The Antietam Civil War battlefield is in a historic area facing suburban sprawl and proposed electricity transmission lines.
Corrected on 11/29/07: An earlier version referred to 23,000 deaths at the Civil War Battle of Antietam. That figure actually includes the dead, wounded, captured and missing. About 3,600 died at Antietam.
Whole Foods Market prides itself on its commitment to sustainable agriculture and community-building. But when it tried to build its first store in Hawaii, the gourmet natural-food grocer unwittingly ran into protests. The problem was that when the developer broke ground in the downtown Honolulu project last year, construction crews unearthed an old native Hawaiian burial site with at least 64 sets of remains. Work has been delayed for months by court battles, and the broader project may have to be redesigned.
Even a well-intentioned company like Whole Foods can find itself caught up in a dilemma that seems increasingly problematic—the tension between the drive for development and the growing urge to protect endangered sacred places. In recent years, the preservation forces have become more vocal, more organized, and, in some cases, better funded. But the sheer scope of the spiritual places vulnerable—whether to development or neglect—is intimidating. "We have to practice triage," says Bob Jaeger, who runs Partners for Sacred Spaces, a nonprofit that works to protect the nation's churches and synagogues. "We can't help them all."
For the past two decades, the National Trust for Historic Preservation each year has highlighted what it considers America's 11 most endangered historic places. These range from urban historic districts to cultural landmarks, but many have a strong sacred identity—American Indian burial grounds, southern black churches, Boston's old Catholic churches, even petroglyphs in New Mexico.
This year, the group chose a 175-mile corridor from Pennsylvania to Virginia. Dubbed the "journey through hallowed ground," the swath comprises, among other things, the nation's highest concentration of Civil War battlefields. These sites, which include Antietam and Gettysburg, have obvious historical significance, and they remain hallowed ground for many. One night a year at Antietam National Battlefield Park, for instance, volunteers light 23,000 luminarias, one for each casualty (killed, wounded, or missing) on the bloodiest single day of the war.
Today, however, the corridor is facing sustained pressure from suburban sprawl, overdevelopment, and even a planned high-voltage transmission line to bolster the nation's fragile electricity grid. As in most of these cases, there are no clear right-or-wrong answers but, rather, competing visions of the trade-offs. Such disputes are nothing new, of course. In 1823, the city of New York banned all burials in the city's private urban cemeteries, citing hygiene concerns. This effectively cut off a key revenue stream for the maintenance of these cemeteries, prompting Brick Presbyterian Church to sue the city. The church lost, but in his ruling, municipal court Judge John Irving admitted, "I am aware that it is an ungracious task to mar those feelings which cling to the remembrance of those who were dear to us in life."
High-rise housing. The debates get even more complicated when the issues are, in effect, global. For instance, Mecca, Islam's holiest city, is facing its own issues with overdevelopment. With some 3 million pilgrims a year taking part in the annual hajj, Saudi Arabia is funding large housing projects. But the result is that a complex of seven high-rise glass-and-marble apartment towers will soon dwarf the nearby Great Mosque that contains the Kaaba, the cubelike shrine revered by Muslims around the world.
The flip side of the development issue is that of sacred spaces threatened by neglect. Cemeteries that are not being maintained, for example, quickly deteriorate and often fall prey to weather and vandals. Careless lawnmowers can run over tomb markers. Harsh weed killers can damage the stones. "Cemeteries suffer frequently because they don't have a particularly loud constituency," says Michael Trinkley, an anthropologist who runs the Chicora Foundation, a nonprofit that specializes in preservation of cemeteries. "But people were buried there with the expectation of eternal rest and that is one of our responsibilities as a society."
The landscape has also changed around them. Trinkley points out that in the South, African-American slaves were once encouraged to bury their dead near the water's edge because it was less valuable for farming. Today, of course, waterfront land is in very high demand from developers.
Older African-American cemeteries have suffered in particular because many look unkempt and are frequently written off as abandoned. But the scruffy appearance is a deliberate part of the tradition. Historically, there was little money for formal landscaping. While graves were sometimes marked by stones, wood or ornamental plantings were also used. Others were left purposely unmarked. Either way, these cemeteries often remain an active part of the local African-American communities.
For Trinkley, a defining moment came after a battle with the city of Columbia, S.C., over plans to build a golf driving range on the site of an old cemetery where African-American mental patients had been buried early in the last cen-tury. Local officials said they were responding to residents' complaints that the rundown land was turning into an open-air drug market. "The response is not, 'We have drug dealers, so let's tear it down,' " insists Trinkley. "My response was, 'Let's fix it up.' We have other options."
The city did agree to spend an extra $200,000 to redesign the project to avoid the graves as well as put up a net to catch stray drives. But Trinkley remains unhappy with the end result, complaining that promises to restore the cemetery went unfulfilled. "I realized that if we were going to protect these cemeteries, we would have to be more aggressive, more determined," he says. Today, he does not hesitate to make much blunter arguments: "How would you feel if it was your family buried here and a politician decided they were not important?"
The Heavy Toll of Man, Nature, and War
The nonprofit World Monuments Fund regularly publishes a list of the world's 100 most endangered sites. Many are sacred places of one sort or another. Some of the choices on the 2008 list, grouped by the type of threat they are facing:
Natural threats, including climate change
Chinguetti Mosque, Mauritania—Perhaps Islam's most important site in Africa, the mosque is threatened by the encroaching Sahara Desert.
Conflict
Remains of Bamiyan Buddhas, Afghanistan—Blown up by the Taliban, the fragmented remains of the Buddhist statues are themselves endangered, and the site's future is in question.
Church of the Holy Nativity, Bethlehem, West Bank—One of Christianity's oldest churches is deteriorating amid the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Development
Dampier Rock Art, Australia—Many Aboriginal petroglyphs, and the spiritual elements they embody, have already been lost to industrial and residential development.
Neglect
Mother of God Peribleptos Church (St. Clement's), Ohrid, Macedonia—This Orthodox gem is at risk from improper roof maintenance and high levels of moisture.
Brener Synagogue, Moises Ville, Argentina—Built in 1909, this center of a Jewish agricultural community has cracked walls and massive leaks and is now closed because there is no money for maintenance.
Vandalism
Tutuveni Petroglyph site, Arizona—These sacred Hopi rock paintings lie next to a major highway and are protected by minimal security; looting and vandalism have been accelerating.
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