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International Journal of Heritage

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Natural and cultural heritage

David Lowenthal
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 International Journal of Heritage Studies
Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 81–92

Natural and Cultural Heritage

David Lowenthal
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We receive communal legacies from two sources—the natural environment and the
DavidLowenthal
lowenthal@lowenthal.free-online.co.uk
International
10.1080/13527250500037088
RJHS103691.sgm
1352-7258
Original
Taylor
102005
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and
Article
(print)/1470-3610
Francis
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2005Group
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of Heritage
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Studies

creations of human beings. To be sure, these inheritances everywhere commingle; no aspect

of nature is unimpacted by human agency, no artefact devoid of environmental impress.
Yet we have traditionally dealt quite differently with these two kinds of legacy. Though
management of both heritages has many features in common, and both realms often share
similar, if not the same, leaders and spokesmen, relations between the two are marked less
by cooperative amity than by envy and rivalry. This essay discusses the reasons for our
dissimilar approaches to nature and culture, and shows how they bear on the campaigns to
protect and preserve each. In some important ways, the history, politics, and rhetoric of
conservation and destruction are shown to have converged, in others to have diverged, over
the last half century.

Keywords: Nature; Culture; Environment; Heritage; Conservation; Stewardship

Heritage denotes everything we suppose has been handed down to us from the past.
Although not all heritage is uniformly desirable, it is widely viewed as a precious and
irreplaceable resource, essential to personal and collective identity and necessary for
self-respect. Hence we go to great lengths, often at huge expense, to protect and cele-
brate the heritage we possess, to find and enhance what we feel we need, and to restore
and recoup what we have lost. What comprises heritage differs greatly among peoples
and over time, but the attachments they reflect are universal. They are expressed by
peoples at all levels of technology and of every political persuasion. And heritage is
everywhere implicated in what we think about, and what we do with, land, law and
justice. How heritages of nature and of culture resemble and differ from each other is
treated in the following essays in a specifically Scandinavian context.
The legacies we inherit stem both from nature and from culture. Generally speaking,
natural heritage comprises the lands and seas we inhabit and exploit, the soils and
plants and animals that constitute the world’s ecosystems, the water we drink, the very

David Lowenthal. Correspondence to: lowenthal@lowenthal.free-online.co.uk

ISSN 1352–7258 (print)/ISSN 1470–3610 (online) © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/13527250500037088
 82 D. Lowenthal
air we breathe. To be sure, human action has profoundly reshaped all these elements of
nature, but we nonetheless consider them as quite distinct from our cultural heritage—
the buildings and engineering works, arts and crafts, languages and traditions, humans
themselves have created out of nature’s raw materials. Yet our natural and our man-
made heritages exhibit remarkable parallels along with instructive differences, as do
campaigns to conserve nature and to preserve remnants of antiquity. Many today, beset
by momentous and often cataclysmic change, lament the degradation or disappearance
of familiar locales and landmarks. Because the loss of habitual environments and tradi-
tional milieus threatens our very sense of being, we treasure their surviving vestiges all
the more. A deeply felt need for tangible relics of both nature and culture fuels crusades
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to protect and conserve them.

As refuges from the everyday world, nature and antiquity have substantially similar
appeal. Natural wonders and historic splendours are advertised and presented in much
the same way. In many lands they become major sources of employment and revenue
alike. Eco-tourism and cultural travel are increasingly conjoined. The World Heritage
Convention similarly lauds and looks after paramount treasures of environmental and
human history. Regional and national agencies affirm the conjunction of nature and
culture. The Caribbean Conservation Association attends to coral reefs and country
houses alike, to mansions and mangrove swamps, to tropical rain forests and sugar-
factory ruins. Britain’s National Heritage Memorial Fund saved from export or extinc-
tion the Communion bread holder of Mary Queen of Scots and the Greater Horseshoe
bat, a fossiliferous chalk cliff and a crumbling castle.1
But what do the treasured residues of nature and culture actually have in common?
What has the Grand Canyon of the Colorado to do with Grand Central Terminal in
New York, the Sussex Downs with St Paul’s Cathedral, the Somerset Levels with
Somerset House? Is natural heritage more or less indispensable, diversified, durable,
resilient, fragile or embattled than cultural heritage? What lessons for cultural heritage
might be learned from the history of efforts to conserve and manage nature, and vice
versa? To answer such questions, we need first to review how conservation and
preservation arose in Western thought.

