The cadence of climate: Heritage proxies and social change

Abstract

With the current and coming climate crisis, archaeologists are questioning how best to contribute to multidisciplinary climate change knowledge. In this respect, much work is being undertaken within multidisciplinary conversations on adaptation and resilience. However, less attention has been paid to the other side of the climate change equation: mitigation. Furthermore, less emphasis has been placed on the translation of archaeological research to public understandings of climate change. Cultural heritage offers an analytical tool for bridging archaeological knowledge to the specific socio-political and ethical challenges facing communities today under global climate change. I suggest that cultural heritage can act as a “proxy” for transferring the archaeological record into the lived experiences of climate change for individuals and public actors. Moreover, in supporting experiences of change, cultural heritage also builds capacity for mobilizing social change, and therefore is well-suited to advocacy work seeking climate mitigation.

Keywords

Cultural heritage global climate change mitigation proxies public ethics intergenerational justice

The challenges of global climate change (GCC) have been recognized as requiring collaboration between academic disciplines—whether interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, or transdisciplinary—and with diverse epistemologies, such as those explored within indigenous knowledge and traditional ecological knowledge frameworks (Bhasker et al., 2010; Hulme, 2010; Klenk and Meehan, 2015; Lynch et al., 2008; Murphy, 2011).

Archaeological research is slowly being integrated within collaborative climate change research across disciplines (which in the following I denote simply as “multidisciplinary” research), in a range of approaches I address below. Such contributions offer a starting point for archaeological involvement in multidisciplinary climate change knowledge. However, I argue that cultural heritage perspectives offer a valuable and necessary analytical tool for bridging archaeological knowledge to the specific present-day challenges posed by GCC. In other words, cultural heritage mobilizes archaeological knowledge to be relevant to climate change currently underway.

Moreover, cultural heritage brings a much-needed focus on mitigation. Societal responses to GCC are broadly characterized as pertaining to either mitigation or adaptation. Mitigation is “a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases” (IPCC, 2014: 1769), whereas adaptation is “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects” (2014: 1758). Mitigation versus adaptation roughly means focusing on either the drivers or impacts of GCC. Archaeological discussions on climate change have been primarily limited to the adaptation process, leaving aside the question of mitigation. This is a fairly passive (or fatalistic) state of affairs. To focus primarily on adaptation, at the expense of concerted efforts to mitigate climate change, works to exculpate those societies and segments of society more at fault for causing anthropogenic climate change. It pushes responsibility and risk to the regions and societies that will be most impacted by GCC. These regions and societies are also typically the least culpable for driving GCC (Althor et al., 2016). In bringing equal focus to mitigation, cultural heritage is well-poised to animate the social and historic inequalities of GCC, and likewise support claims for climate justice.

Archaeology and cultural heritage

Cultural heritage is a selective and creative process of transforming past conditions into present ones to understand, deal with, and mobilize social change (Hafstein, 2012; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1995, 2006; Lafrenz Samuels, 2015). While sharing connotations with “history” and “tradition,” cultural heritage is distinguished from these in its emphasis on the social relevance of the past to present-day concerns (Blake, 2000: 68; Lowenthal, 1996: 3). To talk of a concept or category of “cultural heritage” shares much of the same utility as the category “environment” (Hafstein, 2012: 502), but instead of organizing spatial relations, it organizes temporal ones. Like “environment,” cultural heritage is a mobilizing category—“to mobilize people and resources, to reform discourses, and to transform practices” (2012: 502)—rather than a descriptive category of status quo relations. As such, the strengths of cultural heritage to mobilize change make it particularly suited to the advocacy and communication work required for mitigation.

Further, GCC is, fundamentally, a process of change. The change at stake will not be limited to environmental changes (e.g. sea level rise, ocean acidification, drought, flooding), but will entrain a cascade of social changes for communities across the world as people mitigate and adapt to climate change. This is a key recognition for multidisciplinary collaboration and policymaking: that climate change is not simply an environmental process, but equally, if not more so, a social and political one. As a social tool for dealing with change, cultural heritage becomes a powerful instrument for responding to GCC.

Both archaeology and cultural heritage have the capacity for addressing social change and, for our purposes here, of speaking to social change as it articulates with climate change. The difference between archaeology and heritage, I suggest, is that archaeological evidence provides a record of change, whereas cultural heritage accesses lived experiences of change. This distinction bears similarity to the relationship between climate and weather within GCC knowledge and its translation to the public sphere. NASA (2005) explains the difference between weather and climate as a function of time: weather is the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere, whereas climate is the long-term average over time and space of how the atmosphere behaves. However, the daily vicissitudes of weather or major weather events are often translated in the public sphere as an experience of GCC, or as evidence for or against GCC. Case in point, when I was presenting an earlier version of this article in Washington, D.C., just hours earlier, Senator Inhofe had dramatically brandished a snowball in the Senate as evidence against climate change.

