Cultural heritage is under attack in the United States. The National Historic Preservation Act’s Section 106 regulation, which balances economic development and historic preservation, has been rewritten to leave historic places in the path of the wrecking ball at the federal government’s whim. Developers contend that a new regulation is required because the Section 106 process is too slow, too unpredictable, and too costly. They argue that locking up lands from oil and gas extraction, timber interests, and mining costs jobs and denies the country needed resources. But they’re wrong. Section 106 does not cost jobs, money, or time. Allowing the public to comment on what happens on public land is not to be deplored but celebrated. Most importantly, once destroyed, cultural and historic sites are irretrievably lost, and all of us diminished.
While currently playing out in the United States, fights about heritage are not unique to America. Battles between development and preservation play out across the globe—in countries rich and poor, autocratic and democratic, and new and old. Some of these struggles escalate into loud, contentious, take-no-prisoners pitched battles.
Economic development is often a Faustian bargain for local and affected communities. The lure of a better life must be weighed against unknowable and incalculable costs to one’s way of life. Most communities embrace the jobs, improvements, and well-being that ensue from development. What they fear is severing ties to land and places—some known and others yet to be discovered—that hold meaning and values essential for their community to persist. For local, Indigenous, and diasporic communities, severing these ties is yet another cut added to the thousands of previous cuts that continues to transform their culture in ways they do not like and that they cannot control.
Many developers and government officials mistake cultural heritage as a “soft” or secondary concern for communities. They base their arguments for development on economic and material concerns, convinced that these are paramount in the minds of community members. For some, these arguments resonate. But for most, economic and infrastructure improvements are only beneficial if they do not transform society into something foreign and unrecognizable. As one Mongolian camel herder explained to me, “We would like the comforts promised by the mining companies but not at the expense of being Mongolian. We’ve been poor for a thousand years; being poor is not that big a deal. Not being nomads or having nomads in the country would be the end of our way of life and the end of Mongolia.”
On August 27, 2026, more than 600 organizations sent an open letter to Congress outlining their opposition to the proposed changes to Section 106. Why the outrage? It’s simple. Though couched as common sense reform to enable economic development, the rewrite of the Section 106 regulation is nothing less than the federal government’s attempt to usurp control over whose history counts and whose can be disregarded. If the proposed regulation is simply about the timeliness and cost of development projects, then it would not have elicited so much opposition. Many in the preservation community offered to engage in regulatory reform. But the authors of the proposed change are not interested in reform. Their objective is to control the country’s historical narrative—whose story gets told and whose story is forgotten.
History is replete with attempts to legitimize the present by destroying vestiges of the past. Ofttimes these attempts are resisted, sometimes violently. In these clashes, groups are oppressed and their material culture destroyed. Rarely are such attempts forgotten or forgiven. Remarking on the guilty verdict in the case of Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi for destruction of ancient texts in Timbuktu, Mark Ellis of the International Bar Association, stated in 2016: “Politically, there will be those who will question why Bensouda [then-International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda] is focusing on ancient sites rather than going after rape, torture and murder convictions, but destruction of cultural heritage is not a second-rate crime. It’s part of an atrocity to erase a people.”
We need to wrest control of the past from the federal government and give it back to the people of this country. This is not a fight we sought. But it is the fight we must win. All of us need to spread a message about why Section 106 matters and why we will not let the government destroy it. Simply put, we will not give up the right to tell who we were and what we did through the places we lived, as we want it to be known free from government censure or control.
