Conserving cultural heritage is vital for climate adaptation

Cultural heritage is strangely invisible in U.S. attention to climate change.  

I say strangely because every community holds history and heritage. Every community has ties to places and stories that shape our senses of who we are. Heritage is part of human behavior. It’s part of the social sciences that help us understand society and how we live in the world. But somehow, climate change has come to be defined as atmospheric models, ecosystems and economic impacts — and parks that conserve heritage at the national scale as nature alone. We’ve developed a blind spot for the climate connections of deep human connections. 

This summer’s stories about flood damage at Yellowstone National Park show this clearly. Damage to cultural heritage of the park was limited to a few sentences at the end of one of many articles about infrastructure and tourism. A story about planning for climate change in national parks last year was even more direct, beginning “For more than a century, the core mission of the National Park Service has been preserving the natural heritage of the United States.” It goes on to describe climate issues facing national parks using only examples of natural resources. 

Therein lies part of our problem. The National Park Service is the lead U.S. federal agency for cultural heritage. Two-thirds of all national park units, of which currently there are 423, were founded explicitly to conserve cultural heritage. And all places that are now parks, including Yellowstone, hold the history and connections of people who have lived there. So, it is important to ask — if we don’t see and talk about culture, history and heritage in parks we have set aside as most important, how well are we taking care of it anywhere? 

This is a key question because conservation of cultural heritage is different from that of natural resources. It requires different information and skills and, for our efforts to address climate change, gives us different things in return.  

In the U.S. we are used to defining cultural heritage as things: buildings, sites, landscapes and artifacts. Indeed, heritage is all of these, but it is also far more. Heritage is both place and the values we ascribe to it, held in a web of stories, practices, ideas, knowledge and languages. Caring well for any part of heritage requires understanding its part in that web and all the connections it holds. 

Climate provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed in August direct $500 million to the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management for conservation and an additional $500 million to the National Park Service for staffing. The new law does not specify that any of this funding be used for cultural heritage. It is essential for our climate future that it is.

In my time with the National Park Service, as part of my work with cultural heritage and climate change, I was asked, by superintendents and resource managers across the country, questions such as: What can I change? How do I choose? Where should I start? How do I walk into that room and tell them we can’t save it?

Just as the stories written about parks so often remove the time-depth of people in them, the overarching narrative we tell about climate change is one of science, numbers and technology. And to be clear, I stand in awe of my physical science colleagues and all the data they have and are continuing to build — we would not and will not know the challenges we face without them.  

But to do the adaptation and mitigation they have shown us we need to do over the years and decades ahead, we must also work through questions of what we do and don’t hold on to, what we choose and who makes those choices, where we start and where we go, and how we face experiences of loss and change. These are deeply human questions and science alone cannot answer them for us.  

As the scope of recovery from Hurricane Ian comes into focus, what is also clear is that addressing climate change well is and will be an ongoing process. As we experience the range of impacts of climate change and move into energy transitions, we will have to ask and answer these questions over and over again. Working with cultural heritage is one of the ways we have to build our adaptive muscle.  

In my time with the National Park Service, I was effectively a program of one. Even so, my program drafted policy, supported park interpreters with training in climate and story, as well as providing advice to the State Department team negotiating the 2015 Paris Agreement. By the release of a major strategy document in early 2017 the National Park Service was recognized as a voice on the world stage for climate change and heritage.  

This voice was then silenced. And from all I can see from the outside, it has not been regained. Nor have other agencies or institutions taken up the call.  

What I have seen in my work since is that cultural heritage has many roles in climate change, and these extend far beyond parks. They include supporting environmental justice communities in valuing places they have long known to be important. Working with international partners on heritage as part of non-economic loss and damage. And exploring how heritage is interwoven with fossil-fueled conflicts, such as in Ukraine and sustainable peace-building.

The IRA is a chance to write a new story for how the U.S. responds to climate change. We have much to gain from recognizing cultural heritage as an essential character in that story. We should ensure that programs and capacity to manage and engage heritage well are built anew to carry it forward. 

Marcy Rockman formerly served with the National Park Service (NPS) as climate change adaptation coordinator for cultural resources and has held lead roles in recent major international climate heritage projects, including collaboration with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Currently she is associate research professor with the University of Maryland, College Park and founder/director of Lifting Rocks, LLC. Her major publications include “Colonization of Unfamiliar Landscapes: The Archaeology of Adaptation, Archaeology in Society: Its Relevance in the Modern World,” and the NPS “Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy.”