The Future Has Other Plans Planning Holistically to Conserve Natural and Cultural Heritage

Crisis has enveloped the more than 200,000 nationally and regionally protected natural and cultural heritage sites around the world. Heritage managers – those who manage natural sites such as national parks, wilderness areas, and biosphere reserves, as well as those who manage cultural sites including historic monuments, battlefields, heritage cities, and ancient rock art sites – face an urgent need to confront this crisis, and each day that they don’t, more of our planet’s common heritage disappears. Although heritage management and implementation suffer from a lack of money, time, personnel, information, and political will, The Future Has Other Plans argues that deeper causes to current problems lurk in the discipline itself. Drawing on decades of practical experience in global heritage management and case studies from around the world, Jon Kohl and Steve McCool provide an innovative solution for conserving these valuable protected areas. Merging interdisciplinary and evolving management paradigms, the authors introduce a new kind of holistic planning approach that integrates the practice of heritage management and conservation with operational realities.

Jon Kohl is coordinator and founder of the PUP Global Heritage Consortium , a non-profit global network dedicated to introducing emerging paradigms into the heritage management and planning field to stem the crisis of unimplemented management plans. He launched the Public Use Planning Process while working at RARE Center for Tropical Conservation in Honduras. Steve McCool is Professor Emeritus, Wildland Recreation Management, the Department of Society and Conservation of the College of Forestry and Conservation, University of Montana, and Associate, Center for Protected Area Management, Colorado State University. He is a member of the World Commission on Protected Areas and currently serves on its Tourism and Protected Areas Specialist Group.