves paved the path for many future landscape-scale efforts over the past several decades. Yet, most people in the United States are unfamiliar with the term, biosphere reserve, or assume the program has dissolved because of its long period of inactivity. Some people are trying to change this perception.
With the face of historic preservation changing from house museums with a specific perspective on society, it is important that we address those changes by countering it through the narrative of the other. Diversity in the field of historic preservation is something that we are just beginning to deal with, and by understanding the role of diverse people and communities in our past for what it was, we can encourage people to recognize themselves in today’s continued narrative. Having visited both Monticello and Mount Vernon quite recently, there was a distinct difference in the atmosphere between the slave memorial and Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and at Mulberry Row at Monticello. Read More.
The following article theorizes that by arranging the occurrence of plants and animals into anthropogenic landscapes, ancestral Native Americans had developed new types of economic systems. Through managing nut groves, fruit orchards, and berry patches, utility and medicinal gardens for examples, close to their home-base residences, Native Americans were able to successfully and sustainably manipulate their environments, ensuring predictable yield, while decreasing effort and distance traveled to desired resources
Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula is an 800,000-acre land mass that extends out from Lake Superior’s southern shore. For over 7000 years, people have come to the peninsula to extract pure copper trapped in its ancient volcanic rock formations. The Keweenaw National Historical Park has developed creative ways to tell this story.
Government development projects, really any large infrastructure projects, have the potential to damage the environment, which includes its cultural heritage aspect. While most nations have put in place a process to assess such impacts, as applied to cultural resources the process seems formulaic, does not address impacts to the broader cultural landscape, and ignores or discounts what the communities value as their heritage and what is important for their living traditions.
It is easy to acknowledge our current state in UNESCO’s international Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program, but neglect to see how we got to this point. As one of the pioneers in large landscape conservation, biosphere reserves paved the path for many future landscape-scale efforts over the past several decades. Yet, most people in the United States are unfamiliar with the term, biosphere reserve, or assume the program has dissolved because of its long period of inactivity. Some people are trying to change this perception.
With the face of historic preservation changing from house museums with a specific perspective on society, it is important that we address those changes by countering it through the narrative of the other. Diversity in the field of historic preservation is something that we are just beginning to deal with, and by understanding the role of diverse people and communities in our past for what it was, we can encourage people to recognize themselves in today’s continued narrative. Having visited both Monticello and Mount Vernon quite recently, there was a distinct difference in the atmosphere between the slave memorial and Washington’s tomb at Mount Vernon, and at Mulberry Row at Monticello. Read More.
The following article theorizes that by arranging the occurrence of plants and animals into anthropogenic landscapes, ancestral Native Americans had developed new types of economic systems. Through managing nut groves, fruit orchards, and berry patches, utility and medicinal gardens for examples, close to their home-base residences, Native Americans were able to successfully and sustainably manipulate their environments, ensuring predictable yield, while decreasing effort and distance traveled to desired resources
Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula is an 800,000-acre land mass that extends out from Lake Superior’s southern shore. For over 7000 years, people have come to the peninsula to extract pure copper trapped in its ancient volcanic rock formations. The Keweenaw National Historical Park has developed creative ways to tell this story.