Natural heritage is the legacy of natural objects and intangible attributes encompassing the countryside and natural environment, including flora and fauna, scientifically known as biodiversity, and geology and landforms (geodiversity).
Heritage is that which is inherited from past generations, maintained in the present and bestowed for the benefit of future generations.
The term "natural heritage", derived from "natural inheritance", pre-dates the term "biodiversity", though it is a less scientific term and more easily comprehended in some ways by the wider audience interested in conservation biology. "Natural Heritage" was used in the United States when Jimmy Carter set up the Georgia Heritage Trust while he was governor of Georgia; Carter's trust dealt with both natural and cultural heritage,. It would appear that Carter picked the term up from Lyndon Johnson, who used it in a 1966 Message to Congress. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act of 1964. "Natural Heritage" was picked up by the Science Division of The Nature Conservancy when, under Jenkins, it launched in 1974 the network of state natural heritage programs. When this network was extended outside the USA, the term "Conservation Data Center" was suggested by Guillermo Mann and came to be preferred.
Read more about Natural Heritage: Legal Status
Famous quotes containing the words natural and/or heritage:
“A person who can’t pay gets another person who can’t pay to guarantee that he can pay. Like a person with two wooden legs getting another person with two wooden legs to guarantee that he has got two natural legs. It don’t make either of them able to do a walking-match.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Flowers ... that are so pathetic in their beauty, frail as the clouds, and in their colouring as gorgeous as the heavens, had through thousands of years been the heritage of children—honoured as the jewellery of God only by them—when suddenly the voice of Christianity, counter-signing the voice of infancy, raised them to a grandeur transcending the Hebrew throne, although founded by God himself, and pronounced Solomon in all his glory not to be arrayed like one of these.”
—Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859)