GHF in the News - 2010 News Archives

Jeff Morgan GHF

Peer to Pier: Conversations with fellow travelers

January 2010

 

Jeff Morgan, 48, is co-founder of the Global Heritage Fund, which seeks to save the earth’s most significant and endangered cultural heritage sites in developing countries and regions, through scientific excellence and community development. I first became acquainted with GHF in the summer of 2008, when Jeff sent me a note after reading in The Boston Globe a piece I had written about Guatemala’s Maya ruin of Tikal.

My trip to Tikal made a profound impression on me. It was one of my earliest experiences in visiting a developing country, and I was jarred and saddened by the poverty I saw. I was also puzzled by and incredulous at the dearth of tourists at the site, and the fact that at times I felt like I had its 222 square miles to myself. When I commented as much to my guide Armando, his eyes lit up and he vigorously shook his head up and down in agreement. He was clearly pleased that a visitor appreciated the civilization’s mind-boggling milestones in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, and written language. He was equally gratified that his frustration, too, was understood; that the time, money, and resources of the archeological world have generally focused outside the Americas. See Travel Articles for Tikal story}

Fast-forwarding to a couple of weeks ago, I was editing this conversation with Jeff while on visit to the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. During my stay, I spent time at the Maya ruins of Chichen Itza, Coba, and Tulum. I had the privilege of being given tutorials by Julian, George, and Froylan, whose pride in their heritage was palpable. My new friend Patricio introduced me to a Maya couple, Victoria and Alberto, who welcomed me into their two-room home; Victoria made tortillas by hand and cooked them over an open fire. I bought some small napkins she had embroidered with the name of her village. Patricio told me that such sales had meant literally a new roof for their home, of the thatched variety. {See Travel Photos}

Experiences such as these are humbling. It was powerful to witness how fresh paths being cleared to and among the archeological ruins of a once-mighty society can make a real and meaningful difference in someone’s life. At Chichen Itza, Julian told me that as a Maya, he did not believe the last day of that civilization’s calendar being in 2012 means “the end.” Rather, he believes it represents a time of change and transformation, a time of new hope.

Jeff Morgan and the Global Heritage Fund are a part of that change. I hope you enjoy this conversation with him.

Meg: What exactly is a ‘heritage site’ and why are they important?

Jeff: Heritage sites are important for a wide variety of different reasons—a site might represent a masterpiece of human creative genius, or exhibit an important interchange of human values, or bear a unique testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which has disappeared, or be an outstanding example of human interaction with the environment, especially when it has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change. Heritage sites are also important for their economic value—many sites where we work will generate annual income over the next 20 years in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and be one of the most important economic assets for a region or nation’s development.

Meg: Can you explain Global Heritage Fund’s mission and how its creation came about?

Jeff: I’ve been traveling since I was about 13. I lived in Bogota, Colombia when I was young. I visited Santa Marta, where I saw extensive poverty with thousands of people living in the dirt outside Baranquilla with little to eat. Little has changed since and it made me realize I should focus on the poorest countries with the largest sites. How do you bring people out of poverty? And at the same time you’ve got amazing heritage sites that are just being decimated. I am especially interested to help those in deep systemic poverty use their own heritage to provide economic and cultural heritage revitalization.

If a person who has a lot of potential ends up strung out on drugs or self-destructs, you cry. That’s what’s happening here. You’ve got the best development opportunity for poor countries sitting right in your hand, and most governments just think ‘oh, heritage, that’s high culture that’s not real human development.’ So, they totally miss the long-term potential and they don’t invest. Ministries of Culture are usually under-funded and have few strong human resources. Development agencies and banks rarely combine the two—heritage conservation and development. It is always a distant priority, despite the major potential to bring hundreds of millions of dollars to a poor country which will enable development, schools, hospitals and roads. Out of all the things I’ve seen in my life, this is the biggest lost opportunity that I’ve ever seen- on a global scale.

When I was in international business development in the tech business, I was often traveling in Asia and lived in Japan for three years. I saw during the past twenty years how almost every historic city was torn down for modern development from Chiangmai in Thailand to Chengdu and Beijing in China.

