Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 194: The Climate Imaginary: Preserving Cultural Heritage — with Charles J. Henry
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Gabriel Alegbeleye, Am Johal, Charles J. Henry
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Kathy Feng 00:14
Welcome to ‘The Climate Imaginary,’ a Below the Radar series. As we navigate our future within the ongoing climate emergency, we seek different frameworks to help guide our learning and our actions. In this series, we bring together guests from across artistic and academic disciplines to speak about their approaches to working in solidarity amidst the climate crisis. We feature conversations that range from the unique power of creative works to mobilise people, to the importance of collaboration and interdependence across fields.
Gabriel Alegbeleye 00:50
Hello listeners! I’m Gabriel with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of our Below the Radar series: The Climate Imaginary, Am Johal is joined by Charles Henry the President of the Council on Library and Information Resources. They discuss ways to preserve cultural heritage amidst the current issue of climate change. Charles talks about the importance of cultural artefacts and why they need to be kept accessible for the future. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 01:32
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again. This week, we have a special guest joining us from Vermont, Charles Henry with the Council on Library and Information Resources. Welcome, Charles.
Charles Henry 01:47
Oh, thank you, Am. Very grateful for the invitation to speak with you today. On behalf of my organisation, we greatly appreciate the work that you have been doing in your podcasts, focusing on climate change, social justice and attended issues. It's very important, it's critical, and urgent. And again, thank you.
Am Johal 02:10
Yeah, Charles, I'm wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit, and also the organisation you're representing as well.
Charles Henry 02:19
Yes, I've been President of the Council on Library and Information Resources for nearly 15 years. And my background is I was a scholar, early, long ago, early on, in Medieval and Classical Studies, and migrated into administration about 30 years ago, working in libraries and cultural heritage institutions. And then ended up at CLIR, which is an organisation that has been active for about almost 65 years in the cultural heritage sector. And CLIR has been involved since the 1950s with the preservation and access of the cultural heritage, and broadly defined, when it got started, what some of the major concerns were: the lack of coordination and the proliferation of information, the explosion of knowledge, which is something very familiar to us today. In those days, it included television, and radio, and microform, and microfilm, as well as books, a tremendous surge in academic publishing at the time, so CLIR was formed to try to make sense of all this, and to try to identify cultural heritage artefacts and resources that were threatened and to make those accessible. And we're still doing that today in a much more digital environment of course.
Am Johal 03:55
Now, when you look back at, say, the UN Human Rights charter, you know, a lot of the rights that are built into it in that post work context were individual rights, but this notion of cultural rights, the rights to cultural preservation, these types of things, I wonder if you could speak a little bit to the notion of cultural rights and how we imagine them today that comes out of human rights frameworks.
Charles Henry 04:23
You know, I think that's a key question of much of what we do. In fact, I'd say most all of what we do in our projects are informed directly or indirectly, by the Declaration of Human Rights that came out in the UN, right after World War Two. And it does, there are a number of sections of that declaration that assert and ascertain and I think, hope to enforce the the human right to knowledge and the human right to one's cultural heritage and the human right to live in a society that supports these activities and supports one's interest in culture and the legacy of the society of the country and of the culture at large. And we believe this strongly, and almost all of our work presupposes access and equal opportunity to engage with cultural heritage of one's choice, whether it be one's own cultural heritage or cultural resources of those other countries and other peoples around the world. So we're, I think, fundamental to our mission, are the values that are articulated in the Declaration of Human Rights.
Am Johal 05:45
The French theorist Jacques Derrida used to use this term, "archive fever," in his theoretical writings. And when we think about cultural heritage today, especially in the proliferating digital forms that it comes in as well, what does the preservation of cultural heritage look like today that's different than, say, a few decades ago?