New Attitudes towards Nature and Antiquity

Before nature and antiquity could be treasured, they had first to be recognised as realms
apart from the everyday present. That revolutionary perception had its origins in the
Renaissance. To the medieval mind, the manifestations of external nature and the
vestiges of the past were mere reflections of their own mundane world or unwelcome
distractions from the realm of the spirit; both were at odds with Christianity. The
glories of nature and of antiquity alike found their first celebrant in Petrarch, the first
great humanist. Petrarch’s writings celebrate his emotional involvements with the Alps
and with those great peaks of the human mind, the writings of classical antiquity.2
From the 15th century onwards, manifestations of nature and of antiquity increas-
ingly absorbed scholarship and the arts. At home, the extension of civic authority and
domestic order made travel less perilous and more pleasurable; abroad, exploration
 International Journal of Heritage Studies 83
continually revealed new marvels. Yet the fate of relics of either realm was initially of
small concern. Aside from texts and inscriptions, humanists seldom preserved frag-
ments of material antiquity as such; rather, they amalgamated and emulated them for
use in modern structures. Convinced that decay permeated all the earth’s features and
creatures, 17th-century savants never contemplated intervening to stem the seemingly
ineluctable process of secular dissolution.
By the late 18th century, mariners, naturalists and antiquarians had disclosed a
congeries of exotic wonders, past and present. But the two new worlds of nature and
of antiquity elicited quite different responses. In the realm of nature, the visible
benefits of human intervention, notably in agriculture and engineering, led men to
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celebrate human impact on the face of the earth and to welcome even more far-
reaching environmental transformations. The philosophes viewed untended nature as
hideous and wasteful; God had deliberately left Creation unfinished so that human
skills would perfect it. In the realm of antiquity, however, finds from Pompeii and
Herculaneum to Egypt and the Aegean unveiled fascinating but benighted pasts. The
remnants of prior societies were exotic curiosities rather than evidence of ancient
genius.
Not until the 19th century did the pace of change and Romantic feeling sanctify both
nature and antiquity, promoting their protection against not only decay and dissolu-
tion but improvidence and iconoclasm. But concern for nature and for relics of the past
diverged in rationale and in timing. Sentiment for preserving antiquities arose out of
wholesale transformations of society and thought between 1790 and 1815. The French
Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars made even recent times seem remote and
irrecoverable; the Industrial Revolution distanced them still further. The rise of nation-
alism fostered attachment to ancient monuments as symbols of collective identity;
antiquities gained credence as historical witnesses more reliable and more compelling
than documents; Rousseau and Goethe, Wordsworth and Scott enthroned in popular
consciousness the physical souvenirs and scenic locales of childhood and memory. All
this led to a climate that encouraged venerating and preserving ancient buildings and
monumental remains.3
Nature conservation emerged out of different circumstances about a half century
later. During the 18th century Europeans had on occasion observed that deforestation
and damming induced erosion, flooding and avalanches. Not until the 1840s, however,
did the American scholar George Perkins Marsh expose the widely deleterious conse-
quences of human impact on the environment and propose remedial action to stem
deforestation and soil erosion. In Man and Nature (1864) Marsh extended his observa-
tions from his native Vermont to the Old World. Tracing environmental degradation
from the Roman Empire to his own day, from the deserts of North Africa to the
torrents of the Alps, he warned that without drastic reform mankind would reduce the
habitable globe to the barrenness of the moon. Man and Nature pioneered ecological
awareness over the next half century. Environmental impact was now seen in a new
light. Man the improver became man the destroyer, subverting the balance of nature;
only conservation stewardship could prevent the technology that had subdued the
earth from wrecking the organic bases of civilisation.4
 84 D. Lowenthal
Pressures to preserve the past and to conserve natural resources gained urgency and
began to converge in the late 19th century, as industrialisation and urbanisation threat-
ened to obliterate both the natural environment and the remnants of antiquity.
Nostalgia for what was seen as ancient and stable idealised pre-industrial life and land-
scapes. Men confined to cities and factories were deprived of a birthright, part classical
and Arcadian, part wild or rustic, whose surviving vestiges might yet restore social
health if carefully husbanded.
Concern for protecting nature and antiquities peaked around 1900 in both Europe
and the USA, but transatlantic emphases differed. Americans, who had exalted nature
in place of history even while gutting the wilderness, evinced keenest concern for still
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unspoiled tracts of wilderness. Their conservation efforts were of two main kinds:
afforestation to restore vegetative cover, to equalise run-off and to reduce erosion; and
setting aside park and forest reserves as enduring oases of recreation and refreshment
remote from the turmoil of the man-made world. The latter involved nature protection
on an unprecedented scale.5
By contrast, Europeans long bereft of pristine environments turned for solace to pre-
industrial heritage, treasuring remnant features and folkways and replicating their
forms in Skansen and elsewhere. The century’s end saw the inception in Britain of the
Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings and the first Ancient Monuments Act;
France and Germany, Scandinavia and the Low Countries spurred comparable preser-
vation laws.6 Yet protective action of both kinds took place on each continent.
Americans in the 1880s and 1890s revived Colonial architecture and refurbished
historic houses for display. Britain in the same period promoted countryside concerns
through the National Trust and Country Life. Conserving nature went hand in hand
with preserving antiquities.
Moreover, the same men were often prominent in both crusades. In 18th-century
France, Volney celebrated ruins and nature alike; in the 19th century Chateaubriand
and Hugo led movements to preserve both realms from depredation and neglect.7 In
Britain, Wordsworth, Ruskin and Morris evinced parallel concerns for nature and for
the past. In the USA, Marsh, who pioneered nature conservation, also urged Americans
to save and display relics of home and field and factory as evocative reminders of how
their forbears had forged a new nation.8
Similar ideals animated stewards of both patrimonies. Nature and antiquities alike
were seen as inheritances to be held in trust for future generations. Ruskin’s Modem
Painters and Marsh’s Man and Nature contain strikingly parallel phrases: ‘Old build-
ings are not ours. They belong partly to those who built them, and partly to all the
generations of mankind who are to follow us’, wrote Ruskin.9 And Marsh: ‘Man has too
long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption,
still less for profligate waste.’10 A divine creator had willed Americans an unblemished
continent, a resource heritage secured by the Founding Fathers. The legacy must be
protected and restored not only out of self-interest but as a sacred obligation to future
descendants.
Yet both natural and cultural legacies were at risk if they did not seem to pay. As an
American senator famously said, when asked to reserve a large tract for posterity,
 International Journal of Heritage Studies 85
‘What’s posterity ever done for me?’ Hence whether they seek to curtail pollution, to
maintain diverse gene pools or to prevent the extinction of species, nature conservation
advocates learned to couch their arguments in hard-headed economic terms. So, too,
the historic preservation movement learned to rely on resource and energy savings and
tax-break advantages for restoration developers.