The classic distinction between weather and climate, such as defined by NASA, poses significant challenges for the general public in understanding climate change and for those engaged in climate communication efforts. The general public is told that weather is not climate. However, without the tangible, lived experiences of weather to tap into, the whole concept of climate quickly becomes abstract to the swirl of daily activities and concerns that surround us moment to moment. For the empirical (of the senses) facilities of the average citizen, climate is primarily experienced through weather, and more obliquely through the other impacts of GCC.

Moreover, if climate is a tricky concept to communicate and understand, the concept of climate change is even more so. Public understandings of GCC are hampered by the sheer scale of change, across both time and space. It is this abstracted scale that makes it difficult for individuals to connect GCC to their own lives. People need tractable experiences of climate change for better understanding of the challenges ahead, which records of change alone do not provide. As a social tool for making sense of change, cultural heritage can help.

Like the relationship between weather and climate, cultural heritage supports experiences of change as a means for translating or transferring the long-term records of change into the everyday life of the here and now. However, cultural heritage has the capacity to not simply support experiences of change but also to mobilize social change. Cultural heritage can hook the public’s interest in climate change, to take notice and take action, by translating the archaeological record in felt, tangible ways. While archaeological data provide a baseline of knowledge for GCC, my purpose here is to problematize how this information is going to be used, and furthermore, how it might be mobilized most effectively, especially to encourage the kinds of social or political change needed to mitigate climate change.

Archaeological contributions to multidisciplinary climate change knowledge

At the dramatic snowball event in the Senate, Senator Inhofe stated,

Climate is changing and climate has always changed and always will. There is archaeological evidence of that, there is biblical evidence of that, there’s historic evidence of that, it will always change. The hoax is that there are some people that are so arrogant to think that they are so powerful that they can change climate. Man can’t change climate. (CSPAN, 2015)

This is a stark reminder that the archaeological record is being marshaled within public debates on climate change, whether or not archaeologists are the ones inserting their work within these debates, and that climate knowledge is being built as much in the public sphere as in labs and academic halls. It also demonstrates the need for archaeologists’ involvement in these debates, to interpret archaeological findings for the lay public and to manage how archaeological evidence is being used in climate change research. But the challenge that presents itself is how to do so effectively and persuasively, how to engage the empirical and imaginative faculties of everyday citizens trying to make sense of the (seemingly conflicting) information on climate change.

Contributing to a “common language”

Archaeological research is contributing to climate change research in a range of timely studies. One primary area of archaeological research explores a suite of interrelated concepts—adaptation, sustainability, vulnerability, resilience, coping—which are understood to offer a compendium of examples from the past that might prove useful for responding to similar challenges posed by climate change impacts in the present and future (Anderson et al., 2013; Crumley, 2013; Van de Noort, 2011, 2013). This is a broad field of work, and my intention is not to collapse its richness or diversity, except to highlight similarities for contributing to climate change knowledge, specifically in its capacity as a shared analytical language. Taken together, this body of research operates at multiple scales, from examining human–environment interactions over broad timescales (e.g. Burroughs, 2005; Fagan, 2008; Hornborg and Crumley, 2007; McIntosh et al., 2000; Rosen, 2007), built from closely contextual studies that elucidate the dynamics of sustainability and collapse (e.g. Cooper and Sheets, 2012; McAnany and Yoffee, 2010; Middleton, 2012), to target examples of local adaptations, vulnerabilities, or cultural resilience (e.g. Cline, 2014; Dugmore et al., 2007; Fisher et al., 2012; Hald, 2009; Turney et al., 2006; Yaeger and Hodell, 2008). Here, archaeological evidence is made relevant to climate change knowledge by building a knowledge base on how societies have responded to rapid environmental change and climate change in the past, and this knowledge base is made all the more valuable in being a longue durée or longitudinal tracking of social change, as it is coupled or uncoupled with environmental change. The usefulness of this research also has to be understood within the broader intellectual framework of multidisciplinary climate change research, where one of the greatest challenges is finding a “common language” across which to organize knowledge production. This body of archaeological research becomes particularly “translatable” in that it speaks directly to a constellation of concepts (adaptation, sustainability, vulnerability, resilience) that compose a common platform of language across which the social sciences are communicating with the biological and physical sciences. However, most of these concepts operate within the adaptation paradigm of climate change knowledge, with less attention to mitigation.

