Blog Action Day guest entry by Mary L. MacDonald
Recently I attended a conference called The Heritage Imperative: Old Buildings in an Age of Environmental Crisis. I was excited to hear how the heritage work that I do could benefit from -- and give benefit to -- the Green movement. There is a natural synergy between saving older buildings and saving the planet (reduce! recycle! re-use!) and a natural tension, too, as energy efficiencies are sold in ways that decry the drafty, the outmoded and the outdated. All too often wood windowed souls are blinded by upstart thermal pane systems whose relatively brief lives are designed to ensure short term energy gain and a never-ending cycle of land filling and replacement. Away too with the heavy textured plaster of an honourable trade, hauled off and replaced by smooth, characterless sheets of gypsum. In our modern twittering techno-world even insulation, it seems, is the domain of the young.
Nevertheless, for me the green world still held the promise of a renewed, embodied energy that could be used to support long-standing preservationist goals. Casting off charges of old world sentimentality, we could learn to quantify the environmental cost of demolition and thus convince the land developer to save buildings, not destroy them. Look at the numbers, we'd say. It's all in the chart. After watching truly frightening presentations on the statistical ravages of climate change (it used to be that I worked to mediate the past and the present, now the future demands equal consideration), repeating the preservationist's mantra (the greenest building is the one already built -- thank you, Carl Elefante), considering the relative merits of energy modeling, building life-cycle analysis and the principles of avoided environmental impacts, I was left with an added uneasy feeling. I realized that in this desperation to adopt the language of environmental impacts, to stand with the progressives and not the luddites, we were moving away from the heart and hearth of the matter and allowing the debate to be hijacked yet again.
If adaptation is what allows for the survival of any species, it is without question that we must learn to appropriately adapt our heritage buildings to meet the needs of the future. By embracing new strategies without question, however, and by playing the numbers game, we are in danger of acquiescing to the proposition that only quantity matters. We are abandoning the concept of intangible value (i.e., what is the right thing to do; what makes something valuable beyond the marketplace). In other words, we are not doing our part to shift the very paradigm that continues to allow environmentally negative approaches to the earth and its inhabitants to proliferate, even in the face of environmental catastrophe. Economic arguments will ultimately fail because we will always lose the battle between land value and building value, between short term profit and long term contribution. What we need to do, as environmentalists, as preservationists, as Darwinists and survivalists, is challenge dominant (economic) definitions of value wherever and however we can. We work to save buildings, souls, the planet because it is important. We do it because people matter. Because history matters. Because the future matters. We do it because we care.
