About Us
Cultural heritage is an integral part of climate change - how it has developed, its impacts, and how we build meaningful, just, and sustainable futures.
Learn more here about our vision, our founder, and our name.
VISION
Every community holds history and heritage. Every place has ties to stories that shape our senses of who we are. Heritage is part of human knowledge and behavior. Indeed - it isn’t possible to describe the complexity of climate change or develop effective, meaningful, equitable, peaceful, and sustainable futures without heritage.
Lifting Rocks recognizes cultural heritage as a conduit for care and knowledge of place. The work of Lifting Rocks helps individuals, communities, and organizations find and elevate human connections from and with the past in their approaches to climate change. We do this across practical adaptation planning, training and coordination, climate communication and storytelling, and research and writing that explores how our modern world and its climate challenges have come to be and ways to build our future from them.
Founder
Lifting Rocks founder Marcy Rockman is an archaeologist and one of the foremost experts in climate change and cultural heritage, with US-national and international experience in climate change science, cultural heritage management, and policy.
My long-running research focus is landscape learning, which explores how humans gather, remember, and share environmental information, and I’ve used this to address situations as diverse as cultural resource management in the American West and homeland security risk communication in Washington, DC.
From 2011-2018 I served with the US National Park Service (NPS) as the inaugural Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for Cultural Resources. In this role, I led fundamental research and developed policy addressing federal care for heritage under climate change.
Recently, I’ve held multiple roles in international climate heritage and US scale climate science and policy. Major projects in these spaces include serving as Co-chair on behalf of International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) alongside UNESCO and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Scientific Coordinator for the ICCROM-led conference Climate.Culture.Peace which addressed climate, heritage, and conflict and peace-building. At the national level, I led the Climate Hearings Initiative, a climate science-policy connection project, with Co-Equal, a nonprofit in Washington, DC that provides research and procedural support to the US Congress.
I hold a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Arizona, and a B.Sc. in Geology from the College of William and Mary, and am a Registered Professional Archaeologist (RPA). Please see the Expertise Portfolio for examples of my written work and public speaking.
OUR NAME
The name Lifting Rocks has three inspirations:
First, as an archaeologist with early training in geology, physical lifting and working with human connections to rocks is how my, founder Marcy Rockman, career in heritage and climate began. That work and the landscape learning research model I developed from it continue to shape my approaches to climate change now.
Second, I founded Lifting Rocks in 2019, shortly after having to make the decision to resign my position with the U.S. National Park Service. As you may have noticed, my last name is Rockman, and setting up this company was a step I took to stand back up and carry on my work in a new way - it lifted a Rock(man) up!
Third, the name is inspired by a scene near the end of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. In this, the new Jedi Rey races to help the few remaining members of the resistance, but she finds their way blocked by a massive slide of rocks. In preparing to move them, she tells herself “it’s just lifting rocks.” Just as Rey uses the Force - the energy field created by all living things - to make an escape path for her friends, it is my goal that Lifting Rocks use the context and information and stories that surround all that we value from and about our past to lift up some of the barriers to climate action and allow hope and new possibilities to come through.