Issue-driven collaboration: Defining and characterizing the Anthropocene

In a related vein, a new timescale of geological history—the Anthropocene—is emerging (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Crutzen, 2002; Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Monastersky, 2015; Ruddiman, 2003; Steffen et al., 2007, 2011; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008). The Anthropocene concept has become a veritable battlefield of intellectual debate across academic disciplines, a concept that Bruno Latour (2014) neatly summarized as being a “gift” to anthropologists in the multidisciplinary arena of climate change knowledge, even as it bears semantic relations to “poison.” Although the Anthropocene does provide another locus for multidisciplinary collaborations—in this case, organized around a specific problem or issue—it is a locus in which archaeologists are still seeking to have their voices heard (Braje et al., 2014; Crumley, 2015; Edgeworth et al., 2014; Erlandson and Braje, 2013; Smith and Zeder, 2013). Where to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene remains a point of debate, with bearing on which archaeological evidence is most relevant to characterizing the Anthropocene and defining a new geological epoch. Looking beyond the fixation on starting points, archaeologists are well-poised to parse out the “anthropogenic” character of climate change as differentially produced by some communities and lifestyles at the expense of others, not humanity (Anthropos) writ large, and therefore to contribute to problematizing the Anthropocene.

Making the proxy move

Paleoclimate reconstructions is another major area in which the archaeological record is being brought to bear on climate change knowledge, where archaeological records are used as proxy data for predicting future climate change. In particular, Sandweiss and Kelley (2012) have drawn attention to the important role played by archaeological evidence as proxy data in reconstructing paleoclimate conditions. I argue that their discussion inspires innovative reframings for how we might think about proxies.

Climate change scientists make predictions about the future course of GCC by turning to two primary sources of information: computer modeling and paleoclimate data. Paleoclimate reconstructions depend on “proxy data,” which are preserved physical characteristics of the past—e.g. tree rings, corals, ice core data, laminated lake/ocean sediments, archaeological records—that “stand in” for direct instrumental measurements (IPCC, 2001: section 2.3.2.1). Instrumental measurements of climate at the global scale began in the mid-19th century, so climatologists must rely on proxy data for the time period prior to this. Proxies effectively function to “transfer” data, setting up a relationship between a proxy indicator and the climatic conditions being estimated.

In their article, Sandweiss and Kelley (2012) discuss four case studies to show how “the archaeological record often incorporates important, sometimes unique, proxy records of climate, of environment, and of change in both” (2012: 372). Their focus is on using archaeological data as proxy data for reconstructing past climates and environments, rather than “the potential causal role of climate and environment in culture change.” This choice foregrounds the innovative role of archaeological data vis-à-vis other kinds of proxy data: it is unique in being social rather than environmental/climatic in character. Moreover, it uses societal change to tell us something about environmental change, rather than the inverse.

This is an important transformation in the idea of proxies, that proxies can be social. We might call such proxy data “social proxies.” Further, it diversifies the analytical work of proxies. For the purposes of understanding climate change in the present era, I suggest we use social proxies to represent the social drivers of current climate change, drawing out the differential responsibilities and inequalities that have produced and continue to produce our current global predicament, as it is shaped by some at the expense of others, generating risks that impact those least responsible. The value of thinking through social proxies is that they foreground climate change today as socially constituted—followed through specific chains of historical relationships and attuned to issues of climate justice—moving us away from the fraught language of the Anthropocene, of GCC as being caused by all of humankind.

I see social proxies as particularly valuable mechanisms, or metaphors, for translating GCC knowledge into an experience of socio-climatic change that is tractable and gripping to individuals and communities. Of the three lines of archaeological research I have laid out here that can contribute to multidisciplinary climate change knowledge, I take social proxies as the most valuable for “transferring” the archaeological record to the present-day stakes of GCC, as cultural heritage. Therefore, I use the term “heritage proxies” to discuss this dual process of (a) using archaeological data as social proxies for the anthropogenic character of GCC today, and (b) the transfer of this knowledge about the past to the domain of social relevance and individual experience in the present-day.

