The Future of the Past

When Cultural Heritage Meets Climate Change

Thijs Weststeijn (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

204 Seiten

2026
Polity Press (Verlag)
978-1-5095-6784-3 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Juni 2026)
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As the wooden piles under Amsterdam begin to rot, water levels rise in Venice, and the 4,500-year-old ruins of Mohenjo-daro flood in Pakistan. Compaction of peat soil in northern England is causing Hadrian’s Wall to collapse. The bricks of excavated Babylon are exploding due to increasing salt levels. Melting permafrost in Siberia is endangering the ancient burial mounds of the Scythian civilisation. In the US, hurricanes have partially destroyed the heritage of New Orleans and Puerto Rico, while the 2019 wildfires forced the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to close.

The climate crisis is threatening historical heritage all over the world, with higher temperatures, more storms and fires and, of course, rising water. Monuments, buildings, inner cities and cultural landscapes are at risk, and museums such as the Louvre have already started relocating parts of their collections to climate-proof storage facilities. Written by a highly regarded art historian, The Future of the Past addresses this urgent issue and asks us to include the fate of beauty in our conversations on climate change. Extreme weather means we have to approach history in new ways. Historical heritage now confronts us not only with the past, but also the future.

Thijs Weststeijn is a Professor of Art History at the University of Utrecht.

Prologue: A cry of nations o'er sunken halls

1. Historical heritage threatened by the climate crisis
Dutch canaries in a global coalmine
A bathtub surrounded by water
A heritage worldwide under threat
Higher water temperatures, more droughts and rain
Thawing permafrost
Storms and fires
The rising sea
Museums
Combinations of factors

2. Why heritage?
The heritage crusade continues
Inheriting and legating: the new challenge
Solastalgia Heritage: between micro and micro

3. Art and nature: fertile cross-pollination
Mankind's best moment?
The Little Ice Age
Landscape into art
The artificial landscape
From wind and pear to coal and oil
Shell and the climate movement
Artists versus the fossil fuel industry
The robber barons and their art patronage
Artwashing worldwide
Another colonial dimension: Britain, India, Myanmar, Iran, Iraq
Museums as battlegrounds for climate action

4. The historical sensation in the Anthropocene
Human and natural history: a matter of scale
The historical sensation in the light of the future
The end of progressivism
Progress in the West = decline in the Global South
Cyclical history
The Great Acceleration
Human and non-human time regimes
The multiple temporalities of heritage

5. Transformation
Authenticity and materials
A cyclical view: breaking down and building up
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Abandoning heritage

6. Digitization
The real and the virtual
The ubiquity and ephemerality of the digital world
Digitization as a tool

7. Reconstruction
A receding coastline: the Cape Hatteras lighthouse and Clavell Tower
The temple of Zhang Fei
UNESCO's views on reconstruction
Place, identity and the 'global commons'
Epilogue: looking the beast in the eye
Heritage contributes to better understanding
Cathedral thinking

List of illustrations
Notes
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	5.6.2026
Übersetzer	Liz Waters
Verlagsort	Oxford
Sprache	englisch
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Kunstgeschichte / Kunststile
ISBN-10	1-5095-6784-4 / 1509567844
ISBN-13	978-1-5095-6784-3 / 9781509567843
Zustand	Neuware