Perhaps the same could be said of Ai Weiwei's use of Twitter last week: a modern means of preservation, a way of remembering a work of digital art that might otherwise have simply been switched off and lost.
Asbury Park's Victorian architecture caught their interest, they said, but they had no appetite for the kind of earnest and homogenous preservation under way there.
Mr. Schafer, whose Danish immigrant grandparents were farmers, said he realized "that the mission of this agency goes far beyond the services delivered, to the preservation of a way of life that I believe is the foundation of this country".
"Citizens embraced preservation as a way of bringing the city back to life.
Ms. Huizing said many people had begun to see historic preservation as another way to check sprawl.
Immigration-enforcement activists often try to mute the cultural identity of their movement — they talk about the rule of law, not the preservation of a way of life, even if those things turn out to be inseparable.
They saw the potential for more jobs and the preservation of a way of life in Saratoga County, a mostly rural stretch of 200,000 people about 30 miles north of Albany.
We may wonder if, like the family in Iwaki, bound to their community by gifts of food and fruit, the nuclear-power workers are just stuck, unable to consider their own preservation in a way that we think of as free.
And digital advantages, like the ease of storing multiple copies of documents at separate locations, make preservation a key way to dodge the consequences of regional disasters like Hurricane Katrina.
It was an experiment, they said, to see if a claim could serve as "an unusual public lands preservation tactic," a way to keep other miners out.