Common Aspects of Natural and Cultural Heritage

Increasingly, the heritages of culture and nature came to be viewed as interconnected,
indeed, indivisible. If they are twins, they are Siamese twins, separated only at high
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risk of the demise of both. Science and sentiment alike increasingly blur the bound-
aries between humans and other forms of life, and between living and non-living
matter. Advocates of biophilia and of Gaia embrace the whole earth as a living system;
some ascribe ‘rights’ of existence even to rocks. Every human relic is also a relic of
nature, every aspect of nature altered by human action. No creature exists wholly in
the wild, free from human impact; efforts to save the Californian condor from extinc-
tion required aversion therapy against power cables and protection from lead shot
poisoning.11
The annals of humanity and the history of nature are less and less segregated studies,
more and more a joint enterprise requiring the combined expertise of humanists and
earth scientists. Scholars of prehistory fuse nature with culture, humanity and environ-
ment, in perceptions of landscape and in proclamations of antiquity; Australian Aborig-
inal traces reflecting 45,000 years of co-evolution between humans and their
environment are termed ‘a ruby beyond price’.12 UNESCO now heralds combinations
of nature and human effort—gardens, agricultural scenes, sacred sites—as cultural
landscapes no less deserving of World Heritage status than solely natural or cultural sites.
Legacies of both nature and culture belong not simply to their places and peoples of
origin but to all the earth and its inhabitants. The ethos of global ecological health, of
a global genetic commons and of the global cultural heritage is of like concern. The
iconic sculptures of classical antiquity are no less at home in London and Paris than in
Athens, the Shakespearean legacy is as much American or German as English, and
Stonehenge is the whole world’s property—the British merely its custodians.13
Relics of nature and antiquity alike warrant protection as non-renewable and in
limited supply. Once gone, they are gone for ever. To be sure, both are also continually
renewed: living things reproduce themselves generation after generation; artefacts
newly made all the time eventually become part of the cultural heritage. But an existing
species, a gene pool, an ecosystem are no more capable of regeneration than a cathe-
dral, an earthwork, or an Old Master painting. All aspects of nature, as of culture,
depart from the earth at varying tempos, but none endures for ever.
Crusades to save cultural and natural heritage increasingly enlist similar arguments,
similar needs, similar sponsors. The same elite cadres—largely well born, well off, well
educated—lead both causes, which for all their global reach remain overwhelmingly
First World, not Third World, concerns.14 The same motives animate would-be
saviours; remnants of nature and culture are felt to provide identity and guidance, to
 86 D. Lowenthal
enhance life through their rich diversity and to benefit long-term goals. Both embody
memories that crucially connect us to the world we live in. The loss of either imperils
our very being.
Endangering both the natural and the cultural heritage are the same formidable
forces: development; unfettered private and corporate avarice; insistent productivity;
rampant innovation; heedless technical advance. The bomb and the bulldozer symb-
olise the agencies that transform the world apace at the cost of both aspects of heri-
tage. Technology ever more drastically alters the artefactual and the natural
environment, threatening to obliterate it along with ourselves. The hubris of develop-
ers, the fury of iconoclasts, the rapacity of collectors may be no more vehement than
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in the past, but the power now at their disposal magnifies the scale of destruction
whether the target be a rare species, a prehistoric site, an Afghan Buddha or an art
nouveau building.

