That "Tribal Relationships" Conference at Harvard

A week or so ago, there was a posting on Facebook about an upcoming conference on building tribal relationships, to be held at Harvard University and involving TransCanada, the outfit that’s behind the Keystone XL Pipeline.  The posting noted that no tribes had been invited to the conference.
 

I reposted the item, saying it looked like business as usual.
 

Today I got an email from Lou Thompson, Manager of Tribal Relations for TransCanada.  He said:
 

I noticed on Facebook that you had some concerns about the Think Tank at Harvard. Having worked in Indian Country for 2 decades I can fully appreciate your concern and passion for native people. I am aware of some of your work and admire your contributions. As a point of clarification here is an excerpt from the letter that Harvard sent me:
 

In the case at hand, the upcoming Forum will bring together 25 selectively invited individuals representing the Harvard research team, federal policymakers, senior managers and decision makers from relevant sectors including finance, construction, land and property development, resource extraction, law, and policy. The May Forum will be followed this summer by a separate Forum for tribal leaders and policy makers, with the overall process leading to revision and release of the final White Paper as a useable source of practical approaches for all “sides of the table”.
 

So as you can see, cultural resources are certainly not the main focus of this forum. As you can also see, there will be a separate forum for tribal leaders. My invitation stems from the fact that they were searching for a company that has current substantial collaboration with tribes. For me this is an opportunity to learn how to better work in harmony with tribes not to present myself as a subject matter expert. I would enjoy meeting you sometime to discuss all of your efforts in working in Indian country. Please feel free to contact me should you ever have concerns about TransCanada’s approach to cultural resource identification and protection.
 

So, Lou, we’re to understand that Harvard cooked up this conference all on its own, and invited TransCanada?  That TransCanada had nothing to do with setting it up and organizing and funding it?  Just got an invite in the mail and said “Oh, that seems like a nice idea?”  Honestly, give me a break.

And what does it matter whether “cultural resources” are the session’s focus?  Do you think that’s all tribes are concerned about?  If so, your twenty years in Indian Country haven't taught you much.  Do you think it's all I'm concerned about?  That's more understandable, but it's jumping to a large conclusion that I find rather insulting.

That said, I’m not personally offended (though many tribes understandably are) by the idea of holding a conference on tribal relations without tribal participation.  When I’ve taught classes on tribal consultation I’ve often been most comfortable when tribes aren’t represented, because I can get down to brass tacks with the company and agency representatives.  I can acknowledge that what a tribe or tribal elder says may seem crazy to a white guy, that tribal governments aren’t necessarily paragons of virtue, and that even Indians can lie.  Having thus broken the ice – much harder to do with tribal people in the room – I can try to get a discussion going on the practical implications of treating a tribe like its members are nuts, ill-governed, or crooks, or conversely of choking down one’s suspicions and treating the tribe with respect.  I’ve found this to be a fruitful pedagogical strategy, and maybe that’s what Harvard and TransCanada are up to in this case.

Maybe.  But even giving them this benefit of the doubt, how naïve does the University or company have to be to think it makes sense to put on a confab like this at the very time the president is (ostensibly) pondering whether to let the pipeline go forward, when the EIS on the project is being held up as a classic example of crooked science and Obama administration hypocrisy, and when Idle No More and other groups are demonstrating at every opportunity?  And what kind of naïf are you to suggest that it’s OK because it’s not about “cultural resources” and because unspecified “tribal leaders and policy makers” will be invited in at some later date?  If I were considering an investment in TransCanada or sending a grandchild to Harvard (I’m considering neither), I would not be encouraged by this example of either entity’s political acumen.

You want to meet sometime, Lou?  Well, maybe our paths will cross, but I don’t plan to go out of my way to make them do so.

 

A Letter to the Secretary of the Interior from the Coalition for Cultural Justice

Over the last few months I’ve become involved with a group of academic and non-academic practitioners of historic preservation, planning, sociology and other fields, whose members are concerned about where historic preservation in the United States is going.  Calling itself the Coalition for Cultural Justice, on April 9 the group sent the following letter to the new Secretary of the Interior.

