Cultural Heritage and the Challenge of Sustainability authored by Diane Barthel-Bouchier is going to be published by Left Coast Press on Dec.15 this year.
For cultural and heritage institutions around the world, sustainability is the major challenge of the 21st century. In the first major work to analyze this critical issue, Barthel-Bouchier argues that programmatic commitments to sustainability arose both from direct environmental threats to tangible and intangible heritage, and from social and economic contradictions as heritage developed into a truly global organizational field.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews over many years, as well as detailed coverage of primary documents and secondary literature, Diane Barthel-Bouchier examines key international organizations including UNESCO, ICOMOS, and the World Monuments Fund, and national trust organizations of Great Britain, the United States, Australia, and many others. This wide-ranging study establishes a foundation for critical analysis and programmatic advances as heritage professionals encounter the growing challenge of sustainability.
Neil Silberman, Center for Heritage and Society, University of Massachusetts Amherst says that the book is must-read and offers some sobering implications for both future and past for its frank and fascinating exploration of cultural heritage as nostalgic social obsession and rigid bureaucratic process at a time of global crisis--by one of today’s foremost analysts of heritage and environmentalism. This must-read book offers some sobering implications for both future and past.”
Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 379, Nov.14, 2012
(Edited by Yang Min)