Divergent Concerns for Nature and Culture

Nonetheless, major differences persist in how we view and deal with legacies of nature
and of culture. Despite the common rhetoric of synthesis, these disparities in some
ways become more marked. For example, we admire nature as previous to history, yet
at the same time as part of the present. Wild nature, especially, offers at once the age-
old and the immediate, its configurations and seasonal and diurnal rhythms comfort-
ingly familiar, yet also awesomely primordial. By contrast, the fascination of historical
vestiges lies in the unique confrontations, the unanticipated contingencies, and the
transience of humanity’s relics.
Natural and cultural heritage elicit differing modes of communion. Nature seems
essentially other than us; we may yearn to feel at one with its life-supporting fabric, but
unlike certain aboriginal and tribal peoples15 we seldom put ourselves in nature’s place
or project ourselves into non-human lives. By contrast, the cultural heritage promotes
empathy. Our very lineaments augment our progenitors’ legacy. Our ancestral speci-
ficity imbues the human heritage with personal allure. However deeply we may love
nature, most of us identify more easily with human relics and rise more readily to their
defence.
Hence, crusades to save antiquities are more likely to enlist local support than those
for nature. Outsiders spearheaded the campaign to preserve Tasmania’s south-west
wilderness, when the local government sought to scuttle it in the interest of hydro-
power and logging.16 Threats to the Amazon rain forest and its largely untapped gene-
pool balances alarm world conservation spokesmen, whereas Brazilians dwell mainly
on potential profits in mining, agriculture and industry. Animal rights’ crusaders are
usually strangers to the locales that engage their campaigns. The opposite is the case
with the cultural heritage. Every nation trumpets devotion to its precious cultural
legacy and tries to ban its export and to gain its restitution. To be sure, global stewards
were aghast when local looters pillaged Baghdad’s museum; but antiquity’s main
saviours proved to be Iraqis themselves, just as they were the main sufferers in the loss
of the library.
 International Journal of Heritage Studies 87
Unlike much of the cultural heritage, most of the natural heritage cannot be
exported; its value inheres almost wholly in its locale. Indeed, it rarely figures as a calcu-
lable commodity—a realm that increasingly dominates awareness of artefactual relics.
The big headline when a relic of antiquity or work of art comes on the market or enters
the museum is always its record-breaking price. Could collectors buy ecosystems as they
do paintings and bronzes, they might value the natural heritage more highly, but having
to leave it undisturbed in situ would deter all but the most selfless philanthropist.
Nature and culture are also safeguarded for different reasons. Most reasons
advanced for nature conservation dwell on long-term economic or ecological benefits;
most arguments for the preservation of antiquities cite cultural or aesthetic benefits. To
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be sure, historic preservation is often justified as saving energy and materials and
generating tourist revenue. But economy is seldom the main motive; aesthetic,
emotional and spiritual rewards carry more conviction.
In nature conservation, the emotional vehemence of the bird and wildlife lobbies
is uniquely influential. And the US National Parks system came into being primarily
for inspirational and recreational aims that are still dominant. Increasingly vocal,
green environmentalists and tribal activists treasure nature on religious or aesthetic
or ethical grounds.17 But the vast majority of conservationists dwell either on
NIMBY pollution issues or on national and global ecological problems. Environmen-
tal custodians rest their case on compelling concerns about resource misuse, poison-
ous residues and life-support systems whose loss would cripple society and ultimately
imperil humanity.18 Such fears play no appreciable role in campaigns to protect the
cultural heritage.
Stewards of nature and of culture also manifest sharply opposed attitudes towards
extinction and replacement. Those concerned with nature accept the inevitability of
death, the necessity of moth and rust, of scavenger and of predator—even the desirabil-
ity of such extinctions as locusts and smallpox. Were it not for this ghoulish army of
sextons, our world would be a ‘gigantic morgue, littered knee-deep with the corpses of
dead animals’.19 Since living beings by their very nature perish within relatively brief
