I watched another wonderful museum close down in my community this week. I loved wandering through this institution, looking at the exhibits, the collections of objects that represented great stories of people and events. And yet the museum had experienced declining attendance and financial support in recent years. Unfortunately, this story is repeated many times around the country every year.
Many of us manage natural or cultural resources as part of our duties as interpreters. These resources could take the form of a natural area, a historic site, a collection of cultural objects or nature specimens, or many other possibilities. I’ve been giving more and more thought to the difference between managing these things as artifacts and managing them as assets.
An artifact can be defined as some tangible object or collection of objects, usually human-made. However, a secondary definition is that of something that is left behind or remains from an earlier event or process. That secondary definition can suggest artifacts are relicts that may have limited relevance in our current lives, and may therefore have limited value. If we focus strictly on their collection and preservation, we can inadvertently reinforce that perspective.
An asset can be defined as a useful or valuable quality, person, or thing; also an advantage or resource. Assets are usually managed in a way that maintains and/or increases their value. That value can be defined by the market, by the community or by other institutions. So in managing an asset, the wise manager tries to determine how it is valued and by whom, and then looks for ways to increase that value. Makes sense for a stock portfolio or real estate, but what if we looked at our interpretive resources that way?
In the case of my local museum, the community that built that museum has changed over time. Perhaps the conditions that originally created value for this asset have changed and the organization can benefit from re-defining itself with the current community and re-establishing a new value as an asset to that community. I guess that might be like increasing the “curb appeal” of an older home in a changing neighborhood.
In my work helping to inspire audiences to support ocean conservation, I focus on this perspective frequently. If we view fisheries as artifacts, relicts of a past era when the ocean was seen as an inexhaustible resource, but now broken and without value in the future—there is little reason to care for the future of the oceans. But if we look at ocean resources as important assets with economic as well as other current values, now we’re willing to restore that value and cultivate that asset.
It’s entirely a matter of perspective. We can view resources as artifacts or as assets, and manage them accordingly. Personally, I look at the natural and cultural resources around us as assets that nature and human kind have invested in across decades and eons. This legacy isn’t a relict, rather it’s the accumulated wealth that is now ours to manage. We can continue to grow this wealth and prosper, or we can squander it. Asset or artifact?
-Jim Covel
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