Sic Transit Gloria Mundi: Preserving the Cultural Heritage

By Jan Lundius
STOCKHOLM, Sweden, Nov 6 2024 (IPS)

Thus wrote, not without reason, in 23 BCE the proud and self-conscious Horace. So far, he has been quite right – ancient monuments have crumbled, or disappeared completely, while his poetry still remains. However, you might ask – for how much longer? Latin is already dead, at least as a spoken language, while its connoisseurs are dwindling. Pessimists may contradict Horace’s optimism with Thomas à Kempis phrase from 1418: O quam cito transit gloria mundi, how quickly the glory of the world passes away. As a matter of fact, more and more people, in particular youngsters, have a diminishing interest in the written word, in particular in the form of longer texts like novels and newspaper editorials, preferring short messages and slogans that are easy to understand and preferably not longer than half a page.

Nevertheless, some human creations remain for a very long time. The most potent form of nuclear waste does, according to most scientists, need to be safely stored away for up to one million years, the time needed to ensure radioactive decay, i.e. actually a far longer stretch of time than the period that has passed since the first Neanderthals appeared on earth.

How may we be able to warn future generations about lethal dangers buried beneath Earth’s surface? Thousands of years from now, our descendants can probably not understand any of the writing systems currently in use. And how can we now adequately predict which future geological upheavals lay in store? Nuclear waste is drilled deep down into primeval rock, but can it really be guaranteed that cracks cannot occur, that atomic waste will not sip into underground water resources? Considering who little was expected from the effects of climate change just a few years ago, it makes you wonder about the safe future of our planet and the shortsighted damage we are doing to it.

In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault was inaugurated on the Norwegian island of Spitzbergen. It is intended to be a secure backup facility for the world’s crop diversity. More than 100 metres below earth, in the tunnels of an abandoned coal mine, the Seed Vault currently conserves 1,280,677 accessions, representing more than 13,000 years of agricultural history.

By the inauguration of this unique seed-bank it was said that the deep-frozen plant material would be safe from any temperature change and water damage, resting as it was under Arctic permafrost. However, already in 2016, an unusually large amount of water seeped in to the Vault’s entrance tunnel, 100 metres underground. The water flow was stopped just before it reached the precious plant material, though the incident indicated that the frozen permafrost no longer is a guarantee for safeguarding the Vault – Arctic temperatures are now rising four times faster than in the rest of the world making the permafrost melt at an unexpected speed. Improvements to the Vault have been made to prevent water intrusion, the tunnel walls have been made “waterproof” and above ground, draining ditches now surround the entrance to the Vault.

Filled with pride, hope and expectations Horace wrote that his poems would survive for thousands of years. Nevertheless, he could not have predicted how humans now are destroying our shared environment. Authors have for more than a hundred years warned us about what is currently happening. First it was mainly science fiction writers who produced terrifying dystopias about what could happen to our planet if we continue to abuse its natural resources, depleting its organic life, and destroying its life preserving beauty. This literary trend is still alive, particularly after the nuclear bombs that in 1945 wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the melt down of the nuclear reactor in Tjernobyl. One disturbing and well written example of such dystopias is the Russian author Tatyana Tolstaya’s novel The Slynx from year 2000.

After some kind of nuclear disaster, disfigured people survive in what was once Moscow. They depend on mice for food and clothing, and know almost nothing about the past. Most of them cannot read and write, though a handful of people who live in this nightmarish reality remember how life was before the Blast, before civilization collapsed and brought culture down with it. These people occasionally quote poetry and dream of bringing about a cultural renaissance, though the reader understands they are a dying breed and there is almost nothing left to resurrect. Books still exist, but anyone found with one of them is hunted down and severely punished, while their books are confiscated, all in the name of stopping “freethinking.”

Is a nuclear catastrophe necessary for us all to end up in such misery? The author Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta. He grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and is currently living in New York. In his non-fiction book The Great Derangement, Gosh wonders why an extremely dangerous threat like climate change is not overshadowing cultural expressions. He emphasizes that the frightening effects of climate change are already with us. They are evident everywhere, though strangely enough people are still listening to dangerous climate change deniers, like the increasingly deranged Donald Trump. According to Gosh, depictions of the threat of climate change can no longer be banished to science fiction, but has to be convincingly expressed in all strands of art, literature, theatre, and movies. Gosh provides an example of this in his own novel Gun Island, which takes its starting point in Sunderbans, a huge West Bengali mangrove forest, currently threatened by polluting biochemical industries and rising sea levels. The novel deals with the vulnerability of climatological migrants and the ongoing, galloping destruction of human and animal habitats. As a story coloured by magic realism it ranges from Bangladesh, which climate change threatens with almost complete annihilation, to Venice, this dreamlike treasure house of amazing art that likewise appears to be doomed to disappear.

Gosh’s novel leads us back to Spitzbergen. Close to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is another abandoned coal mine, even deeper than the one where the Seed Vault is accommodated. At the depth of 300 metres, we find the vaults of the Arctic World Archive (AWA), where governments, associations and private persons are welcomed, for a fee, to store what they assume to be world heritage. Down deep below, under permafrost (so far) we find copies and microfilm of a wide assortment of items that AWA is guaranteeing to safeguard for at least 2000 years. Here the Vatican has sent copies and microfilms of its vast collection of inestimable manuscripts, an organisation called Linga Aeterna is preserving recordings of 500 languages on the brink of extinction, the Polish Government has deposited copies of literary works and Chopin’s manuscripts. Here we find a wide collection of movies and rock music, as well as blueprints of architectural-, industrial, and car designs from the World’s biggest firms, etc., etc.

Thoughtful speculators and depositors are by AWA treated with advertising materials and movies reminding them of threats to the cultural heritage, like war and terrorism with footage showing the destruction of the immense Buddha in Bamiyan and how ISIS destroyed priceless cultural treasures in Palmyra and Mosul. Other disasters are highlighted, not the least those triggered off by climate change, which if nothing is done to stop it, will around 2050 have placed most of Florida, Bangladesh and the Maldives under water and completely inundated and destroyed Venice.

Spitzbergen is not the only place harbouring deposits of cultural heritage. In the salt mines of Hallstatt in Austria the so-called Memory of Mankind stores, within specifically designed, “indestructible” ceramic containers, huge amounts of microfilm and copies of valuable art and manuscripts. Libraries and archives around the world also shelter underground labyrinths, filled with books, magazines, and documents.

However, the question remains – for how long time will these enormous deposits be able to withstand the drastic changes that menace our Earth, and will future generations, if they now survive what threatens us all, be able to find these deposits of human endeavour, be interested in them, or even be able to understand them? Will our descendants be capable of benefitting from all that presumably has been preserved in these secluded places – or will they like the miserable creatures of Tolstoya’s depressing wasteland either despise all of it, or consider these items to be dangerous? Let us at least for the moment appreciate the written treasures left to us by poets like Horace and teach our children to appreciate what our ancestors have left behind, learn from it and also value, and enjoy what is written today.

Main sources: Gosh, Amitav (2016) The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press. Gosh, Amitav (2019) Gun Island. London: John Murray. Horatius Flaccus, Quintus (1967) The Odes of Horace Translated by James Michie. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics. Stagliano, Riccardo (2024) “A futura memoria”, Il Venerdi di Repubblica, 25 ottubre. Tolstaya, Tatyana (2016) The Slynx. New York Review of Books.

IPS UN Bureau