Heritage proxies

Advocacy for climate mitigation: World heritage sites and sea level rise

As discussed above, one of the difficulties in conceiving GCC is the sheer scale of it. Operating on scales that are both global and over the longue durée, GCC can seem beyond the capacity of any individual to experience. Archaeological sites—as places marked off for their temporal “deep time” character—have a special capacity to transfer and communicate the long-term character of GCC. Furthermore, some archaeological sites tap into both the long-term scale of climate change as well as its global reach. Foremost in the public imagination of “global” sites are UNESCO World Heritage Sites (WHS), which instill a sense of global concern and conservation.

The 1972 Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage established the World Heritage List to recognize sites of “outstanding value to humanity” (UNESCO, 1972). Today the List tops 1000 sites and continues to grow each year. As the world’s internationally recognized cultural treasures, WHS elicit concern for conservation and sustainability, coupled with a well-known “brand” recognition. These two facets of World Heritage—conservation and branding—provide an excellent vehicle for drawing public awareness and advocacy to the problem of GCC.

As a result, World Heritage has also been picked up by climate scientists and activists as a flashpoint for taking action on GCC, given the impacts that climate change will have on well-known heritage sites. Archaeologists and heritage specialists have long been active in calling attention to the impact of climate change on archaeological resources (Barr, 2008, 2013; Cassar, 2005; Colette, 2007; Sabbioni et al., 2012; Terrill, 2008), as well as on natural and cultural WHS (Beniston, 2008; Perry, 2011; UNESCO, 2007, 2008). Significantly, the impacts on archaeological heritage are now being picked up by environmental advocacy groups and other non-governmental organizations, particularly in translating archaeological knowledge to the public. Earthjustice and the Australian Climate Justice Program have used the World Heritage branding to call attention to the impact of GCC on natural WHS (Burt and Boom, 2009). Likewise, a recent report from the Union of Concerned Scientists drew attention to the impact of climate change on US National Landmarks and US WHS (Holtz et al., 2014).

Nowhere is the advocacy strategies of highlighting significant historic sites more apparent than in efforts to raise awareness about the impacts of sea level rise. James Hansen, a leading climate scientist and activist, connects the historic past and present predicament for his readers in his popular book Storms of My Grandchildren (Hansen, 2009: 84–85):

[T]he sea level stability of the past 7,000 years probably contributed to the development of civilisation, because stable sea level led to high biologic productivity and thus ample amounts of fish in coastal areas. With the exception of Jericho, the first cities that developed on several continents 5,000 to 7,000 years ago were all coastal cities. Even today a large portion of the world’s cities are located along the coasts; more than a billion people live within a 25-meter elevation of sea level. If ice sheets begin to disintegrate, there will not be a new stable sea level on any foreseeable time scale … Because the ocean and ice sheets each have response times of at least centuries, change will continue for as many generations as we care to think about … Given the enormous infrastructure and historical treasures in our coastal cities, it borders on insanity to suggest that humans should work to “adapt” to climate change, as opposed to taking actions needed to stabilize climate.

As if following up on Hansen’s call, an important recent study by Marzeion and Levermann (2014) showed that 20% of cultural WHS would be impacted by rising sea levels from GCC. Therefore, the scale of impact to WHS from sea level rise is significant, and includes many historic cities and heritage sites within coastal cities, lending further urgency behind Hansen’s comments above. The study purposely does not seek “to quantify the timing of a potential impact” (2014: 2), that is, when one-fifth of cultural WHS would be impacted due to sea level rise from 3℃ change. This is mainly due to uncertainty regarding the contributions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. However, more recent studies suggest these impacts could be seen within 200–500 years (Rignot et al., 2014; Joughin et al., 2014), and 3℃ warming is well within the range of 2.6–4.8℃ predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 2100 if nothing is done to control greenhouse gas emissions (IPCC, 2013). Some may dismiss these losses of WHS because of the long timescales involved, beyond several generations, but if anything the timescales—whether 2000 years or 200 years—highlight the sites’ historical depth, many having been built and bequeathed to modern society over the same time periods.

The popular news press and digital artists, such as Nickolay Lamm, have also used sea level rise visualizations on Google Earth to produce striking images of WHS like the Statue of Liberty and other iconic monuments partially covered by water (e.g. Johnson and Berger, 2014; Strauss, 2015; Vaughan, 2014). Lamm’s work is a useful reminder of the kinds of creative mobilizations possible for archaeological sites and other sites of cultural heritage within the public sphere. Scientific publications are being picked up and reimagined in climate advocacy circuits and expounded across social media. Artistic and other cultural productions therefore provide one mechanism for the proxy work of translating historical and temporal sensibilities to the everyday experiences of citizens. Another good example is the 2012 documentary Chasing Ice that follows the work of photographer James Balog. The documentary directly intervened in the temporal difficulties of experiencing climate change, namely the way it proceeds by incremental change over long timespans, by running together time-lapse photographs at key glaciers around the world. The effect was to “speed up” the impacts of climate change on melting glaciers. A glacier melting over the course of several years is experienced instead over one minute, a temporal dimension more viscerally felt by viewers, in tune with the general busyness and short attention spans of daily life. This was a key success of the documentary, that it was capable of manipulating the cadence of change in order for viewers to experience climate change, and “in a sense” to know and understand climate change on an empirical, experiential level.

