Many disasters are approached by researchers, managers and policymakers as if they have a clear beginning, middle and end. But often the experience of being in a disaster is not like this. This book offers non-linear, non-prescriptive ways of thinking about disasters and allows the people affected by disaster the chance to speak.

The essays in this volume address the displacement of natural and cultural heritage caused by disasters, whether they be dramatic natural impacts or terrible events unleashed by humankind, including holocaust and genocide. Disasters can be natural or human-made, rapid or slow, great or small, yet the impact is effectively the same; nature, people and cultural heritage are displaced or lost. Yet while heritage and place are at risk from disasters, in time, sites of suffering are sometimes reframed as sites of memory; through this different lens these -difficult- places become heritage sites...

The concepts of nature, culture and heritage are deeply entwined; their threads run together in some of our finest museums, in accounts of exploration and discovery, in the work of artists, poets and writers, and in areas that are cherished and protected because of their landscapes and wildlife. The conservation ethic - placing a value on the natural environment - lies at the heart of the notion of -natural heritage-, but we need to question how those values originated, were consolidated and ultimately moulded and changed over time. In a contemporary context the connections between nature and...