A Past Yet to Arrive
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Date
2018-08-25
Authors
Quiroz, Nadja
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Abstract
Planning for uncertain, future climates has become a dominant framework
in resource management fields, and has recently expanded into cultural resource
strategies within the National Park Service (NPS). However, because the NPS views
material cultural resources, such as built features, as having no ability to change
with the environment, adaptive capacity has been omitted from the cultural resource
vulnerability assessment framework. Adaptive capacity contributes to a living system’s
ability to recover from and resist future impacts, thereby increasing its resilience.
By omitting adaptive capacity, recent preliminary cultural landscape vulnerability
assessments (VAs) excluded all resiliency considerations— an oversight that could
undermine cultural landscape comprehension and adaptive planning. This project
demonstrates that flood-resilient, culturally significant built features exist worldwide,
and that they embody climate change management insights. Objectives included
distilling resilience strategies from four case studies; applying these strategies to
design intervention thought-experiments for Scotty’s Castle, a flood-vulnerable
NPS cultural landscape; and assessing each intervention's resiliency and cultural
integrity trade-offs. Findings suggest that all realms of resiliency (ecological, social,
organizational, and engineering) should be factored into cultural landscape VAs, and
that truly adaptive planning requires tight coupling of management and resource subsystems.
Additional adaptive management implications are discussed.
Description
Examining committee chair: Robert Ribe
Keywords
Resilience, Adaptive capacity, Cultural landscape, Adaptive management, Climate change, Social resilience, National Park Service, Historic rehabilitation, Historic preservation, Social ecological system, Flood resilience, Adaptive planning, Hazard cultures, Cultural adaptation, Katsura Imperial Vill, Kinderdijk, Living bridge, Cherrapunjee, Santa Cruz de Mompox, Resilience strategy, Kintsugi, Cultural landscape adaptation, Death Valley Scotty Historic District, Scotty's Castle