Public History Education and Environmental Sustainability
Case Statement: Bethany Serafine, National Park Service
In recent years in my career with the National Park Service (NPS) in cultural resource management I’ve seen a significant shift towards institutional sustainability practices. My home park, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller NHP in Woodstock, VT has been working towards a goal of only using renewable fuel to heat the park buildings in the long Vermont winters. The park’s historic structures and administrative offices are fueled by wood that is harvested within the park’s forest. Just this fall, the park invested in a geothermal system that will erase the need to use fossil fuels to support the park’s historic structures and administrative buildings. While I would like to think that Marsh-Billing-Rockefeller is a common story within NPS units, most parks get stuck in both bureaucratic red tape and the immense maintenance back-log that plagues the National Park Service. So, while sustainable practices may be institutional practice at some parks, it is still not an attainable goal at other parks. A Public History Education and Environmentally Sustainability best practices document should make a strong statement that emphasizes the need for sustainability practices to be a core component of public history and preservation education programs/programming. How can public history and preservation programs create the next generation of historians and preservationists that may enter a field in which sustainability is an ingrained best practice of their work, not just a supplement to it?
Could NCPH partner with land management agencies like the National Park Service to promote sustainability practices in public history education and preservation? Should there be a greater partnership between public history programs and agency training institutions like Mather High School or NPS’s Historic Preservation Training Center? What about other federal land and property management agencies?
In my personal career experience, the projects I have managed for the National Park Service (Administrative Histories, Historic Resource Studies, and National Register of Historic Places nominations) all, in various detail, document the effects of climate change on NPS resources (both cultural and natural). However, these documents do not require a discussion of climate change and sustainable adaptations potentially explored or made by the NPS. Again, how can and or should we institutionalize the practice of sustainability in relation to climate change in public history documents?
My current work is almost completely focused on preparing documentation of federal property in the National Register of Historic Places. Part of evaluating a property for inclusion in the NRHP is assessing its “historic integrity.” How might integrity evaluation change in light of climate change and sustainability practices? At what point does sustainability trump historic integrity? Does there have to be an either/or to that component? What perceptions at the institutional level need to be made to ensure that sustainability is equally as valued in preservation of historic properties as significance and integrity? We have all heard the adage that “the greenest building is one that is already built.” To take that thought further, how do we sustain that building into the future while maintaining its integrity and significance?
One of the challenges to Public History Education and Environmental Sustainability is that climate change and sustainability may be perceived by the public as an issue effecting the “recent past.” However, maybe there is an opportunity for public history and preservation programs to create a specialized focus on sustainable practices in history. NPS exams this concept in a short case study in the recently published Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy (https://www.nps.gov/subjects/climatechange/upload/ClimateChange_01-05_DigitalPrelim.pdf) at Wupatki National Monument. The case study examines the changes in agricultural practices of native populations after eruption of the Sunset Crater that had major environmental impacts.
Sustainability should be incorporated into every aspect of public history training. Climate change and the need for sustainable practices to both mitigate and prevent climate change effects are a part of the society in which we live and should be reflected as such in public history practices and cultural resource management studies. Management of museum objects and archives can require a great deal of climate control—how can that control be done sustainably? How should institutions be collecting to document climate change and sustainability history? Interpretation of historic sites should include sustainable practices (when appropriate at cultural and natural sites). How can this be added to public history program curriculums? This topic is also explored briefly in the NPS’s Cultural Resources Climate Change Strategy.