Charles Henry 06:11
Well, I won't get into the Derridian interpretation of the culture, but we can save that perhaps, for another podcast. See, if you go back even 30 years or 40 years, preservation often meant the rebinding of books, and the reconstitution, and the reconstruction of analog resources. And those were largely books. They were articles. They were newspapers, artworks, of course, restoration of artworks and preservation of art, and artefacts in particular environments that assured the longevity of these material objects, for the most part. You began to see, in the 1950s, 1960s, the beginning of a proliferation of microfilming. And this is mostly in higher education and in an academic setting, the microfilming of newspapers and the microfilming of old books, and microforms, and this led to— anybody who's used microfilm knows that it's not easy, you're basically scrolling a reel of film, through a reader, and it it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of squinting, often, to get at the information that you're searching. Digital technology changed that significantly, and I would say, much of today, we look at digital technologies, scanning, cataloguing, and preserving through digital surrogates, a lot of the academic information that began in analog form. So, old books, and newspapers, images, pictures from museums, there are literally hundreds and hundreds of millions of those objects that are now available online. They're often not organized very well, we're still wrestling with that. But they are, at least for the short-term, accessible, and preservable through digitization and digital technology. Interestingly, there's also a surge in what's called born-digital information. And these are a lot of research, huge amounts of data, unprecedented amounts of data, and new publication, new forms of publication, that start out digitally. And given the tidal wave of this information, the born-digital material is difficult to preserve now, so while the digital technology worked for decades in helping to preserve analog, material culture that we have created and inherited, the objects, the digital objects, digital artefacts that are amongst us now, are, let's say, more slippery, they're more elusive, they change more quickly, they can be modified in ways that the analog materials couldn't. So, the paradox, I think, is that digital technology has been a very successful method of preservation and making access to culture across peoples and across nations. But the resurgence of the digital information is creating a very complex challenge and compounding any attempt to preserve and make accessible our legacy. So we're wrestling with that, I’ll say.
Am Johal 09:50
I recently had a conversation with a documentary filmmaker based in Toronto, Ali Kazimi. He was here for a festival in Vancouver, and he did this amazing, wonderful film called Random Acts of Legacy, which, he bought the home films of a Chinese-American person named Silas Henry Fung, who had an obsession with the Chicago World's Fair. And it takes the technology, and I think he contacted somebody whose solution to fixing the film to be watchable was to put it in a bucket of WD-40. And he recovers the film and he gets in touch with the person's daughter. And it's an amazing film about what an archive is, and how to kind of bring it to life, and all the kinds of meanings that can be drawn from it. And I think also, you know, one of my questions is, you know, in contexts of, say, war, or conflict zones, or occupations, do you see time and investment put into the preservation of cultural heritage and say, the Palestinian context or the Kashmiri context or in Ukraine, right now, in the Middle East as well during, during many wars, the loss of cultural heritage? I'm wondering with your own organisation, what are the kinds of conversations that open up with, say, organisations like UNESCO, and others who are invested in these questions? What are the kinds of things that come to the surface today when thinking through the preservation of cultural heritage?
Charles Henry 11:29
Oh, that's a great question, and there's a... part of the response is that, I would say there is a much-increased awareness, now very different from even 10 years ago, about the disruption and the potential loss that climate change, the climate crisis, is bringing to the world. That's gratifying in a way. It's also underscoring the difficulty of responding to this new kind of recognition and this new kind of awareness. One quick example is that my organisation is working… We have begun conversations to set up a consortium of about 12 to 18 institutions in Africa. And we're working with them, we'll work with them to digitise their resources as much as is feasible. And these are mostly universities, there's also museums involved in various archives. The impetus for this collaboration is climate change. There's only about 4% of the cultural record, cultural resources on the continent of Africa that has been digitised. And there is a very strong and growing awareness of the potential devastation of climate change, and that is through desertification, rising sea water, floods, droughts are a particular concern, and there's also an issue here, I think we can touch on briefly, which is displacement, human displacement, diaspora. And while we think about our culture in often still in the kind of material objects and books and archives and various records that we will, in fact, with our colleagues in Africa, we hope to digitise and preserve, and make accessible over time. When large portions of a population are displaced, often through drought or desertification, or even war, the more ephemeral, less tangible forms of cultural expression can be lost as well, and this includes ritual, this includes certain religious rites, it includes language itself. Language is often dispersed, and languages are often lost in a major diaspora. Performances, theatre performances, song, singing, that's lost as well. So, there's a very complex web of an array, let's say, of culture that is threatened by climate, both in a kind of material way, as well as the less tangible ways that we express our humanity. And that, I think this kind of recognition, this conversation, is important and represents, as I noted, I think an ongoing and intensifying awareness of this problem. When you look at Ukraine, Ukraine represents a really new and, I think, interesting response to this kind of destruction. Literally being bombarded, and invaded and bombarded, and they created a... I don't know how to describe it, it would be a kind of digitization and preservation of Ukrainian heritage, almost on the fly. It's very, very quick, it's very efficient, it's massive digitization of their cultural record. And those digital surrogates have been preserved and put into a very large database. I would characterise this database as raw information: the cataloguing is, when it exists, is pretty rough. It's not easy to find a lot of this information, but it is there. And I think that what we're seeing in Ukraine is setting up a kind of paradigm, that as climate change accelerates, and the disruption becomes more devastating, it's this kind of activity, that's quick, that's efficient. And that doesn't rely so much on traditional forms of organisation. We're going to see that more and more.
