ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how a range of heritage practices museums, heritage buildings and villages, performance and consumerism refer to people's interaction with the natural environment in the Arabian Gulf. It contextualises these heritage practices within shared regional concerns about damage to the natural environment and debates on sustainability. The chapter focuses on two industries pearling and oil that have been central modes of production in the Arabian Gulf littoral and now feature in emerging debates about the environment in the Arabian Gulf. First, it considers the benefit of understanding pearling and petroleum as extractive resource industries in order to illuminate relationships and interactions forged between people and then examine the way that pearling heritage is mobilised in specific practices. The chapter considers how natural pearls and pearl-diving are things of the past that thrive in heritage practices and cultural references in the present, where social and environmental values, political histories of exploitation and human environment interactions meet.
