ABSTRACT
Climate change, melting glaciers, and vanishing Arctic ice will lead to rising sea levels and endanger our future heritage, be it cultural or natural. This is the apocalyptic scenario the world faces today, based on scientific models and popularized by the media. But can heritage and climate really be imagined as separate from each other? In this chapter, I challenge the implicit assumption that heritage is a passive victim of external forces. From critical heritage studies, we know that heritage comes into being through a political process; it is contested and productive. Heritage is not passive and climate change is not “out there”; instead, both are inseparably linked to each other. We cannot imagine climate change without thinking of our heritage, and we cannot imagine the future of our heritage without considering climate change. As an anthropologist interested both in climate research and heritage studies, I use this chapter to compare the sometimes fatal relationship between climate change and heritage in two different scenarios, one from today and one from the nineteenth century, with a special focus on the popularization of scientific knowledge.