Ethical dimensions of heritage proxies: The case of the Nazca lines

A major challenge of transferring the broad temporal and spatial scales of GCC into a lived experiential understanding of GCC is to embed this understanding within the ethical and moral stakes of the present. Advocacy efforts for climate mitigation run the risk of flattening the moral terrain if over-emphasizing the deep timescales and global significance of archaeological heritage at the expense of the situated moral concerns of individual communities dealing with local impacts of GCC. The case for building heritage proxies from an ethically reflexive and accountable practice is made most starkly in considering the controversial direct actions of Greenpeace ahead of the Lima Climate Change Conference (“COP 20”) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. COP 20 was held in Peru in December 2014, and was seen as a pivotal step in the negotiations leading up to a new climate treaty, the Paris Protocol (which has since been signed).

The first action taken by Greenpeace involved the World Heritage Site of Machu Picchu, where on the evening of November 30, 2014, Greenpeace projected the message “Act for the Climate! Go Solar! GREENPEACE” in six languages onto the cliff face of Huayna Picchu overlooking the site. In a press release on the event, Greenpeace marked the global significance of GCC and summit negotiations: “The Temple of the Sun in Machu Picchu is where we are announcing to the world that, as the power of the sun is our past, it is also our future. We urge summit attendees to commit to the world’s largest source of energy—the sun—to solve our global climate crisis” (Greenpeace, 2014). Further, as Sven Teske from Greenpeace International put it, the choice of Machu Picchu was seen as a tribute to the past: “Last night, Greenpeace paid tribute to the old Incan culture, also sometimes referred to as the enlightened ones. They believed in the positive energy of the sun, and so do we” (Teske, 2014). However, establishing moral connections to the past apparently meant disconnecting from the present-day ethical implications of staging direct action work at a sacred and protected archaeological site. Critics of Greenpeace were quick to jump. The well-known climate denialist lobbying group Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow released interviews with community members local to Machu Picchu, who called Greenpeace’s actions disrespectful (CFACT, 2014).

The Machu Picchu incident, however, was otherwise of little note until Greenpeace carried out a second action a week later at the Nazca Lines, another World Heritage Site in Peru. The Nazca Lines are a collection of geoglyphs set in the high Nazca desert plateau in southern Peru, 400 km south of Lima. The lines were made primarily by the Nazca culture (200 BC–AD 600), with several dozen attributed to the preceding Paracas culture (Reindel, 2009). The designs were constructed by clearing away the desert pavement of sun-blackened rocks to depths of 10–30 cm, exposing the white sand underneath. On December 8, 2014, 20 individuals from Chile, Germany, Brazil, Austria, Argentina, and Spain set out a message in letters of yellow cloth next to the iconic hummingbird geoglyph. The message read “Time for Change! The Future is Renewable. GREENPEACE,” and was intended to be seen by delegates to COP 20. Drone footage afterwards showed damage to the site from overturned rocks in linear formations, due to the activists walking in a line over the fragile desert pavement of the site. The outline of where the “c” from “Greenpeace” had been placed is also visible.

Public outrage at Greenpeace’s actions was swift and vociferous, and news of the event circulated widely. Within Peru, Greenpeace’s actions were considered a violation of the site’s sacredness and of Peruvian patrimony. Peru’s vice-minister for culture Luis Jaime Castillo (also an anthropologist) called Greenpeace’s actions “a true slap in the face at everything Peruvians consider sacred” (McGrath, 2014). He further rejoined: “Disrespecting humanity’s cultural heritage—I don’t think that’s the message this summit or Greenpeace is trying to spread to the world! Most of us in the cultural sector agree with the message. But the means don’t justify the ends” (Collyns, 2014). Many beyond Peru identified the action as thoughtless destruction and appropriation, whether of Peruvian heritage or as a WHS of universal value to humanity, and filled Greenpeace International’s Facebook page with scathing rebukes.