Around major archaeological and heritage sites , we have people living in dirt-floor, tin-roof shacks, five people in the family in one room, and basically, little future for income growth ahead of them. Most of the international development organizations that are helping those places have really been doing charity work. They’re giving people fish as opposed to helping them learn how to fish and to take advantage of the major heritage sites and their potential.

And right next door, where there’s a big archeological site, you have hundreds or thousands of people who are benefiting from the tourism-related businesses with toilets and running water in their homes, and more income and a better life in terms of education and health. This huge difference was what really got me to think how major archaeological and heritage sites could be developed in a responsible way and really generate a long-term income for very poor people.

Meg: Was there a particular catalyst that moved you to take action?

Jeff: In 2001 I was on Santa Cruz, an island off Santa Barbara, sitting with the head of The Nature Conservancy (California), a guy named Steve McCormick. He said, ‘Jeff, we need more people from the private sector. Why don’t you do something in conservation?’

So I started thinking that day how I could make a personal commitment in the conservation world. I wasn’t a orange gibbon specialist or a marine biologist, but did have a degree from Cornell in City and Regional Planning. I knew I needed to work in the poorest countries, because that is where the real leverage is for philanthropic investment, not where everyone already has a Mercedes and a BMW. Major heritage sites offer a real economic opportunity- what I call a Trillion Dollar Opportunity for poor countries over the next fifty years. So, in 2002 I really decided to dedicate my life to save heritage sites in really poor areas.

More importantly, the planet is losing many of its most unique and one-of-a-kind sites- where there is only one example for an entire civilization like My Son Sanctuary in Vietnam, the country’s only archaeological World Heritage site which represents 2,000+ years of Champa Civilization. While there are hundreds of Roman amphitheatres across the Mediterranean getting funding, unique, one-of-a kind sites are being lost every year. Most of them happened to be in developing countries. If you look at where all the money goes, it goes into churches, mosques, synagogues and Buddhist sites. And then it goes into the Classics—Roman and Greek heritage, amphitheaters, temples and plazas. There’s a lot of money for the Classics. But a great many spectacular ancient sites don’t fit any of those categories. They are ruins and temples from early civilizations which happen today to be in very poor places with little human and financial resources to take care of them.

I had seen over the last decade working that there is a crisis of global scale- we are losing some of our most important heritage and archaeological sites in our generation. In Asia, except for Luang Prabang, Lijiang, Pingyao and a few other examples, we were losing pretty much every intact, historic district. Kathmandu to Chiang Mai has turned into high rise hotels, apartments and strip malls, just like my own California. I kind of got to the point where it was unbearable to go to Asia anymore. Even in Japan if you go to Kyoto it’s just one big love hotel. So it’s sad, you know, to have such a sacred place like Kyoto in one of the world’s richest countries, getting neon-light love hotels on every block. It just shows poor management. And that’s in Japan. That’s a first-world country. So you can imagine what’s happened in Chiang   Mai, Thailand which was one of Asia’s most intact sacred temple towns, and is now just high-rise apartments and hotels with a few historic sites in between

At Cornell, I studied city planning and learned about historic preservation from my professors, one of whom is on our board, Michael Tomlan and John Reps, who wrote the book on Historic American Cities. I learned about the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation and English Heritage helping to preserve historic monuments like Monticello and historic downtowns like Savannah, Georgia that were being lost to box retailers and by-passed by freeways, or lost to neglect and blight. After my experience in California watching one of the most beautiful places on earth become one big El Camino Real with malls, parking lots and industrial complexes with little regard to planning, livability or heritage, I became driven to make a difference.

How do we help to saves the places that are left? Help them manage their UNESCO World Heritage designation which suddenly brings millions of visitors? Help them improve site management, train the leadership in the towns or sites?

Dr. Ian Hodder had just come to Stanford from Cambridge University and was asked to establish the Stanford Archaeology Center (SAC). He is now on page one of every archeology textbook for his work in Catalhoyuk—the oldest known city in the world—9,000 years old in central Anatolia Turkey, near Konya. He is highly respected theoretically as an archeologist, as an author, and also as a leader in the movement towards community-based conservation and responsible site development.

