UNESCO World Heritage: Preserving the Best of Humanity

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeartRadio.

**Josh Clark** (0:11)
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and this is Stuff You Should Know. And this is a fairly rare edition where we do an episode that we decided to do within the last few episodes. We don't usually turn around that fast. Usually it's like seven to eight years.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:29)
Yeah, this is a quick one, and Julia turned this around for us pretty statty. I just made that up.

**Josh Clark** (0:38)
Sure, but I get it.

**Chuck Bryant** (0:39)
I think everyone knows what we mean. But we're talking about Unesco World Heritage Sites.
Unesco standing for, which I never knew. I'm glad I know this now, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, whom in 1972 drafted this treaty to preserve world heritage as a whole. Whether it's, as we'll see, like a place or a thing, and they even expanded later into like, you know, cultural processes and customs and traditions.

**Josh Clark** (1:14)
Yeah, and that's where this idea came from. We were doing our episode on contortionism, and we found that Mongolia was turned down for getting world heritage protection for their contortionist history. They were like, what the H? So we started looking into this, and it is pretty interesting. One of the things that apparently is a fairly common misunderstanding is that if you have like a heritage site, like something is identified and labeled a world heritage site, that that is no longer sovereign territory in your country.
Could not be wronger. That still belongs to you. But what's happened is that the world, essentially everybody who's a member of UNESCO has agreed to say like we want to preserve this in your country, it's yours, but it really, we're all agreeing that this belongs to humanity, because it's so important to human culture, so unique that we need to preserve it, and it takes more than just one country to preserve things like this. So we're all going to get together and take shared responsibility for this important part of human culture.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:21)
Yeah. Also a little bit of protection, like you know you've got something valuable on your shelf there.
We're all watching you as you juggle your way through the room.

**Josh Clark** (2:33)
You want to leave it in mint condition.

**Chuck Bryant** (2:35)
That's right. There's one quote here that I think kind of nails it is, it's things that have outstanding universal value. So it's the universality of it all, as far as needing to cherish and care for these things.
And I think it's kind of a kind of a cool deal. I mean, some people might criticize it as a big sort of political thing to get tourist dollars headed your way.
But I'm not so cynical. I think it's actually pretty great.

**Josh Clark** (3:02)
Oh, I do too. I think it's good too. I think it's both though. I think the ideal of it is awesome. I think that in practice lately, it's-

**Chuck Bryant** (3:09)
Yeah, agreed.

**Josh Clark** (3:10)
In trouble. The thing is the idea that it was of outstanding universal value, I get that, again, is an ideal. But in practice, that is not always the case. And I draw your attention to the Uusduunkerke, which is horseback shrimp fishing in Belgium.
And if that sounds obscure to you, you're right, because only 12 families practice this still.
That is a protected and tangible heritage. That is not of universal value, although it is super interesting and I'm glad it's protected, because why not? But I just thought that that was- there's a lot of different things that contradict the idea that it's of universal value.

**Chuck Bryant** (3:51)
Yeah, for sure. This all got started post-World War II after the world got together and decided to wreck everything again for the second time in about 30 years. And everyone kind of looked up and were like, geez, we lost a lot of museums and churches and monuments and entire cities sometimes, or huge portions of cities are just gone. And maybe we need, as a world nation, to get together and sort of start caring for these things a little bit more. So the UN kind of led the brigade on this and Unesco was formed in 1945
I think I said that 1972 was when the World Heritage Treaty or whatever came about. So Unesco was around quite a while before this came around. So starting in 1945 is when Unesco was formed and they basically started a campaign to start protecting these places from a few things. It's not always just like war that is definitely one of them, but also human development and natural disaster.