The Honorable Sally Jewell

Secretary of the Interior
1849 C Street NW
Washington, DC 20240

 Dear Secretary Jewell:

 

Congratulations on your confirmation as Secretary of the Interior.  We hope we can look to you for innovative and creative leadership in the coming years.

Among the less-known functions of your department is the leadership role Congress charged it with providing in historic preservation.   Under the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 (NHPA), the Secretary of the Interior sets standards for historic preservation throughout the country, oversees the State and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers, maintains the National Register of Historic Places, and is a member of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), advising the president, congress and federal agencies on ways to conserve the cultural heritage of the nation and its diverse communities. 

There is widespread support throughout the United States and across the political spectrum for historic preservation as part of a program of flexible, humane heritage conservation. What’s more, there is mounting evidence from public health and other fields that heritage conservation benefits communities, neighborhoods, Indian tribes, and citizens in general – if it is responsive to public needs and values.

But in recent decades, historic preservation has been bureaucratized to the point where it often seems to serve the needs of government officials and consultants more than those of citizens. Too much power has been concentrated in official bodies both within your department and on the state and local levels.  These officials tend to be preoccupied with bureaucratic survival, leading them to serve development and real estate interests with little accountability to ordinary citizens affected by their decisions.  Or they become rigid in their interpretation of technical guidelines and unyielding in their exercise of control, to the detriment of socially responsible planning and public engagement.

Meanwhile, preservation practice has come to be dominated by specialists trained in narrow professional fields, especially architectural history and archaeology. As a result, the systems and programs overseen by your department often focus on places and things valued by specialists, rather than those held dear by the public.  This has particularly unfortunate implications, both for environmental impact assessment (EIA) conducted under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and related state and local laws, and for historic preservation activities carried out under state and local laws. With regard to impact assessment, much time and money is spent analyzing impacts on places and things that meet professional criteria but may be of little importance to the public, while environments of true cultural value to citizens are ignored and destroyed.   

The fact that development project sponsors pay for and direct most EIA work biases the system against conservation and deeply compromises the integrity of historic preservation, environmental protection, and community planning. With regard to local historic preservation, the deference accorded to the National Register and the Secretary of the Interior’s standards by many local ordinances amplifies the impact of too-narrow judgments at the top: these reverberate down the preservation ladder, leading local commissions to be less responsive to local needs than they should be.

The department you now head, sadly, has failed to combat or redirect these tendencies.  DOI’s legal mandate can, and we think should, be interpreted as one of promoting broad, flexible heritage conservation with sensitivity to all affected communities and interests.  But in recent years the DOI has focused too narrowly on technical matters like documenting and registering historic buildings and archaeological sites, giving little consideration to heritage from a community perspective. 

Historic preservation has become a cul-de-sac, isolated from broad streams of thought and action in fields like environmental conservation, social work, public health, community planning, public history, and community arts, as well as from the most innovative thinking in academic disciplines like geography, anthropology, and sociology.  It has become a bureaucratic exercise pursued by government officials and profit-seeking specialist consultants, disconnected from communities and the cultural heritage they value.  This is not only wasteful of money, historic properties, intellectual capital and other resources; it is fundamentally unjust, depriving the nation’s communities of the ability to use federal law to preserve what they think is important to maintaining and revitalizing their cultural integrity..

As a group of academic and non-academic practitioners of historic preservation and related fields, we are deeply concerned about how historic preservation has drifted, and urge you to take action to give its practice new life and direction.  Specifically, we urge you to:

•  Take a hard look at the National Register of Historic Places, which has come to be dominated by narrow quasi-academic interests and the economic priorities of developers seeking investment tax credits, often at the expense of community values. Consider what can be done to reorient the National Register to serve as a useful tool in community planning and heritage management; if it cannot be such a tool, perhaps the time has come to devise a better one.

• More generally, re-think the role of the National Park Service (NPS) in the national historic preservation program.  Consider whether the external preservation functions of NPS should be reorganized and re-tasked to relate creatively and with understanding to the world outside the parks.

·         Re-think the emphasis NPS insists that State and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers and Certified Local Governments give to National Register nominations and technical oversight of compliance with regulatory requirements.  Seek to encourage attention to the genuine heritage concerns of citizens and communities.

