ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for putting heritage centrally in sustainability research and action. Drawing on four encounters across island landscapes—a celebrated solar park of Ameland, contested wind turbines on Tinos, community-owned tidal power in Shetland, and an inactive solar installation on Lipari—it discusses how seemingly identical renewable technologies acquire distinct local meanings. These same islandsthe Wadden Islands, the Cyclades, Shetland, and the Aeolian Islandsanchor the remainder of the book. The chapter engages with debates on climate change, globalization, uneven geographical development, and authorized discourses of heritage and sustainability. Critiquing dominant technocratic approaches, it posits that substantive sustainability requires a systemic shift, one that can start through landscapes as diverse milieus, shaped by environmental forces and inherited practices. The chapter introduces heritage as a dynamic, future-oriented process rather than a static collection of artefacts and explains how it has historically been both complicit in practices of exclusion and commodification, and a vector of resistance and landscape stewardship. Islands, positioned between peripherality and interconnectedness, foreground resistance against centralized, extractive processes through heritage-driven agency and creativity. Ultimately, the chapter sees interconnected localities—or archipelagoes—as potential sites of emancipatory change.
