A Past Yet to Arrive

Examining committee chair: Robert RibePlanning for uncertain, future climates has become a dominant framework in resource management fields, and has recently expanded into cultural resource strategies within the National Park Service (NPS). However, because the NPS views material cultural resources, such as built features, as having no ability to change with the environment, adaptive capacity has been omitted from the cultural resource vulnerability assessment framework. Adaptive capacity contributes to a living system’s ability to recover from and resist future impacts, thereby increasing its resilience. By omitting adaptive capacity, recent preliminary cultural landscape vulnerability assessments (VAs) excluded all resiliency considerations— an oversight that could undermine cultural landscape comprehension and adaptive planning. This project demonstrates that flood-resilient, culturally significant built features exist worldwide, and that they embody climate change management insights. Objectives included distilling resilience strategies from four case studies; applying these strategies to design intervention thought-experiments for Scotty’s Castle, a flood-vulnerable NPS cultural landscape; and assessing each intervention's resiliency and cultural integrity trade-offs. Findings suggest that all realms of resiliency (ecological, social, organizational, and engineering) should be factored into cultural landscape VAs, and that truly adaptive planning requires tight coupling of management and resource subsystems. Additional adaptive management implications are discussed