Greenpeace initially scrambled to make sense of the backlash, responding on the Facebook page:

We can assure you that absolutely NO damage was done. The message was written in cloth letters that laid on the ground without touching the Nazca lines. It was assessed by an experienced archaeologist, ensuring not even a trace was left behind

as well as “Everyone was very careful and no harm was done. We wish the same could be said for the oil/coal/gas industries and the future of our planet” (Greenpeace International, 2014a). In an official statement, Greenpeace noted in defense that “we have always been most respectful with people around the world and their diverse cultural legacies” (Collyns, 2014).

Eventually Greenpeace understood the backlash as a “moral offence” and issued a statement of apology (Greenpeace International, 2014b). A Greenpeace spokesman, Kyle Ash, explained, “The surprise to us was that this resulted in some kind of moral offense. We definitely regret that and we want to figure out a way to resolve it” (Collyns, 2014). The organization sought to clarify its choice of a heritage site as a platform for climate messaging. The specific history of the Nazca culture was referenced, variously pointing to the culture’s environmental sustainability or its climate-caused collapse: “The peaceful protest by Greenpeace in the area of the Nazca lines was to demonstrate the impacts of climate change and honour the historical legacy of this town who learned to live with the environment without affecting it” (McGrath, 2014). Another statement explained,

Our intention in choosing Nazca for the activity was to pair a message of climate urgency and existential threat to humanity with an artifact from an ancient civilization. What happened to the Nazca people on a local scale could happen to mankind on a global scale due to climate change. (Greenpeace International, 2015)

Whether indexing sustainability or threats of collapse, the temporal and historical character of the Nazca lines was being mobilized to make a comment about social change, specifically a call for energy transitions to renewable energy sources. This call for renewables might be taken as a pointed juxtaposition, vis-à-vis the non-renewable character of the archaeological remains, which indeed was a defining feature of the site that provoked such backlash from the public. Alternatively, their actions could have been read as renewing the significance of the site, adding further layers of meaning to the long-term history of the site. Indeed one could argue that, in some respects, their actions were more in line with historical uses of the landscape than the preservation ethos of modern heritage management practice. Aveni and Silverman (1991) have drawn attention to the palimpsest character of the landscape, where the Nazca Lines were inscribed over time, “like an unerased blackboard” (1991: 42). The lines and geoglyphs were carried out by multiple actors for multiple reasons through the centuries, with later markings sometimes overlapping or changing previous ones. The traces of Greenpeace’s action have now added to this palimpsest on the landscape, according to yet another rationale. Overall, the case of Greenpeace’s action at the Nazca Lines highlights the complexity of transferring the archaeological record into present-day needs, and positions the best proxy work as firmly situated within the socio-political and ethical challenges of the current contexts involved.

Intergenerational justice: Energy heritage in Norway

Indeed, climate change is increasingly understood, at heart, as an ethical and moral problem (Broome, 2012; Gardiner, 2011; Singer, 2006). In particular, “intergenerational justice” is often framed as a leading issue for climate change ethics (Brown Weiss, 1992; Caney, 2006; Davidson, 2008; Page, 2007), and has been shown to impact people on a personal level, motivating individuals to adopt practices that help mitigate climate change (Zaval et al., 2015). Intergenerational appeals signal another strategy for translating the abstract long-term character of GCC into a lived, experiential understanding of climate change. They invite individuals to project the hardships of climate change onto the experiences of their own children and grandchildren, or likewise for a community to recognize the struggles of the next generation as an ethical struggle of their own.

Therefore, tapping into intergenerational justice offers another mechanism for heritage proxies, with the capacity for transferring the archaeological record into the lived experiences of ethics made personal: to one’s legacy and intergenerational relationships, whether familial or communal. Intergenerational thinking has long been a mainstay of heritage management, in seeking sustainable management of heritage resources so that present uses do not impinge on those of future generations (Taylor, 2013). It is now taking on an added urgency in the face of GCC, as appeals for climate mitigation have focused on the social value of heritage resources and their transfer to future generations as a flashpoint for action. As we saw with the studies by Marzeion and Levermann (2014), and Hansen’s Storms of My Grandchildren (2009)—whose title alone encapsulates this intergenerational thinking—intergenerational appeals in climate advocacy build from the capacity of heritage sites to foster social understandings of phenomena like climate change that span generations.

