Dr. Barbara Rasmussen
Assistant Professor of History at WVU
Coordinator, Graduate Certificate Program in Cultural Resource Management and MA in Public History
My short answer is ?sometimes.? The rub comes from deciding when. As a historic preservationist who lives in a house that occupies a space where once Native Americans and bison ranged, I must plead guilty to having abetted the altering of nature by providing a market for the practice. Sometimes we alter nature recklessly, and sometimes we alter nature to survive. If man ?has dominion? over nature, I believe we must come to know that just because we can alter nature does not always mean that we should. I do not mean to argue against progress, growth, or expansion; I believe that we must incorporate nature and history into that growth.
I believe that tearing down another man?s history to aggrandize one?s own is a terrible act of social violence. It rejects the value of what has gone before. It erases memory and rarely is it equivalent to the value of what it destroyed. It trivializes what, given proper reflection, might be far more valuable than a new enterprise. Sometimes, altering nature is a confession of ignorance and insouciance. For example, when the City of Morgantown erected a ?platform? on top of Sky Rock, for no clearly explained reason, city fathers were foolishly altering nature. This contempt for the architecture of Mother Nature will prove expensive as well as thoughtless. Never will Sky Rock attract the tourists and visitors that it would have if left pristine. That platform has become an attractive nuisance that poses a threat to the safety of visitors to the rock because they climb on it to be clear of its fetters. This alteration also expresses an ignorance of the past, which is a dangerous affliction from the perspectives of those of us who are historians. Sky Rock is the place certain that we can point to in Morgantown where whites and Native Americans shed blood, each for the sake of their own future security. They paid terrible prices, and that history is a part of who we are now. I believe we should have paid homage to our community?s past by not altering nature in this way.
Mostly, we alter nature on a whim. We recognize new needs, housing for instance, and race for the bulldozer and the closest open field. While the need for housing is certainly just, the need to alter nature to accommodate it does not necessarily follow. Adaptively reusing resources that already exist is a more conscientious stewardship of nature that keeps in mind the needs of the yet unborn. Historic preservation speaks to that ideal. As I reflect on the advance of humankind at the expense of the natural world it seems to me that we are dangerously out of touch with a very basic truth —there?s barely enough nature to go around. If we want to survive and retain our humanity, we need to embrace nature as the giver of all life and work toward ensuring that it will ever be able to do so. Altering nature is frequently an act of violence. We really should look for alternatives when we can. It?s in our own best interests because nature, in all of its forms, will have the last laugh.