Am Johal 15:41
I'm wondering, you referenced this a little bit, but I wanted to speak with you a little bit further about this notion of intangible heritage. We have, you know, similar conversations happening here in Vancouver, where our local Heritage Vancouver Society, which historically has looked at, you know, physical buildings that were done or architecturally significant in particular periods of time, and trying to grapple with the colonial history of Canada. You know, what constitutes heritage when we're thinking about Indigenous populations here, and intangible heritage of diasporic communities? I'm wondering how your organisation, if you've looked at the importance of intangible heritage and how that fits into broader work of heritage and cultural preservation?
Charles Henry 16:29
Well, we think it's essential and we, my organisation CLIR, has a program, which is called Amplifying Hidden Voices. It's a program that is focused on North America, so it's mostly the United States and Canada. A number of grants have gone to Indigenous peoples, to various tribes, because in order to make accessible, to preserve and make accessible, parts of their cultural record, we've had— and this this includes treaties and oral responses to treaties, which is a kind of ephemeral aspect, you have the treaty itself, and then you have the arguments about the treaty, the debates about the treaty. We're working to help capture those debates and those interpretations, which is, in many ways, much more ephemeral than the treaty itself. As an example of the importance of this kind of cultural legacy. So we're working on that, as noted, to state the obvious, it's quite complicated. There's also a great deal of sensitivity involved with this kind of digitization and preservation, so obviously, we're working very closely with the Indigenous people to make sure that their wishes are respected. In fact, they drive these projects, and we provide whatever service we can to make this possible. These are examples that will become more and more prevalent, I think, in the wake of climate disruption. And I think the short answer is that we find these kinds of cultural expressions extremely important, and certainly equal to the more tangible kinds of material expressions that we work with. Another example, we haven't started to work with them yet, but there is the Palestinian Al-Harah, which is a theatre group that goes around to the occupied territories and other areas within Palestine, the old Palestine, and teaches the children Palestinian history. Those are recorded, many of those are recorded, and we've been thinking about working with that troupe and those artists to assure long-term preservation of that cultural record, which is extremely important. This is how many, many children gain an understanding of their culture, is through these performances. So we feel that they must be preserved.
Am Johal 18:53
In terms, Charles, in terms of climate change, and its effect on the preservation of archives, cultural memory, records, what do you see playing out in the sort of immediate term, in terms of how this is already having an effect now, and sort of, what keeps you up at night in terms of the future of the preservation of archives, and the historical human record, that is not being dealt with urgently enough, that we could plausibly lose important records of human culture, wherever they may be, in terms of there not being enough time, attention, or resources being placed into the protection of these important records?
Charles Henry 19:39
Being kept up at night, I think, is probably just an aspect of living in 2022, for a variety of reasons, climate change, perhaps chief among them. When you look at the reports coming out of the interagency panels, and other scientific organisations, and you look at the remarkable and consistent research that's being done about climate change, and how it's accelerating, almost every month, there's new indications of massive ice sheets melting. And there was an article today about the Barents Sea, which is becoming— is melting, and the consequences of that for the circulation of cold and warm water around the northern hemisphere. And you can just pile on literally thousands of articles and investigations. It's very clear that if something, if we cannot muster a response, that we will lose this planet. I think that is not controversial at this point. I think we will lose not Earth, Earth will stay but we will lose our habitat, and perhaps irrevocably. And that would be completely devastating for any kind of cultural legacy that we have created over the last hundreds of thousands of years. What my organisation is doing is to recognise the potential catastrophe that is looming, and we are building a digital environment that we call Pangea. The name comes from the solid landmass when all the continents were kind of jammed together about 300 million years ago, it was called Pangea, "all Earth", or "complete Earth." If we were around, which we weren't, but if we were around, you could walk from one end of the landmass to the other. And that's the concept here, is the unification of the planet, in this case, through its cultural expressions. And Pangea will have three major components to it. One will be information that relates to science, for the most part, social science, and climate change, and climate disruption. It will be a kind of coherent amalgam of all of this, as much as this information is we can link to, and we want to we will be we're beginning to provide visualisation tools, and semantic searches, and other kinds of applications that will make this information, which is just astonishingly huge, at least more understandable, and hopefully conducive to more concerted action. The second piece of Pangea is cultural heritage, mostly the more tangible kinds of cultural heritage that's under threat. So it is a record of what has been lost, and a record of what is under threat and might be lost, as well. And the third piece of it is the diaspora, the social side of it, and that is the displacement of humanity. Some estimates put the displacement of us at 200 or more million in the next 20 to 30 years, which is a staggering tide of loss and suffering. And with it is noted that it's those less tangible aspects of our nature, and of our legacy, that can be lost with that kind of massive migration. So, we're looking at Pangea to try to capture, in a way, that I would call conversational. The digital architecture is set up to be a dialogue between these three elements, and to your question, at some point, this project could be a celebration. In 10 years, 20 years, maybe action will be taken to help mitigate this change. The acceleration of heat and rising water, and the more and more violent kinds of weather that we're experiencing may, in fact, be better controlled through our action, and that would be grand. On the other hand, Pangea could at some point, what I call the "elegiac turn," be more of a requiem for a loss foretold, in that this very large, intricate database would be a record of what we're essentially unable to accomplish.
