In this project, she is investigating how heritage, local knowledge, and historical experiences can contribute to a just and sustainable approach to climate and energy transitions.
Climate and energy transition requires far-reaching changes, but in many areas it also leads to new tensions. At the same time, the way people relate to their environments through history, culture, and place can provide essential knowledge amidst the climate crisis. Assistant professor of Heritage Studies at VU Marilena Mela investigates how cultural heritage is used to denounce environmental damage and develop alternative visions of the future for people and their living environments. To do so, she focuses on three landscapes shaped by mining and energy extraction: in the Netherlands, Greece, and Chile. These areas also playing a key role in the energy transition due to new plans and infrastructure for the extraction and storage of raw materials and energy.
Contributions to environmental stewardship and care
Through fieldwork, archival research, and intensive collaboration with local partners, Mela examines how protest movements, historical experiences, and intergenerational landscape knowledge contribute environmental stewardship and care. The research shows that heritage not only reflects the past but can also play an active role in shaping sustainable imaginaries for the future.
The social relevance of the research lies in its contribution to a more equitable socioenvironmental transition. Mela demonstrates that climate policy and technological innovations alone are not sufficient if local communities, historical inequalities, and culturally embedded knowledge are overlooked. By focusing on the unequally distributed impacts of resource extraction and communities’ historical struggles against environmental damage, the project offers new insights for community empowerment and decision-making.
Ultimately, the, the research conceptualises local knowledge and protest practices as valuable resources for addressing climate change and environmental damage. In this way , Unearth, Re-earth contributes to more place-based and inclusive approach to the climate crisis and demonstrates that the ocal histories can have broader, even planetary, significance.