Heritage Species for Historic Preservation

Abstract

The United States has no standardized concept to recognize nonhuman species of cultural significance. This thesis argues that the field of historic preservation should play a role in cultural species documentation to fill this gap. To achieve this, preservation practice must expand the documentation process to include culturally significant nonhuman species to fully understand the complex historical relationship between species, people, and places and manage cultural landscapes holistically as dynamic systems. This thesis provides an overview of policy and practice, explains cultural landscape documentation and programs, discusses a brief legislative and regulatory history of the nature-culture divide, and provides examples of how nonhuman species are typically captured through current documentation methods, focusing on the National Park Service’s (NPS) National Register of Historic Places (National Register), Cultural Landscape Inventories (CLI), and Cultural Landscape Reports (CLR). I introduce a new concept to identify culturally significant nonhuman species: heritage species. The heritage species definition and criteria are grounded in existing frameworks such as ethnobiology’s Cultural Keystone Species (CKS) and World Heritage Species. I apply the proposed heritage species concept and evaluate example heritage species, including Mexican free-tailed bats along Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas and old-growth trees within Glencarlyn Park in Arlington, Virginia, against the National Register. This study finds that heritage species can fit into existing documentation methods within our preservation framework and presents a set of five actionable options geared toward historic preservation professionals which act as possible steps forward to integrate heritage species into documentation. Out of these proposed actionable options, this study suggests preservation professionals document heritage species and their habitat, heritage species habitat, when appropriate rather than the living species itself; this approach fits more easily into the existing place-based framework. Beyond proposed actionable options, additional recommendations to update preservation practice include updates to the current cultural landscape guidance published by the NPS. The proposed heritage species concept is intended to serve as a catalyst for preservationists to update preservation practice from a peoples-first to a living-species-first approach. This paradigm shift has many implications for communities and resource managers regarding the Section 106 process and integrated resource management. This study aims to initiate conversations about integrating species, people, and places within historic preservation theory and practice to reconcile how to preserve living landscapes.