Am Johal 24:09
This is both inspiring and frightening, simultaneously. And in as much as climate crisis gets talked about in the media, and in a broad way, in the particular way that you're working to preserve archives, cultural records, preserving cultural memory, it's a specific intervention that I think a lot of people will find quite new, in terms of how to respond in an effective way to the various effects of climate change. I'm wondering if you could speak to, a little bit, how you found yourself becoming interested in this area to work in, and also, in a broad sense, in the field that you're working in, in Library Information Sciences, in terms of academic areas that are working around this? What are the types of conversations that you're having with your colleagues? And what are kind of, you know, impending conversations or important questions that are still left unanswered in this work?
Charles Henry 25:13
Well, I think so many questions are unanswered and will remain so, given this complexity. My organisation got involved with the climate crisis, oh, probably about 10 years ago, maybe a little less. And one of the pivotal events was the rise of ISIS in the Middle East, and the kinds of destruction that ISIS was perpetrating against the cultural heritage. I think we all can recall the daily images of mosques that were blown up, and churches that were blown up, synagogues that were destroyed, great works of antiquity, Babylonian artefacts, Assyrian artefacts that were sledgehammered in museums. And this was part of the denigration and destruction of a culture that that particular group despised, essentially, and felt it was corrupting. So we began to work with a new organisation at the time, called The Antiquities Coalition, which was set up also in response to the destruction of these artefacts, and the looting that was contemporary with this. And so, many of the objects were destroyed, and also many objects were stolen, from the Middle East, from museums that were attacked, and from Special Collections, and from libraries. And a lot of this, a lot of these precious items ended up in very nice antiquities dealerships in London, and New York, and Los Angeles. So there was this quite sophisticated black market while this destruction was going on. Underneath it, things were being stolen. So this is where we got involved, and the climate aspect was the realisation that, we look at Syria and the devastation of the country of Syria, that was caused in large part by a drought, one of the most intense, longest droughts in the history of the country. And a lot of the disruption in the Middle East, while not exclusively instigated by climate change, often, almost always, had some climate change as part of the fabric of the disruption, as part of the fabric of the war. And as we looked at this, we became, I would say, in certain ways, more knowledgeable about the relationship between the destruction of cultural heritage preservation, the imperative of the preservation of what was left, and the prevention of looting as much as we could do. And that was one week, my organisation created what's called the Digital Library of the Middle East, and that's still going. And that was a digital library that has surrogate digital representations of cultural heritage relating to the Middle East. And it's a compilation of materials that are held in various libraries and museums in Europe and North America, as well as significant contributions from the Middle East itself, the various countries and cultural institutions onsite. So that was the beginning, I think, of getting involved with this. And over time, our arc of— call it an arc of understanding, we began to realise the potential devastation of climate change, per se, the loss of cultural heritage through the climatological upheavals and also the attendant wars that would likely come from this, and the attendant, diaspora that would come from this. And also began to understand more deeply the inequality of the response. So many institutions don't have the financial backing, they don't have the wherewithal, they don't have the support. And richer institutions, none of which I think will be exempt from climate change, do have it much easier in the way of reaching out, digitising and preserving at least a record of what they have. So we're involved with this in just a variety of thematic concerns. They're all interrelated, and again, they just point out that it's not just climate change, but it's aspects of social justice, aspects of aggression, aspects of often horrific examples of human nature that these changes can inspire.
Am Johal 29:41
Charles, I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to sort of the role of higher education in the work that you do, or postsecondary education, as we call it in Canada. I imagined there's a diverse set of practices that different universities, colleges are taking in terms of preservation of their own archives, or specialising in particular areas or particular technologies, and also in making archives accessible in new and novel ways. And it's such an important place where there are resources located, but what can higher education be doing that's more effective? And if you could speak to, you know, some particular archives, or places, or universities that you think are doing some interesting things related to the questions that you're talking about?