An important component for intergenerational justice as a heritage proxy is not just which resources will be passed on to future generations, but more specifically what narratives these heritage resources might tell future generations. Cultural heritage will best support the kinds of large-scale social change we expect from GCC by helping future generations make sense of how they got there: to build future generations’ historical understanding of our present-day challenges in the current era, and likewise the choices made by previous generations to which the present era is accountable. On the one hand, heritage sites that will be impacted by climate change make one obvious category of sites that are capable of communicating GCC to future generations, whether from so-called “natural” impacts like sea-level rise (as discussed above), erosion, thawing, or shifting material microclimates, or from more “social” effects of climate change, such as mass migration, famine, and conflict—as with the cascading effects of the Syrian civil war (Kelley et al., 2015).

On the other hand, we can include heritage sites that provide records of the anthropogenic character of GCC, or have the capacity to communicate this history of anthropogenesis. This is the case with the historical remains of fossil energy resources, and their associated histories of fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and exploitation. Unsustainable use of fossil fuels for energy is the leading source of increasing atmospheric CO₂ levels that cause global warming and climate change (IPCC, 2013; Heede, 2014). Heritage work being done in Norway offers an illuminating example for managing heritage resources related to fossil fuel development, in ways that draw out an experiential understanding of GCC through intergenerational thinking.

The Norwegian economy has undergone a remarkable transformation since the late 1960s with the discovery of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea. The timing was impeccable, with Norwegian oil production ramping up at the same time as the global oil crises of 1973–1974 and 1978–1979; the petroleum industry now represents Norway’s largest industry, equal to 20% GDP and 45% of total export revenues (Statistics Norway, 2015: 38). Norwegian experiences of wealth and national well-being are therefore closely tied to the discovery and development of the country’s oil and gas resources. Fittingly, then, the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage moved to make Ekofisk—Norway’s first productive oil well on the Norwegian Continental Shelf in the North Sea—recognized as a site of industrial heritage (Figure 1). A documentation project for Ekofisk was undertaken in collaboration with ConocoPhillips and other license holders, and focused on Ekofisk’s first phase of oil and gas development (1962–1998) ahead of the decommissioning or refurbishing of 14 platforms.

Figure 1.

Ekofisk complex in the North Sea, approximately 200 miles (320 km) southwest of Stavanger, Norway, the first productive oil and gas field on the Norwegian continental shelf (Credit: User:BoH/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0).

What is particularly interesting about the case of Ekofisk as industrial heritage is that the Ekofisk oil field remains the second largest producing field for Norway, producing 117,000 barrels/day in 2014 (EIA, 2015). The Ekofisk complex is a heritage site even as it continues its daily operations, a quality of “living” heritage that more effectively presents an intergenerational perspective. Thus, the site is allowed to continue changing and developing in ways that the preservationist logics of many heritage sites are not. While visiting Ekofisk is naturally out of the question for most, given its location in the middle of the North Sea, Ekofisk is made accessible through exhibits and curated industry materials at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum (Norsk Oljemuseum) in Stavanger, Norway, a city in southwestern Norway known as “Dubai of the North.” To support this experience of visiting off-shore oil rigs by proxy, the architectural design of the museum mimics those of the off-shore platforms, jutting out into the sea (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Norwegian Petroleum Museum, in Stavanger, Norway. The architecture mimics offshore oil wells and platforms (Credit: Photo by the author).

While exhibits inside celebrate the technological achievements of off-shore drilling, present the deep-time geological formation of petroleum resources, and relate the experiences of workers, these are also complemented with exhibits on climate change, which give a reflexive account of the contributions of Norwegian fossil fuel development to GCC. The exhibits on climate change are narrated around a series of dilemmas: “Climate or Oil” and “Climate or Prosperity.” Perhaps given the more recent timeline of Norwegian oil and gas production, the exhibits are more able to critically question Norway’s role and the best pathways forward.

Nevertheless, the technological celebration present throughout much of the museum perhaps also feeds an unrealistic optimism. At the end of the exhibit, visitors are faced with a question and choice of two doors to exit: “What do you think? Will things go the wrong way or the right way?” After choosing and passing through one of the two doors, the visitor sees a screen with the totals thus far for either choice. When I visited in late May 2014, 73% of visitors to the exhibit had chosen “It can go well,” versus only 27% of visitors “It can go wrong.” However, accompanying this screen was a final plate of text explaining that to keep Earth’s temperature within the 2℃ “safe” ceiling, a “dramatic turnaround” in global carbon dioxide emissions would need to occur, with global emissions to cease rising by 2015. In fact, in 2014 global emissions flatlined for the first time in 40 years (IEA, 2015), and emissions are predicted to have declined in 2015 (Jackson et al., 2015).