We started talking about what we could do together and he brought all of his knowledge from 20+ years in the field and his ethics and methods which helped us develop Preservation by Design- our method and process. He helped us set up the GHF Senior Advisory Board, and I brought the business and management experience.

Meg: Can you tell me about the preservation program that the two of you came up with?

Jeff: We wanted to set a new, more effective and scalable private-sector model that would be focused on developing human resources and create sustainability in developing countries to save their heritage. Preservation by Design is a community-based model where the local people become the stewards and benefit from long-term income and jobs which enable site protection and preservation. The Preservation by Design method and process we developed that takes each site through a four-step process- planning, science, community and partnerships. It’s important to have all four happening in a site conservation program, because if you only do the science and you don’t work with the community, then the work will be neglected and fall apart down the road. If you only do the planning and you don’t do the conservation, then there are no trained conservators or jobs for people on the site to maintain it. Without partnerships, you have no local co-investment and long-term stewardship in the country. So you have to do all four simultaneously and make them work together.

You can bring in foreign experts, but if they don’t train the local people and the community, just parachute in and restore something and then walk away, then when the monument collapses the next time, there’s no local knowledge to restore it well or vested stewards in the site.

Partnerships are really important also for funding—we require in-country matching co-funding for all GHF Projects. In Guatemala, for the preservation of Mirador, an archaeological park comprising the largest and oldest Maya cities in the world, we’ve secured eleven companies to donate three million dollars towards the project, which doubles our funding. More important than money, we now have eleven founders and CEOs of the leading industries in Guatemala taking the project forward, working with the government and getting the general public to care for heritage. Now, Guatemalans are taking charge to care for Guatemalan heritage for the first time in a major way.

In every country we work to do the same- build partnership to last. In Cambodia, we’ve now got six companies: Land Rover, Comcel, the local banks – all coming together to save Banteay Chhmar, the next UNESCO World Heritage site in Cambodia, three hours north of Angkor.

That’s a very important process that hasn’t happened much in the world heritage conservation world to date. Most funding today comes from European governments or Japan and is given to developing country governments through UNESCO. In many of these developing countries, corruption of this system is rampant, and we believe a new, more effective private-sector model using a drip-feed system is needed to ensure monies are used in the best way.

Archaeologists have been accused of being some of the most destructive forces for heritage. For centuries, sites were dug up and left open to the rain and elements and artifacts pillaged. Now, a new conservation ethos is becoming the norm and while few archaeology project integrate scientific conservation into their programs, more larger projects are getting good planning, science and training local people.

We take a different tack which is that ninety plus percent of the people on a GHF Project site are locals, and we bring in a few key experts in each discipline to train the locals. It takes a little longer, but the end result is that locals are empowered to do more.

Because most cultural world heritage sites are basically ancient cities, my city and regional planning experience is highly relevant today. Because the sites are well defined in size and project scope, i.e. 5 km x 5 km area, and not 10 million hectares, I feel we can really make a difference. Because world heritage sites have international recognition, this helps in their protection and tourism to these sites guarantees sustaining income for site preservation and community development, which both reinforce each other.

Within the defined boundary of a site and its UNESCO World Heritage designation, I can use my skills and the skills of our experts, with seed funding and our methodology to make a strong impact. With our Preservation by Design method and process, we take them through an organized program of planning, science, community development and partnerships, which we hope will be a great replicable model in each of the countries we work and others then can use Preservation by Design for their other sites where we can’t work.

Meg: Can you tell me about the completed projects so far?

Jeff: Our first project completed was Lijiang Ancient Town in China, which was started in 2002 and we completed our work in 2007. Lijiang today has an approved master conservation plan and we completed over 200 historic Naxi residences.

The Old Town Management Committee of Lijiang has grown from just two people when we started to now over 150 full-time staff. They are taking care of many of the big problems they have had stemming from massive tourism which came from the UNESCO World Heritage designation in 1997. This brought unplanned modern construction inside the ancient city. But, with our master plan in place and approved by all government agencies, we were able to remove over 400, 000 meters of cinder-block concrete construction by 2007.