·         Work with the ACHP, the Council on Environmental Quality, and the Environmental Protection Agency to rework the rules governing EIA, emphasizing true consultation with affected communities, tribes, property owners and other citizens and greater responsiveness to cultural heritage concerns; at the same time seek ways to counter the natural influence of development interests on the consulting firms they hire to conduct EIA work.  Encourage similar reforms by state governments.

·         Direct Interior agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Fish and Wildlife Service to build model programs of community-oriented, culturally sensitive EIA.

·         Encourage state, tribal, and local governments participating in the national historic preservation program to carry out projects linking the conservation of heritage – including but going beyond historic preservation – with community planning and social service agencies, so that heritage conservation serves as a component in building and maintaining strong communities.  Evaluate, document, and disseminate the results.

Almost fifty years ago, Congress enacted and President Lyndon Johnson signed the NHPA into law, with its finding that “the historical and cultural foundations of the Nation should be preserved as a living part of our community life and development in order to give a sense of orientation to the American people.”  DOI, together with the federal and state agencies assigned duties by the NHPA, have drifted very far from that worthy, community-oriented goal. 

We urge you to conduct a full review of the national historic preservation program with the aim of bringing it back to the intent of its founders, as that intent relates to the imperatives of the twenty-first century.  We would be pleased to do whatever we can to assist in such an enterprise.

I signed the letter, as did: 

Ned Kaufman, PhD, Professional Consultant in Heritage Conservation,   

Daniel Bluestone, Professor of Architectural History and Director, Historic Preservation Program,
University of Virginia, Charlottesville,

David Rotenstein, PhD, Historian and Historic Preservation Consultant,

Michael R. Allen, Director, Preservation Research Office, Washington University in St. Louis,

Michael Nixon, Cultural Resources Lawyer and Consultant,

Peter A. Primavera, Managing Partner, Peter Primavera Partners, President, National Landmarks Alliance, and Managing Partner, Garden State Legacy,

Danielle Del Sol, Managing Editor, Preservation in Print Magazine and Adjunct Lecturer, Tulane University,

and Tufts University graduate students Andrea Devining, Alix Fellman, Maurice Robb, Merik Ugdul, Annie McQuillan, Claire Nellisher, Osi Kaminer, Umayank Teotia, Shane McCabe, Frederick Wolf, Blayne O’Brien, Laura Casas Fortuno, Francine Morales, Umi-hsi Chao,

The letter has received no response, and it’s not clear what the Coalition will do next, but its membership rolls are open and I, at least, find it encouraging that people are thinking about and discussing such matters.

 

Historic Preservation in Cuba: a First Impression

In the late 1950s – probably like every other high school kid not immersed in sports and cars (I was into pothunting and chess), I dreamed of joining Fidel Castro’s cadres in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. Had I only been a couple of years older, with better eyes, been a better shot, more able to roll my “r’s”…..

The aspiration was soon enough forgotten as I went off to the Navy and then to college, and as Cuba found itself with no choice but to align itself with the Soviet Union. But its memory echoed around in my head last week as I visited the island nation with my wife, daughter, and son on a Smithsonian Institution “People to People” tour. Such tours are among the several ways that U.S. citizens can now visit Cuba, despite our continued idiotic embargo (the Cubans call it el bloqueo – the blockade). Keeper of the National Register Carol Shull was on the same tour with her husband Joe; we carefully avoided philosophical discussions.

The tour – well organized, well directed, jam-packed and exhausting – wasn’t particularly focused on historic preservation, but naturally I paid special attention to the historic fabric of the places we visited – several parts of Havana, Matanzas, Cienfuego, Trinidad, the reforested 19th century coffee plantation at Las Terrazas. And came home with a range of impressions and puzzlements.

I don’t pretend to have become in any way expert – or even knowledgeable – in Cuban historic preservation, but such deficiencies have seldom prevented me from expounding on a subject, and the visit certainly provided lots of food for thought. So here are some first impressions.