Charles Henry 30:32
Yeah, well, this is a, for me, particular hot button, so I'll try to keep a cool head. There are, there really are institutions that are doing terrific work. We work closely with Stanford University on a lot of these projects, and I think Stanford has an exemplary record of digitization, preservation, and organisation of knowledge and how that gets structured. We're also working closely with the historically Black colleges and universities, working with them to get a better idea of their special collections, their archives, and to make those archives accessible. These institutions are often underfunded and understaffed, yet they have just an amazing record, often of community archives. They're really unprecedented, and we're trying to see what we can do to provide assistance and service with some of these institutions, to make those records known. And this goes back to, I think, the Declaration of Human Rights, that it is a right to participate in one's culture, and when one's culture, in this case, with the historically Black colleges and universities, when that culture is intentionally, has been intentionally suppressed and underfunded, we as a nation lose a tremendous amount of our understanding of our identity, of our narrative, our historical narrative, and we're trying, as best we can, to correct that. I think working with the HBCUs has been just a wonderful opportunity, an enlightening opportunity, to see how marginalised voices and communities can become more visible and become part of a greater story. That being said, and there are some other institutions I think, that are doing really interesting work. That may kind of, may sound like a quirky digression, but I don't think it is. There's been a lot of discussion in the news lately— of US News and World Report. And it comes out, as you probably know, every year with rankings of universities, and rankings of everything, right, colleges, universities. And there's all this vying for who's in the top 10, and who's number one. And then this year, there was, the university that was designated number one prompted a mathematician at the university to just castigate US News and World Report about its methodology, and how this was bogus in many ways. All of this papers over, to me, the core problem here, and that is competition, and that is, interinstitutional competition. Our great schools, they compete, they compete for money, they compete for faculty, they compete for students. Most of all, they compete for prestige. And what that does is to pit institutions against one another, to vie for top positions, to get the laurel of a top 10 notice. All of this, if you look at this, it's almost exclusively based on very, I would say primitive arithmetic. I call this the debilitating arithmetic of prestige that these institutions are striving constantly, building new buildings, hiring new faculty, stealing faculty, taking in students, in order to burnish their reputation. So, you step back, and you look at climate change, and you look at the kind of global shared incidents of devastation that's going on. It's tremendous, almost every day, there's some story about a wildfire, or a sea rising, or flooding, never happened to hope before, or just record temperatures. When you read about Siberia in the 90s, in the summer, it should give you pause. I think it does give pause, but underneath this, the infrastructure of the university, the universities here and elsewhere, which should be a system, and I think the point here is that climate change because of its scale, requires an at-scale response, and you cannot achieve this if you are fighting and vying against one another all the time. This may sound as a one-off remark. I don't think it is, I think it's at the heart of the problem. And you see this competition among countries, you see this competition among research institutions, you see this among researchers too that we live in an environment, an academic environment, a knowledge environment, that competition is pervasive. And there's so many silos of knowledge, there's so many kinds of barricades of knowledge. And one library can have, you know, great information, one institution can have just 20 million volumes and another could have 30 million volumes. What we need right now is a concerted effort of people to work together in partnerships that are interdependent, not independent, in order to address these problems. These are problems of unprecedented scale, and unprecedented implications. We are not organized to do this, and I think that's what keeps me up at night more than anything.
Am Johal 35:48
Charles, is there anything you'd like to add?
Charles Henry 35:51
Well, I'm sorry, if this is not so uplifting, but I think it's important. I don't have anything to add specifically to the conversation. I do think there is hope, I will say that, and I do take inspiration in the way that conversations are turning, these days, and seem to recognize more and more the importance of what I would call interdependence, this podcast among them. So that's heartening. We're not giving up, but we're looking at our world in a way that is both respectful and rigorous, and at the same time sceptical as well.
Am Johal 36:31
Well, I just wanted to say Charles, I actually find it uplifting, because to me, I think that part of the work that you're doing, and the organisation you're with, is that you're asking the right questions, and for us to broaden the implications of what a climate emergency looks like. So, it provides the outlines for a kind of resistance and a kind of work and labour that we can all be doing. And so, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and joining us on Below the Radar.
Charles Henry 37:03
Oh, thank you, Am. been a great pleasure. And I hope we can continue this conversation.
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Gabriel Alegbeleye 37:13
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Charles Henry! Head to the show notes to learn more about the resources mentioned in the show. We release episodes every Tuesday, so make sure to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcasting app of choice to make sure you never miss an episode. Tune in next week for the fourth episode of The Climate Imaginary with guest Andréanne Doyon!
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