Commercialization became a big problem so a plan was developed to focus on local products and support local stores and craftsmen. So we basically kicked out all the Nike and Adidas stores, and all the other non-native products, and everything had to be made or at least branded locally. Now there are regulations enforced to make sure that shops and their products are more authentic and locally sourced, and neon and signage has been torn down and replaced with beautiful wood carved signs.

We restored about two hundred Naxi historic courtyards focusing on only the poorest families in the community. They went on to do about four hundred total and kept our Preservation Incentive Fund (PIF) program going. Despite our efforts and that of the government, the whole place is still just treading water to stay above the negative effects of mass tourism hitting the ancient town. When we started there, there were about sixty thousand tourists a year and now there are three and half million, mostly Chinese visitors, and the old town has been turned into a bar district with Karaoke and late night entertainment blasting music until the early morning. It is sad, but at least the historic fabric and authenticity has been greatly improved and they are working on moving out the Karaoke, wine and cigar bars to the new town as we speak.

Meg: Tell me about a couple of the other sites where you work.

Jeff: Foguang Temple in China was the first site that received UNESCO World Heritage designation during our work when we restored the monastery there. It’s the oldest wooden temple in China from the Tang Dynasty and is referred to by many as the Parthenon of Chinese architecture.

Foguang is a work of love and probably my favorite place- sacred, Buddhist, in the mountains where someone can be at one with nature and a sacred site . You have a lot of feeling there. People I take there are very touched and some have started crying when they go there because of how intense it is. Every Buddhist feels that the place has some kind of spirit. It’s in a remote part of China where the community didn’t realize what they had; how important Foguang is. Now they do. The government is starting to put a lot more money into the site’s preservation, I think they’re going to put about two million dollars into the East Hall temple next year, so that is a great sign that they are now paying great attention to Foguang. No one would put any money into it before.

In Kars Ancient City in eastern Turkey, we worked to save the historic district under one of the country’s top five fortresses . Kars is an amazing place, the crossroads of history, with an Armenian ancient city settlement and churches, and Ottoman hammams (bathhouses), bridges and mosques, and one of only two Russian historic grid layout cities in Turkey. So combined with its proximity to Ani Ancient City, it’s a pretty interesting place. We did the master planning, preserved the hammams, restored the Namik Kemal Community Center for use by local NGOs for training and other programs, and now Kars is a Class A registered archaeological area by the national government with strong protection.

Meg: What are a couple of the projects that GHF is involved with now?

Jeff: The site of Chavin de Huantar in Peru, which dates back to 1500 BC, was a center for ritual and pilgrimage with extensive trade and communication contacts. Chavin society ruled from Ecuador to Chile throughout the entire Andes 2,000 years before the Inca ever came on the scene.

GHF is working to integrate conservation, and sustainable community development in order to ensure long-term site appreciation, preservation and sustainability. The conservation team is involved in a range of activities including stabilizing primary monuments, repairing underground structures, locating underground structures with non-intrusive technologies, and cataloguing artifacts. The local community is engaged in conservation and craft training, employment, tourism entrepreneurship and regular consultations regarding the management of the site and its environs.

Banteay Chhmar, also known as “the Citadel of the Cats,” is one of the great architectural masterpieces of Southeast Asia and the Khmer Kingdom’s epic Angkorian Period. With no conservation over the past 800 years, the temple complex has slowly collapsed and disintegrated – its towers and awesome temples disappearing into the overgrowth. With GHF’s holistic approach to long-term site sustainability, the primary conservation and development goals at Banteay Chhmar are to implement a site Master Conservation Plan, to preserve the bas-relief galleries and stabilize the central temple complex, to aid the community in developing tourism to the site and, fourth, to assist the Cambodian government in the UNESCO World Heritage Site nomination and inscription process.

