Agricultural Heritage and Conservation Beyond the Anthropocene

Abstract

This chapter explores the contemporary significance of agricultural heritage, a concept in which the largely cultural and societal concerns for heritage preservation are shuffled into those related to nature conservation and the development of agriculture. Both heritage preservation and nature conservation cast mutually constitutive and relatively fixed ideas of past nature and culture into present and future. Agriculture, too, arrives heavily burdened with inherited meaning, as historically and materially it is “Exhibit A” in the powerful modern narrative of “Culture” gradually rising over “Nature.” In this context, agricultural heritage is almost automatically cast as a relic of the past ways of traditional peoples and their less efficient, less useful, pre-Modern natures. This chapter suggests instead that agricultural heritage represents one of humankind’s richest bodies of environmental experience and most successful manners of conveying knowledge through time, providing material examples of alternative knowledge of nature itself.

Managing the Historical Agricultural Landscape in the Sicilian Anthropocene Context. The Landscape of the Valley of the Temples as a Time Capsule

“…According to Niles [73,74], traditional agriculture is usually considered a relic of the past, an inefficient way of farming the land. In reality, and this is amply demonstrated by the case of the Valley of the Temples, traditional agriculture is one of the richest testimonies of human environmental experience, one of the most successful ways to establish a relationship of collaboration with the nature that is transmissible and sustainable [13].…”