Contemporary theory of conservation is developed around current democratic narratives - otherwise, it would not be acceptable at all - but it also resorts to another contemporary conceptual tool: sustainability. In common usage 'sutainability' has economic and ecologic resonance, but its usefulness in conservation has also been recognised. [Its most] interesting approach is the application of the notion of sustainbility to the feature of the object that convert it into something valuable - to the object's significance. [...] The principle of sustainability in conservation mandates that future users should be taken into account when decisions are made. The object is seen as a 'source of 'meanings' that can be exploited at different levels. If only present users were considered in conservation, it would only be natural to transform objects in as free a way as desired, just as radical subjectivism proposes: without the notion of sustainability, contemporary theory of conservation would be a sort of 'democratic radical inter-subjectivism', where 'anything goes' as long as it is democratically agreed upon. The object could, thus, end up being patched and remade over and over again until just a tiny kernel of the original object remained.
Munoz Vinas, 2005, p. 194-5
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