The newest GHF Project is in Colombia at Ciudad Perdida—a Tayona civilization site, one of about four hundred sites in the Burritaca Valley that are being opened up for tourism right now. Called the “Lost City,” it’s located high in the coastal range on northern Colombia’s Caribbean coast. The site is comprised of a series of stone platforms constructed along mountain ridges and today are threatened by erosion, destabilizing vegetative growth, neglect and unsustainable tourism, while related sites are also at risk of damage from looting. So we’re working with the Colombian government to help them manage the site in a responsible way and work with the indigenous people there, the Kogi, so that they’re part of the development. Right now they don’t own any of the tourism operators, they don’t have any of the ecologies, they don’t benefit from any of the visitors. And a lot of the young people in the Kogi want to be part of that positive development and income for the local communities.

Meg: So in that type of scenario, are you their advocate with the government?

Jeff: We’re always the community’s advocate with the government. By providing training and funding to establish local community associations for tourism and site management, local communities can be the stewards of a site and directly participate in visioning the site’s future. In Mirador, we have worked in the Mesa Multi-Sectorial involving over 100 stakeholders and today the area is getting major government investment in park infrastructure ($3 million in 2010) guided by this same community-led process.

Meg: Tell me a little more about the Cuidad Perdida project.

Jeff: It’s pretty new. It’s basically the next (Machu Picchu) Inca trail. If you look at the backpacker crowds, they’ve hit it now, and Israelis and Germans are all going now. There are now about forty visitors a day or twelve thousand people annually. It will be about thirty thousand pretty soon, so there is a pretty big need to manage that. The site’s falling apart, it doesn’t get any funding or have any conservation experts there. There’s no master plan yet.

There are two big sites. There’s Ciudad Perdida and then Pueblito. It’s all part of the Tayona National Park, a very special, natural reserve and also an indigenous Indian reserve. We’re just consolidating the site so it doesn’t wash down the hill. We’re making sure that the people are trained so that they can continue to maintain the site after the rains. Every time it rains, you’ve got to go out and make sure all the broken walls and things are fixed and are not sliding down the steep mountain slopes.

Meg: And is there another current project that you would single out?

Jeff: Fujian Tulous is in China, across from Chinese Taipei (or Taiwan). That was nominated and approved for UNESCO World Heritage last May. We’re doing one valley, which has four major tulous—those are round, earthen buildings that are a unique style of architecture designed for communal living. We have to tear down a lot of modern construction, train, and restore the tulous, make sure the highway that goes through doesn’t put in strip malls, gas stations and cinder-block apartment blocks and all that other stuff in this pristine environment.

We are training the local communities so that when someone shows up, the tulous are community-run, and well-run and people can stay there to generate local income. Basically, we are setting a new model. For the other 2,000 tulous in Fujian, most of them are not going to get national government money. They’re not going to receive millions of dollars like the other ones, and they’re going to have to take care of themselves, and they need to run them and benefit from them. We’re teaching them how to do planning, how to make sure that there’s not modern encroachment so that it’s an environmental, natural preservation project as much as it is heritage preservation. These are beautiful green mountain valleys that are being destroyed with ten-story high-rise hotels.

Meg: How do you select the sites that you choose to focus on?

Jeff: There are five criteria: that the site is endangered, that it has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site; and thirdly, that there is a proven leader in conservation and a team in place. We don’t create teams. There is usually a world-class archaeologist like Dr. Ian Hodder who has perhaps been working at a site for fifteen years but doesn’t have money for conservation. Fourth, that there’s in-country matching funding available. Fifth, there’s opportunity for tourism—we don’t tend to work in remote places that don’t have a city or town nearby where we can find skilled people and where there is an opportunity for development – because it’s the tourism that creates the income for the people and sustainability.

Meg: Could tell me a little bit about the Global Summit for Heritage that’s planned for next year?

Jeff: Global Heritage Fund is a primary convener of a summit on heritage conservation in developing countries that’s being held next April at the United Nations in New York.

We’re bringing together about 250 of the top funders for heritage in developing countries from around the world. There are a large number of funders around the world—universities, development agencies, foundations and others—but it’s a very fractured, dispersed group. Many are not focused on developing countries, where we really believe the greatest need is.

Meg: And is this is the first such gathering of its kind?

Jeff: That I know of.

Meg: And can you tell me what your hopes are that will come out of it?

