Natural, Wild, Canada: An Ethnography of Canada's World Heritage Sites

Phillip Vannini used Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council funds for an interdisciplinary exploration of Canada's World Heritage Sites and their relation to nature and wilderness.

World Heritage Sites officially recognized by UNESCO as having special cultural or natural significance. At the present time, the list of World Heritage Sites is comprised of 1031 sites: 802 of which are cultural, 197 natural, and 32 mixed cultural and natural. To be nominated and then recognized, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one of ten criteria, six of which pertain to cultural qualities and four to natural properties. The criteria pertaining to World Heritage Sites’ outstanding natural properties include superlative natural phenomena, exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance, significant examples of geological, ecological, and biological processes, as well as most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity. Canada has 17 World Heritage sites: 8 cultural and 9 natural.

UNESCO’s descriptions of the significance of the 9 Canadian natural sites make repeated references to their pristine, intact, undisturbed, spectacular, and wild characteristics. Such discourse draws upon a well-established cultural vocabulary of nature, wildness, and wilderness that has deep historical precedents rooted in the prototypical Western binary opposition between culture vs. nature and civilization vs. wilderness. Contrasted with culture and human civilization, wilderness brings to mind places where humans are excluded, remaining only as short-term visitors. For example, the 1964 US Wilderness Act specifies that wilderness places are: natural and thus free from the effects of modern civilization; undeveloped and therefore not permanently inhabited by humans and devoid of building structures; untrammeled and hence free from control and manipulation; and rich in outstanding opportunities for solitude and primitive types of recreation.

Researchers in cultural studies have long disputed these notions of nature and wilderness and worked at unsettling the binary opposition between nature and culture. If we cannot take for granted what nature is, then it is imperative to document how natures unfold. The research question is how is nature assembled at Canada’s Natural World Heritage Sites? Rather than existing outside of socio-cultural processes, natures are conceptualized here as entangled outcomes of their relations—thus as “meshworks” undergoing constant transformation. Participant observation and interviews to be conducted at all nine Canadian Natural Heritage sites will generate the data necessary to answer the research question.

Cultural studies of Canada’s World Heritage Natural Sites are virtually non-existent. At first, this gap in the literature seems to make sense: cultural studies scholars are supposedly best equipped to deal with cultural heritage, whereas the natural sciences are ideally suited to focus on nature. Nevertheless, if we agree on the importance of rejecting the long-surpassed nature-culture binary opposition, then it makes perfect sense to approach the study of natural heritage from the perspective of cultural analysis. I aim to describe and understand how natures are enacted in Canada’s World Heritage Natural Sites through writing and a documentary film inspired by contemporary thinking and empirical knowledge on nature, wilderness, wildness, and natural heritage and therefore contribute to the interdisciplinary literature on this subject across the cultural and social sciences. The project has a strong focus on knowledge mobilization outside the academy, seeking to generate more sophisticated (but still engaging) and culturally responsible notions of nature, wilderness, wildness, and natural heritage.