Preservator Resolutions 2011

New Year's Greetings. NYPL Digital Gallery Image ID: 1587814

As we face a new year, the Preservator offers a few slightly heretical resolutions as food for thought. Care to share yours?

1. Don’t Look Back.

The past isn’t everything. Good preservation is as much about planning for the future as it is about caring for the past. It’s time to get more comfortable with treating preservation as one among many creative tools for shaping the future. Idealized recreations of the past are not suitable landscapes of the future. We should carry forward the lessons that historic places and things teach us and use those to help create a sustainable future for our cities, towns, and landscapes. Good preservation cannot and does not end with putting something under glass and then regulating the hell out of it.

 

2. Go Stealth.

I think it was Lenin who said that radical change was possible through a few well-placed men. Consider this as inspiration for the next year. There are real boundaries for preservation’s growth as a field. Ignore them. Better yet, violate them by embedding yourself in other fields. Work with environmentalists, historians, planners, architects, landscape architects, writers, urbanists, teachers, and policymakers alike to think holistically about the past and its future. Abandon territorial pissing matches over credit and ownership. These are meaningless and futile. Go forth and infuse.