Jeff: There are three goals. The first is to build a global coalition, similar to the Global Fund for AIDS, focused on heritage in developing countries. Second, we are working to build global awareness with the experts, the general population and the donor community. The third goal is to increase overall funding focused on endangered heritage in the poorest countries.

We hope this summit and the global study we will be publishing will help stop the loss and destruction before we lose many of mankind’s most important sites and one of the planet’s greatest opportunities for economic development in poor countries.

Meg: That’s a good segue into the next question—can you describe who makes up the Global Heritage Fund infrastructure, and what the different roles involve?

Jeff: Basically we have a global network, which is growing. The inner core is the staff, about 12 people full time. Then next circle is our project directors. Then there are our Board of Trustees and the Senior Advisory Board, which provide the strategic and technical direction for GHF’s work. Basically we are working with a large network of experts and donors around the world to develop a safety net for the most endangered sites. Everybody has different expertise and ways to contribute.

I think in the past people didn’t feel like they could contribute because they thought only archeologists can do that. But, no, lots of people can do it. Look at our Board. They’re all business people, and they’re helping save sites. Our donors are helping save sites. Our partners are helping save sites. There are multiple skill sets coming together with funding and regional knowledge, country knowledge and conservation and development knowledge.

We just set up the GHF Diplomatic Counsel—many are former ambassadors from the countries where we work. People like Hon. Henrietta Fore, who was the administrator for the U.S. Agency for the International Development (USAID) and Bonnie Cohen, who was Under Secretary of State for Ambassador Madelaine Albright are taking the initiative to save our heritage. We now have other ambassadors that have been working in Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Russia, China. They all provide country knowledge and contacts we vitally need to be successful.

The Project Directors are the core for the whole GHF program to save the sites. These are the people that we select very carefully to give money to over five years to save sites. Most are archaeologists and we work with them on the areas they don’t tend to know as well – planning, scientific conservation, community development and partnerships

Meg: Can you tell me what a day-in-the-life of what a project leader is like?

Jeff: Get up real early in the morning, its 110 degrees outside. You get as much work done as you can before everyone has to shut down at 11:00. Then back up 4-8pm. Then do it all over again. Wait out the rains when it starts pouring for four days straight. I mean, these guys are just super heroes. Each Project Director is not the same at all, and each site is so different- one’s in the jungle, one’s on the coast of Libya – but they all have a Herculean task of archaeology, planning, conservation, community development, training and building partnerships for long-term sustainability.

Meg: Can you describe your role?

Jeff: The most important thing that I do is I help an archeologist develop a plan and the team to bring the needed expertise and the skills for site conservation success- what training is needed, what materials to use, how do you restore a mud-brick building versus the stone buildings, etc. Then the third big thing is how to work with the community. Most archeologists bring their students down each summer and really don’t involve the community in the preservation of the archeological site. Now we have a number of programs with hundreds of community members involved. I work with the team to build the partnerships so that they have private sector donors and other leaders—like the Mirador board—who can continue to support a site’s progress after GHF exits after our 5-6 year program.

Meg: Can you tell me a little bit about the interplay between the Global Heritage Fund and UNESCO?

Jeff: UNESCO World Heritage is an inter-governmental agency which is largely government-funded. We are a privately funded international conservancy. We work primarily with national governments and keep in close communication with UNESCO people all around the world in all our projects. UNESCO works on the government level to set the rules and regulations and manage the UNESCO World Heritage list.

UNESCO World Heritage has over 990 sites now. Their designation brings major tourism to sites, and suddenly, Angkor Wat’s got three million visitors crawling all over that temple. Mass tourism can be a huge destructive force if not managed. This is especially a problem in developing countries without regulations and enforcement. International cultural heritage tourism is really starting to ramp up in the last ten years. Now we are having three million people crawling on a three-thousand-year-old city without restrictions- this is a disaster. An ancient city will last for about 20 more years then start to rapidly deteriorate and once it is gone, it is gone forever. If you rebuild it with new stone, then it is no longer authentic, or if it is so beat up, then no one wants to go there. Machu Picchu has the same problem. Angkor Wat, Petra — these places that have so many tourists, and the countries are not reinvesting into the site what is needed to stay ahead of the conservation issues. In many cases, the gate fee money is being pulled out and not being reinvested- the site is being used as a cash cow. It’s the same way in Tikal – lots of money in but little for the site or other major Maya sites in the region.

