Our heritage is already broken: meditations on a regenerative conservation for cultural and natural heritage

Abstract

This essay is about the interdependence of story and action with respect to cultural and natural heritage. It is also about the inexorability of change and its relationship to heritage conservation. In the following paragraphs I share several stories and excerpts, some heroic, others less so (I leave it to the reader to decide which is which), to make the case that the traditional, Western perspective on heritage does not hold up well under scrutiny—there is now an emerging paradigm for heritage conservation, one that both realizes its “empty” nature and guides us in developing a conservation approach that aligns with this recognition.