lifespans that can scarcely be prolonged, it is a futile exercise to preserve any particular
plant or animal. Hence nature conservation mainly focuses not on individuals but on
groups—seldom on any particular tree or bird or whale, almost always on species or
ecosystems, creatures in the aggregate. (There are exceptions: British Sites of Special
Scientific Interest (SSSIs), small in area and unique in character, echo the individuality
of a cathedral or a country house.)
Preservers of antiquity, by contrast, tend to focus on discrete relics. To be sure,
concern with neighbourhoods, districts, entire towns, whole categories of structures is
greater than it was; over and above any single church, medieval parish churches in the
aggregate are valued for the character they lend the English village landscape. But areas
and aggregates remain marginal to primary emphasis on individual items. In dealing
with the realm of artefacts, we note and identify particular relics; we rarely do this with
particular plants or animals. Normally attributable to known dates and authors, the
cathedral, the painting, the silver goblet, possess a specificity seldom seen in living
beings, humans and their pets excepted.
 88 D. Lowenthal
Like living creatures, churches, paintings, and other artefacts also perish, but usually
at slower tempos that outlast human lifespans; and their existence is deemed capable of
indefinite extension through conservation. Their unique individuality and tenuous
longevity lead us to mourn their disappearance even more grievously than that of living
beings. Devotees of culture typically lament every loss, be it an archaeological site, an
historic building, an ancient painting or a language. Curators treat every accession as
eternal; they regard deliberately ephemeral and self-destructive art as a detestable
contradiction of the permanence they (and museum trustees and audiences) hold
dear.20
On the other hand, nature’s custodians express purist and nativist preferences that
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conservers of culture increasingly reject. In the past, cultural heritage was largely
dictated by national and tribal exclusivity. Heritage champions lauded what was, or
seemed to them to be, ancestrally pure, untainted by borrowings or accretions from
without. Over the last half century, however, it has become increasingly clear that
heritage is everywhere mixed. Just as biology and prehistory discredited delusions of
racial purity, so studies of art and technology revealed the treasured icons of every
society to be of mixed origin, owing to the flux of migration, the borrowings and
embellishments of countless coadjutors. The global dispersion of Judaeo-Christian,
classical and other traditions is seen to have enriched the whole world. A cultural heri-
tage derived from a single source is now less apt to be praised for purity than pitied for
being impoverished; the hybrid, commingled, creolised medley of ancestral influences
is most truly nourishing.
In contrast, the heritage of nature, above all that of plants and animals, has moved
towards parochial exclusion. During the half-millennium of European discoveries and
conquest, wholesale transfers of flora and fauna were largely lauded for enhancing
agriculture and horticulture, manufacturing and medicine, with materials from every
continent. Pests and predators often accompanied the exchanges that marked ecologi-
cal imperialism, but the unwanted consequences, even where lethal in new lands
lacking incomers’ natural predators, were adjudged more than compensated by the
benefits. No more; ecological purists now combat the incursion of foreign plants and
animals as environmentally, economically and aesthetically disastrous. The wildfire
spread of exotic species, some piggybacked on staple cereals and flocks, others intro-
duced to control pests, is viewed with alarm. ‘Native good, alien bad’ is now the obiter
dictum.21
That most exotics soon become naturalised and perceived as indigenous is ignored
or forgotten. ‘The Orcadian vole may originally have been an immigrant’, notes a British
defender of diversity. ‘So were the rest of us. Throughout our long history we have
managed to cure immigrants of their foreign ways and turn them into true Britons. The
vole has lived here long enough to have earned its mousehole security as an important
part of the native fauna and flora food chain.’22 Even this betrays a bias towards expung-
ing foreign ways, remaking exotics into natives. Species are sanctified as original, hybrids
rejected. Some British naturalists would exterminate the American ruddy duck as a rival
to the native white-tailed duck. Not only is the white-tailed duck at risk of extinction,