Meg: And what do you see as a solution to that?

Jeff: I think fifty to seventy five percent of gate fees should go to the site, for sure. And then better management, better training, better planning. Every site should have a good management plan; every site should have a conservation plan. Every site should have an excavation and research plan. Those three plans then dictate the priorities, the development, and then the conservation science. Experts, whether international or regional, should help the people who don’t have as much expertise learn how to consolidate and restore monuments. We propose changing the mindset from heavy reconstruction to lighter, non-destructive consolidation of ruins. You can stabilize the ruin, but you can’t rebuild it. No new stone.

Meg: For all those people that want to see these historic sites, the three million people that want to go to Machu Picchu, how would you have society respond to the demand by such great numbers to see these sites?

Jeff: Better tourism management. You have to limit use; you have to redirect use to other parts of the monument. You have to put in walkways, so they are not crawling on the monument itself. You have to restrict visitation. I mean, it’s just as simple as that. It’s just like managing a lake resource or a natural resource. If you go to Versailles, they don’t let you just crawl all over and write graffiti in every room. In the first world, where there are lots of trained people and lots of resources, the sites are being fairly well taken care of. There are a lot of exceptions to that but in general, the work in Italy and France and the United States is pretty good. It’s really the poorest hundred countries where there’s the worst problems and, unfortunately, many of the best sites in the world happen to be in those countries. We’re in a crisis situation right now in over 100 countries.

Meg: What has been one of your most rewarding moments?

Jeff: When someone thanks us sincerely for our work- this gives me a lot of hope. When people start to really care for a monument or sacred site again. Where they have hope and they didn’t before. Before they were looting or digging ditches for somebody for $2 a day. Or they were poaching the wildlife, or they were taking the bricks off of the buildings to build their houses, and now they’re making two hundred dollars a week guiding tourists or conserving the monuments. Or they’ve got their own restaurant, or they bought a taxi and they’re taking people back and forth. There’s a hundred ways to make money in the tourism business.

The Guatemalan government just announced three million dollar funding for Mirador, that was our biggest success yet from a government funding. We had a big celebration in Guatemala in December, and that was a very good moment because a very poor country is realizing how important what they have is. They are realizing that if they put three million in that site, if it’s done well, it will generate thirty million a year for the next twenty years. When the president of Guatemala gave his inauguration speech in January, 2008, he said that one of his priorities is Mirador, so that was a big thrill for us to be at the inauguration. Having recognition of the sites and their value by the local people and by the top government people are probably our best moments.

Meg: There must be heartbreaking moments—could you share a couple of those experiences?

Jeff: Seeing the destruction of our world heritage, especially in the developing world is heartbreaking. The loss is accelerating and we will have few historic sites left in many countries, especially historic districts of ancient cities like Lijiang or Pingyao. There will be only a few left out of hundreds, and those highly exploited. We’ve lost hundreds of sites in the last ten years. Those are being documented and put up on to our Global Heritage Network (GHN) in a very scientific way so we can monitor the loss and destruction and highlight the progress and innovative solutions many sites are implementing.

We are one of the only groups working exclusively in the poorest countries and regions, so we are enabling conservation and community development successes for the first time for many of these countries. It is filled with challenges but we can set a model for success and show all the new opportunity for development and protecting sites for the long term.

I recently briefly surveyed the 92 ancient cities registered in China and found only 14 that have a historic district left. Kashgar has been in the news lately. Kashgar is considered the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia. We’ve helped save two of the 14, Pingyao and Lijiang, and hopefully they’ve stabilized, but the rest of the fourteen left I really don’t know how they will fare, even with China’s increasing focus on heritage conservation and the environment.

In the past decade, we have lost hundreds of sites and many world heritage sites have been extremely damaged. In Azerbaijan they tore down a World Heritage-class Armenian cemetery that was five acres of carved stone in one week and sent in the soldiers and knocked the whole thing down and turned it into road rubble. Mosques are being blown up in Samarra; temples and mosques are being destroyed up in Pakistan, and neglect and the elements continue to destroy incredible and unique heritage sites year in and year out.

