Motives
Early preservation efforts were driven by patriotism and a desire to protect the new establishment of the nation by wealthy, private individuals. Early efforts focused primarily on individual stuctures as opposed to areas such as a neighborhood in a city or a rural landscape. The preserved stuctures were often turned into museums to create a showcase and generate tourism. The focus of preservation eventually shifted from patriotism to the aesthetics of a structure or area and ultimately to the their structural relationships with society at large. Today, individuals and groups in a community work towards preservation as a whole. According to Dr. Robin Elizabeth Datel, modern motivations for preservation can be summed up in four points:
- to retain diverse elements of past
- to perpetuate the distinctive identities of places
- to involve amateurs in landscape care
- to practice a conservation approach to environmental change.
The economic benefits of preservation continue to become more important and better understood and documented. Preservation efforts produce the most number of jobs in the nation’s economy and these jobs create new businesses and tourism, increase property values, and enhanced the quality of life in a community.
Read more about this topic: National Historic Preservation Act Of 1966
Famous quotes containing the word motives:
“Single mothers have as much to teach their children as married mothers and as much love to share—maybe more. Yet their motives are often labeled selfish and single-minded—never mind all the babies brought into the world to snag husbands, “save” faltering marriages or produce heirs.”
—Anne Cassidy. “Every Child Should Have a Father But....,” McCall’s (March 1985)
“We have done scant justice to the reasonableness of cannibalism. There are in fact so many and such excellent motives possible to it that mankind has never been able to fit all of them into one universal scheme, and has accordingly contrived various diverse and contradictory systems the better to display its virtues.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“There seems to be a kind of order in the universe, in the movement of the stars and the turning of the earth and the changing of the seasons, and even in the cycle of human life. But human life itself is almost pure chaos. Everyone takes his stance, asserts his own rights and feelings, mistaking the motives of others, and his own.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)