What they say about Cuban historic architecture is true; the major cities at least are amazing mélanges of Neoclassical, Baroque, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Moderne, Moorish, and the well-named Eclectic styles. Lots and lots of elegant, handsome buildings, quite a few of them very well preserved, restored, or rehabilitated.

But the well-preserved or fixed-up buildings are mostly major government and ecclesiastical edifices, high-end house museums, places entered in the World Heritage list and getting help from UNESCO or ICOMOS, and/or hotels and restaurants attractive to tourists. And even many of these show the sad fruits of much-deferred maintenance. I saw several major rehab projects – facademized gut jobs, often – abandoned in mid-career, scaffolding festooned with vines. I failed to ask, but my guess is that these were underway in the early 1990s when the Soviet Union collapsed and Cuba, deprived of its major trading partner, descended into the profound economic crisis now referred to as the “Special Period.”

In the neighborhoods, the graceful little houses and streetscapes that reflect the lives and values of ordinary people are pretty uniformly rotting and weathering away.

So I found myself puzzling over what a country like Cuba could possibly do – if it wishes – to maintain its historic character, respect the traditional cultural values of its people and communities and neighborhoods as expressed in architecture, while staying true to its socialist principles. I reached no very useful conclusions.

Just “opening up” to its northern neighbor (casually referred to as “the Empire”) is surely not the answer. That way has to lie a return to the days of Batista and his cronies, or rather to their steroid-infused ideological descendents on Wall Street and K Street and Miami’s Calle Ocho. But that’s clearly what a lot of people expect and want to see happen. “Five years,” crowed our airport shuttle driver in Miami (himself a fairly recent immigrant), “and then it’ll be wide open; you’ll be able to do ANYTHING!”

Yes indeed, and we can imagine what that anything may look like, both in socioeconomic terms and in terms of the historic, cultural, and social fabric of neighborhoods.

So what devices might Cuba employ to preserve its character while improving the lives of its citizens and achieving some sort of détente with the Empire and the rest of the capitalist world? And are such devices anything that we elsewhere in the world ought to consider emulating? We were shown a couple of maybe-models.

Art in support of preservation

We visited an art studio in a private home. Mimes performed outside – to expose the neighborhood to culture, we were told, in which its residents must have been perceived to be deficient. Proceeds from the sale of the art in the studio go – in part, I assume – to preserving and “restoring” (stabilizing?) the picturesque ruins of an old slave-operated sugar mill out in the country.

The president of the local Committee for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) lived in a vernacular wooden house across the street with a weathered, unpainted facade; its residents and those of neighboring homes watched both the mimes and the tourists with what appeared to be studied impassivity.

It struck me that the model of using art to support preservation had promise, but I wondered if – especially for consistency with socialist principles – it couldn’t be reoriented somewhat. If one wants to involve the neighborhood in the arts, why in the world use the proceeds of your sales to preserve some ruin out in the bush? Why not use them to help the people fix up their houses, which are just as much a part of Cuba’s cultural fabric as are collapsed sugar mills? Wouldn’t this be truer to the spirit of the Revolution, and build a better relationship with the community?

There probably aren’t enough artists or art buyers to have a huge impact on the deterioration of Cuba’s unique architecture and neighborhoods, but it could make a modest contribution. And the model is doubtless exportable; I found myself imagining something similar being done in a pueblo in the U.S. Southwest, with pottery and weavings substituting for studio art. I don't know about the mimes.

Microbrigades

Our very accomplished guide, Amircal Salermo Llanes1 (who thoughtfully goes by “Cal” among yanquis) told us about the “microbrigades” that in the 1970s built a good many of the apartment blocks around Havana and elsewhere. In essence, those who were going to live in them built the structures, using standardized plans and with supervision by a core of trained builders.

The structures are pretty ugly, though Amircal, who grew up in one, says he loved it and its community of residents. They not surprisingly reminded me of the brutalist slab-like structures you see all around Beijing, and that I understand are common in Moscow and other cities that fell under the humorless sway of the USSR after World War II. But the notion of investing sweat equity in building one’s own place is a widely attractive one, that a lot of governments (one thinks of Israel) have used to good effect.