Meg: So would you say the destruction is environmental and lack of funding as well as conflict?

Jeff: I just think it hasn’t been a priority of our planet. But, climate change wasn’t a priority four years ago, and now it’s on the table in Copenhagen. Al Gore has been a great communicator, and the scientists are finally coming through. That has not happened yet in heritage, and heritage is being decimated and nobody seems to care.

We are building a new coalition of scientists and the experts, the president of the American Archeological Institute, the top professors at University College in London, Cambridge, Harvard, Stanford – these experts are now all saying that what’s happening is unsustainable and we’re losing our irreplaceable heritage.

I wake up every morning and think, ‘what a loss.’ But we are going to do something about it. In a developed country, most of the sites where we work would be a billion dollar site generating tens of millions every year for the country and the local community. So, why isn’t conservation happening? There is the issue of will, and there just aren’t yet the resources available or the organization to tackle the problem on a global scale. That is what we have set out to change.

We have to stop the loss and destruction, and take advantage of this incredible, huge development potential we can unleash for developing countries—this is a win-win in every way. We don’t have to trade development for heritage—we can combine them and make it an even bigger long-term opportunity.

By training people and making small investments like we’re doing, sites can consistently generate a millions of dollars every year. Many sites are much larger opportunities over 40-50 years. Chavin de Huantar—the next Machu   Picchu. Pingyao Ancient City can easily be a billion dollar site, second only to coal for industry in the entire Shanxi province. My Son and Hoi An together in Vietnam is another billion dollar site. Every one of the sites we’re working on—Lijiiang, China—a billion dollars over 40-50 years.

So we’re working in an industry that has hundreds of billions, if not a trillion dollar potential, that’s just being lost because of lack of vision and small investment. That’s the worst. Like the promising Harvard grad who ends up lost on drug addiction—what a total waste.

Meg: Is there anything that gives you hope?

Jeff: There are a lot of amazing people in our industry of heritage preservation—that’s the good part. People are coming up with new, innovative solutions. There are new technologies and new consortiums working together. Look at what happened in Copenhagen. Everyone got together and said we’re going to solve this, that’s pretty hopeful. And I hope we’ll do the same thing for world heritage in the next couple years.

Meg: Has a stranger ever made a difference in your day?

Jeff: A park guard in Guatemala at Mirador saying that he had hope for the first time in his life. He was basically out there as a looter for his whole life digging up these places, and he knew it was wrong. We have now moved an entire community, about 1,500 people, to a conservation economy away from an exploitation economy. We have shut down the looting for most of the Mirador area, which is about a million acres now. It’s under tight control with guards and rangers and now the looting is scattered as opposed to systematic. Eighty percent of the economy is now related to tourism and conservation of the park rather than exploitation, poaching, looting, illegal logging. For this guard to come out in front of all his family and local people and say this is the first time I really have hope for the future, that was a pretty powerful day. Every site visit we meet new people and learn from their own experiences. I think the most important thing is to keep listening.

Meg: It sounds like you have found your calling, your place in the world. For readers who want to make a change in their life, and want to contribute and make a difference, and aren’t sure how to begin, what advice would you give them, as someone who has successfully made a major vocational shift?

Jeff: I realized that my background in city planning and historic preservation could work in poor countries and regions with major archaeological and heritage sites. Working in a specific technical discipline is also a plus where you can add value from your training and experience. My years in international business development gave me the other foundation—the ability to work globally, a respect for other cultures and proficiency in five languages, especially Chinese and Spanish, which are critical for half the world. I just needed the model. Dr. Hodder gave me the framework to think holistically about heritage conservation- which is now our Preservation by Design method—planning, conservation, community development and partnerships—which we hope will become a foundation process and method for all future work in world heritage conservation to achieve long-term sustainability.

My suggestion, in short: Just Do It. Decide what you value in life and work to help what you really believe in. For more information about the Global Heritage Fund
www.globalheritagefund.org/