Merging Environmental Conservation and Historic Preservation by Barry Stiefel, Associate Professor at the College of Charleston Historic Preservation & Community Planning Program.
Stiefel's book Sustainable Heritage: Merging Environmental Conservation and Historic Preservation brings together ecological-conservation theory and heritage-preservation theory and explores topics such as Cultural Relationships with Nature, Ecology, Biodiversity, Energy, Resource Systems, and the Integration of Biodiversity into the Built Environment Rehabilitation Practice. His current work is titled Reconciling Heritage and Sustainability in Canadian Conservation Higher Education. This paper pushes the reader to think critically about sustainability as our actions as educators may not be the same as our words (hence the reconciliation). His final project “Historic Sights and Sounds Long Gone: Ecological Reflections on the College of Charleston’s Campus,” uses the College of Charleston as a case study to demonstrate how the historic campus founded 1770 can never be what it originally was. The the Live Oak trees dripping with Spanish moss are a historical fiction that was developed in more recent decades based on stereotypes about the South. The original American Elm trees were wiped out on campus by Dutch Elm disease. Now an endangered species, the Dutch Elm trees were also roosts for passing flocks of 200-300 Carolina parakeets, which have also gone extinct. Thus, we cannot see or hear what the campus was originally like because of the ecological damage.
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