American International Journal of Social Science

Sustainability and Cultural Heritage in the Catalan Coast
Eliseu Carbonell

Abstract
This paper proposes to consider two questions that are being increasingly involved nowadays: sustainability and cultural heritage. That is, the relationship between the concern for a sustainable development of marine resources management, and the concern for the preservation of maritime cultural heritage seriously damaged due to the coastal tourism development. On one hand we observe the emergence of cultural discourses about nature (e.g. the case of marine protected areas) where the limits of natural and cultural heritage are blurred. On the other hand, we observe how the attempt for the preservation of certain tangible and intangible cultural heritage (e.g. traditional methods of catching fish, fishermen's ecological knowledge) is done on behalf of environmental sustainability. In this paper I propose a reflection and debate on this issue from some ethnographic examples of my current research on the central Catalan coast in Western Mediterranean Europe.

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