CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 11 WHERE HERITAGE AND NATURE MEET Opposite: Stone-cutting machinery at Albion Stone’s Jordon Mine on the Isle of Portland (see page 29) Editorial We are all doomed, but… Buildings and nature met in the first cave that people adapted as shelter, and in the first hut that they made from whatever materials were growing around them. The local vernacular developed from what the natural world provided close at hand: timber in sufficient spans to make a roof; stone, mud or brick clay to make roofs and walls. Later, there were leisure and resources to make formal gardens and landscapes that demonstrated how nature could be tamed. ‘There’s nothing wild and uncultivated about us,’ was the message. Later, gardens and landscapes that looked less formal showed how the natural world could be shaped to a refined sense of beauty. Dominating nature, through landscapes and buildings, became a habit. In time, some people came to value what had been built and became less sure that it could be replaced by something better. Focusing on taming nature perhaps blinded us to the effects that development can have on the natural environment even when we do not notice it. Only recently has promoting biodiversity become an aim of the planning system. More than that, we have come to realise that what we build has a fundamental effect on the planet and its climate, and vice versa. The changing weather has always been the favourite topic of conversation. We can cope with weather. A changing climate is something else: just as unpredictable as the weather, but with potentially catastrophic consequences. That means, as far as historic buildings are concerned, that conservation is becoming more difficult. As ever, we have to decide what we value most, and where we are willing to invest our scarce resources. We are finding that the changing climate’s heat, cold, wind, rain, sea levels and other extremes are making some of those decisions unusually painful. ‘We are all doomed,’ Imogen Wood writes in her article in this issue (page 12), ‘but in the short term, some places and assets are more doomed than others.’ Responding creatively to that predicament will involve, she rightly suggests, asking some difficult questions about how we balance what we value in heritage and nature.
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