but the two are interbreeding, an outcome anathema to species purists.23
 International Journal of Heritage Studies 89
Interference is another issue over which devotees of nature and culture differ. Both
know that human meddling is ubiquitous, unavoidable, and in large measure neces-
sary, but they instinctively react in opposite ways; the cultural steward accepts interven-
tion as normal and necessary, the devotee of nature finds it distasteful and seeks as far
as possible to mask it and to conform it to supposed natural processes and results.
Culture is ‘ours’ to tamper with; nature, increasingly, is not.24
To be sure, devotees of John Ruskin and William Morris continue to reject any
architectural restoration or efforts to avert decay, beyond simple daily care; in their
view, buildings and works of art should be left alone, to die gracefully at the end of their
natural span. But cultural-heritage managers generally now eschew the hands-off
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stance as untrue to history and unworkable in practice. Nothing is just as it was first
made; every survival is a compage of its original state along with all subsequent alter-
ations and additions, deliberate or unintended. Indeed, our very efforts to preserve
relics attest their malleability. Antiquity is in large part an artefact of the present, even
our own perceptions of it altering over time.
Nature is likewise an artefact of the present. Intentionally or otherwise, human agen-
cies continually and often irrevocably change the face of the globe. Nature conservators
some time ago recognised that human impact, their own included, inevitably alters the
objects of their concern. We can return neither to a state of nature nor to any supposed
‘balance’; environmental interference always requires further interference, and stew-
ardship means not leaving nature alone but meddling more carefully. Indeed, we could
not leave nature alone even if we wished to; for manipulating the environment is inte-
gral to the nature of humanity. But while professional biologists and ecologists long ago
abandoned equilibrium models that equated non-interference with environmental
health and beneficial climax ecosystems, the general public still finds human distur-
bance to ‘nature’ distasteful and distressing.25
Consider the reactions to the Tower of Pisa, to Avebury, and to Yellowstone’s ‘Old
Faithful’. Each of these has been or is being ‘restored’ to supposed stability. Few
complaints are levelled at conservators returning the Pisa tower to its historic incline;
the tower is seen as a solely human creation even though it is, of course, nature that
caused it to lean. Underpinning and straightening two precariously leaning stones in
the prehistoric Avebury stone circle likewise evokes general approval on aesthetic
grounds.26 It is quite otherwise with the Yellowstone cauldron. An advertisement for a
well-known laxative recently boasted that adding it to the pool had made Old Faithful’s
eruptions more regular. Visitors were outraged by this slur on nature. Nature was ipso
facto ‘faithful’; butting in by humans was sacrilege.
The notion that nature can and should be left to look after itself—an idle dream
for a humanity dependent on agriculture, architecture, antibiotics, water-supply and
sewage systems—is no longer a tenet of ecology. Yet even scientific experts continue
to view nature as superior to culture, the alterations of humanity as inferior to the
previous untouched fundament. In the very book that launched and lauded
UNESCO’s cultural landscapes programme, essay after essay implies that nature is
perfect and culture a nuisance, and rates ‘anthropogenic’ areas below pristine ones—
even when they admit that none are pristine. A prime criterion for inscribing
 90 D. Lowenthal
cultural landscapes in World Heritage Sites remains their supposed harmony with
nature.27
It is the lamentable lack of such harmony that impels the environmental movement
today. It becomes ever clearer that human occupance has been largely responsible for
depleting the legacies of nature. Those who deplore mankind’s environmental devasta-
tion must, however, balance the losses of nature against the gains of civilisation. Thus
the deforestations of India and New England helped to create cultural heritage of
enduring value, and the pine trunks of Dalmatia were sacrificed to build the incompa-
rable palaces of Venice. No wonder, then, that heritages of nature and of culture
continue to arouse quite different expectations.
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Notes
[1] Lord Charteris of Amisfield, ‘The Work of the National Heritage Memorial Fund’.
1

