DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
15 July 2008
The Heritage of All Humanity
What does Independence Hall, an 18th-century building site in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, share with the teeming sea life of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef? What is the connection between the icy peaks and the hemlock forests of Alaska’s Glacier Bay and the ancient temples and spiritual presence of Cambodia’s Angkor Wat complex?
All of these are designated as World Heritage Sites, places of distinctive significance in humanity’s shared natural and cultural inheritance. The World Heritage List, now encompassing more than 875 sites, is maintained under the World Heritage Convention, a conservation treaty recognized by 185 nations, making it the most widely recognized international instrument for the preservation of both natural and cultural heritage sites.
Seventeen of the 20 U.S. sites on the World Heritage List are part of the National Park Service system, and the Park Service’s Office of International Affairs serves as the U.S. government’s technical advisor on World Heritage matters. World Heritage sites in the United States include such iconic landmarks as Yellowstone National Park, Grand Canyon National Park, and the Statue of Liberty, along with lesser-known sites such as Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in Illinois – a prehistoric American Indian city -- and the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, a still-active communal living structure built by Anasazi Indians before 1400.
The idea for the World Heritage Convention comes from a 1971 proposal by the administration of President Richard Nixon, who portrayed the idea as a global expression of the park concept born in the United States. Nixon outlined the idea in a statement of his environmental policy: “It would be fitting by 1972 for the nations of the world to agree to the principle that there are certain areas of such unique worldwide value that they should be treated as part of the heritage of all mankind and accorded special recognition as a part of a World Heritage Trust.”
The U.S. delegation presented the concept of the convention at the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972, and the convention was adopted later that year by the General Conference of United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).
Russell E. Train, who served as chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Nixon administration, made the U.S. presentation in Stockholm and played a key role in the founding of the convention under the auspices of UNESCO. On the 30th anniversary of the convention, Train said that the World Heritage Convention recognizes “the integral interrelationship between humanity and environment, as well as between the natural environment and the man-made environment.”
The diverse and far-flung sites recognized by the convention are considered the legacy of all humankind while still being under the control of the country that nominated them. By participating in the convention, nations pledge themselves as caretakers of the unique sites on the World Heritage List “for whose protection it is the duty of the international community as a whole to cooperate.”
The National Park Service and other U.S. agencies such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Forest Service have worked with participating nations in the convention to help protect hundreds of World Heritage Sites around the globe -- from the Galapagos Islands to the Taj Mahal to the volcanoes of Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula.
The Port of the Moon, port city of Bordeaux, France, is among the most recently listed sites, noted as an inhabited historic city that has fostered cultural exchange for 2,000 years. The Jeju Volcanic Island and Lava Tubes in South Korea were also added to the World Heritage List in 2007. The site includes the finest system of lava tubes anywhere on Earth and has contributed greatly to the scientific understanding of volcanism, according to World Heritage Convention documents.