The most popular and lively exhibit, however, was located just outside the main entrance to the museum. Here, dozens of children scampered over repurposed oil drilling equipment (Figure 3). For many visitors to the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, their visit ended here as their children laughed and played among the creatively reimagined materials normally devoted to oil and gas extraction. To my mind, the experiences of Norway’s industrial heritage and the problems of GCC become framed as intergenerational ones through this play exhibit situated at the end of the visit.

Figure 3.

Children playing on repurposed offshore drilling equipment at the Norwegian Petroleum Museum, in Stavanger, Norway (Credit: Photo by the author).

Conclusion

Questions about how archaeological research might contribute to multidisciplinary climate change knowledge have raised in sharp relief the real challenges of multidisciplinary research, and of making historical knowledge tractable to contemporary social issues. Archaeologists have contributed through the common multidisciplinary language of adaptation, sustainability, and resilience. However, these concepts offer comparatively passive approaches to GCC by not emphasizing mitigation and, therefore, not calling out those most responsible to act to reduce the drivers of climate change. To speak of adaptation, without also addressing mitigation, pushes responsibility and risk to those communities most vulnerable to the impacts of GCC. Archaeologists have also been interested in helping to define the Anthropocene as a geological epoch, and while their contributions could problematize the Anthropocene (particularly in not being the work of all humanity, but rather specific classes and societies), thus far archaeologists have had little say in that process.

Further, a recent article by Lane (2015) questions the value of deep-time archaeological records in addressing current and future climate change. Lane argues that archaeological contributions to climate change research are most effective when targeted to specific challenges, which are best approached by foregrounding the dynamics of power, justice, social and economic inequality, including the differential contributions and burdens of climate change. Following Lane’s call, I have argued that closing the gap between archaeological records and the contemporary and future challenges of GCC requires the analytical strengths of cultural heritage. Cultural heritage approaches offer the capacity for transferring archaeological knowledge into the specific social contexts and experiences of climate change today, and for bringing multidisciplinary knowledge to the public domain. This capacity to transfer I have referred to as a “heritage proxy,” to suggest that thinking by proxy (as a transfer of data to experience) is a more appropriate mechanism for archaeological contributions, particularly for addressing inequality, accountability, and climate justice.

Additionally, perhaps the deep-time archaeological records are the most fraught as heritage proxies, providing the weakest proxy relationships for the social causes and conditions of GCC in the present. This would make sense given that the anthropogenic sources of GCC are more directly traceable since the industrial revolution. The archaeological record of the historical and industrial eras might be best fitted to the work of heritage proxies, by elucidating most clearly the faultlines of inequality and responsibility that mark out the anthropogenic sources of GCC today. For example, sites with particular promise in proxy work might be those that communicate specific examples of the most anthropogenic activities, such as fossil fuel production (coal mines, oil wells, pipelines), coal-driven manufacturing, mass consumption, factory farming, and widespread deforestation.

As discussed with the case of sea level rise, heritage proxies are already being mobilized in climate advocacy and by researchers outside archaeology who are working with archaeological sites as heritage sites with social value. However, as with the troubling case of Greenpeace actions in Peru, heritage proxies must be embedded within considerations of ethics and justice, attuned to power and resource differentials, with foundations in the social, political, and economic issues at stake. This is in line with understanding climate change as a moral and ethical issue. Intergenerational justice, in particular, is a key component of climate ethics, and is one angle through which I suggested heritage proxies might transfer GCC into the daily experiences of individuals and communities by personalizing the impacts of climate change. Such appeals for justice are especially directed to those more affluent and culpable segments of society who must act to mitigate the effects of GCC. In sum, the strengths of a cultural heritage approach in mediating between archaeological knowledge and its public dimensions is its capacity to support experiences of change, and therefore also to mobilize social change, modulating the cadence of climate.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

I thank Anna Kerttula for our conversations on proxies. This article was strengthened by the generous time and feedback from four anonymous reviewers, for which I am appreciative.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Aspects of this research were funded by the National Science Foundation, Arctic Social Sciences Program (#1332261) and the US-Norway Fulbright Foundation.

Author Biography

Kathryn Lafrenz Samuels is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Maryland. Her work combines ethnographic and archaeological methods to study the contemporary sociopolitical contexts of archaeological practice and heritage management, focusing in particular on global relations forged through international economic development, human rights, democracy building, and global climate change. She is co-editor of Making Roman Places: Past and Present (2012, JRA Supplement Series) and Heritage Keywords: Rhetoric and Redescription in Cultural Heritage (2015, UP Colorado).

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