ABSTRACT
The obsession is promoted and exploited by specialist publications which service groups of cognoscenti, and retail outlets, usually operated by experts who are engaged full-time in talking up the esteem and values of the objects which are conserved and/or collected. Culturally-defined conservation directed towards a heritage inventory seems to achieve the importance it enjoys only when the past becomes viewed as a lost space and the future is seen as a threat. The sense of optimism which disappeared long before the collapse of communism leaves a situation where the future has not been created but a heritage might have been destroyed. The combined attack on the inherited built and natural environment from simplistic functional planning, the rush for industrial development without consideration of its ecological impacts, and economic failure, has left most of the former communist states in Europe with an enormous task of environmental recovery.