[2] Mazzocco, ‘The Antiquarianism of Francesco Petrarca’.

2

[3] Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, 75–88, 390–5; idem, The Heritage Crusade and the
3

Spoils of History.
[4] George P. Marsh, Address delivered before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County,
4

30 September 1847, Rutland, VT, 1848; idem, Man and Nature.

[5] Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Sellars, Preserving Nature in the National Parks.
5

[6] Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980, 44–70; Marsh, Back
6

to the Land.
[7] de Lagarde, La Mémoire des le pierres, 54–78.
7

[8] Marsh, The American Historical School; Lowenthal, George Perkins Marsh, Prophet of
8

Conservation, 96–8.
[9] Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, chap. 6, sect. 20, 186.
9

[10] Marsh, Man and Nature, 36.

10

[11] Nash, The Rights of Nature; Matt Kaplan, ‘Plight of the Condor’.
11

[12] McDonnell and Pickett, Humans as Components of Ecosystems; Buchanan, Ubiquity; Tim
12

Flannery quoted in an interview with Rachel Nowak, New Scientist, 22 June 2002, 43–5.
[13] Chippindale et al., Who Owns Stonehenge?; Barbara Bender, Stonehenge.
13

[14] Guha and Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism; J. R. McNeill, Something New under
14

the Sun.
[15] di Chiro, ‘Nature as Community’; Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian.
15

[16] Aiken and Leigh, ‘Hydro-electric Power and Wilderness Protection’; Hay, ‘Will the
16

“Tasmanian Disease” Spread to the Mainland?’

[17] Barrow, A Passion for Birds; Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination; Dunlap,
17

‘Communing with Nature’.

[18] Cohen, Risk in the Modern Age.
18

[19] Drayton, Confessing a Murder, 208–9.

19

[20] Corzo, Mortality/Immortality?

20

[21] Smout, ‘The Alien Species in 20th-century Britain’; Coates, ‘The Naming of Strangers in the
21

Landscape’.
[22] ‘The Questing Vole’, The Times (London), 30 September 1995.
22

[23] Warren Hoge, ‘Unarmed American Intruder Roils Britain’, New York Times, 2 March 2003: 1.
23

[24] This reflects a major shift since I addressed this topic 15 years ago (David Lowenthal,
24

‘Conserving Nature and Antiquity’, 122–34). Back then, cultural stewards still viewed
alterations as perverse; artefacts were considered authentic to the extent that their original
materials or form had survived.
 International Journal of Heritage Studies 91
[25] Cronon, Uncommon Ground; Dizard, Going Wild; Lowenthal, ‘Environment as Heritage’.
25

[26] Simon de Bruxelles, ‘Ancient Stones to Regain True Standing’, The Times (London), 8 April
26

2003.
[27] von Droste et al., Cultural Landscapes of Universal Value.
27

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