In the midst of one group of Microbrigade apartment blocks there was a massive old building – I don’t know what it had been, but it was a handsome neoclassical masonry pile, about the size of the apartment buildings – standing vacant, windows and doors blown out. “Sadly,” Cal said, “there’s no use for it.”

“Huh?” I thought. Why couldn’t it be – have been – rehabbed as an apartment building along with all the new (sic) construction? Of course, I don’t know the particulars, but suspect that it didn’t fit into the Microbrigade program because it wasn’t amenable to (re)construction following cookie-cutter plans. But surely it could be rehabbed, and there’s no intrinsic reason why a Microbrigade couldn’t do it. Is that a model worth considering? Put people to work rehabilitating usable old buildings under modest professional supervision? Would such a model make sense in the U.S., too? A sort of neighborhood-scale urban homesteading program? One couldn’t expect rigorous attention to the U.S. Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation or their Cuban equivalent, but it would surely be better to get people comfortably housed and retain good old buildings than to be sticklers for principles that, on the whole, are most meaningful to preservation specialists.

The Old Havana section of downtown Havana has been, on the whole, handsomely maintained and/or restored, as has the Plaza Major of Trinidad, with a good deal of help from UNESCO. All well and good, but I have to wonder whether there’s a tendency toward all or nothing – either preserve/restore fully or ignore. It’s an easy tendency to adopt. One of our fellow Yanqui tour participants engaged me in conversation and brought up the Old Post Office in Washington DC – as an example of poor preservation because it’s been converted to federal offices! Never mind what Donald Trump’s going to do to it, but my oh my, have we so badly failed to alert the public to the acceptability and practicality of adaptive use?

I continue to ponder lessons learned, or at least glimpsed, in my brief introduction to Cuba, and certainly have no answers. I just hope that someone is thinking creatively about its remarkable urban fabric, and how to preserve and make good use of it as the doubtless inevitable opening up proceeds.
----------------------

1. amiricalsalermo@gmail.com; HIGHLY recommended to anyone seeking a guide or translator in Cuba.

Of Aimless APEs and Pedestrian Profiteers

I am just back from a conference of the National and California State Associations of Environmental Professionals (NAEP/AEP) in Los Angeles. I believe it will be my last professional conference. There are a couple of reasons for this, but the major one is that I just find the things too bloody depressing.


I was there at the invitation of Kurt Dongoske, Tribal Historic Preservation Officer (THPO) for the Pueblo of Zuni, to take part with him and Theresa Pasqual, Acoma HPO Director, in a session on the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and tribal concerns. That session didn’t depress me; I thought it went pretty well, and was well enough received by the 30 or so people who attended.


But beforehand I wandered the display area, where environmental consulting firms display their wares. The exhibits pretty uniformly advertised work under NEPA and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and almost every one touted their “NEPA/CEQA Documentation.” Documentation. Not analysis, not conflict resolution, certainly not consultation or creatively addressing public concerns. Only one ad I saw even alluded to “compliance.” Nope, crank out those documents, that’s what we do. That’s why you pay us the big bucks.


That, however, was not the most depressing aspect of the conference. That distinction was reserved for a session on “Cultural Resources in Large-Scale Linear Projects.”


I should’ve known better than to attend. I should’ve gone to something on wetland delineation or air quality.

One of the papers was about evaluating historic highways, and it just struck me as silly. Lots of stuff about historic contexts and what gives an old road integrity in the eyes of – well, somebody; exactly who was never specified, but it seldom if ever is. Another was about an interagency effort to “streamline” (God, I am sick of the Cult of the Streamlined) review of projects to refurbish existing railroad facilities. This struck me as a lot of strained labor to give birth to gnats, but it did offer a few modestly clever ways to reduce time wasted on pointless paperwork. And since the poor devil had all the usual dead weights to contend with – Advisory Council, National Trust, State Historic Preservation Officers – glacial progress was the best one could hope for.

But then there was the one on archaeological surveys of linear projects like pipelines and transmission corridors, in which we were told that:


1. The area of potential effects (APE) of a linear project is the area subject to ground disturbance; and

2. “Cultural resources” are identified in these APES through the conduct of “pedestrian surveys” – i.e. archaeologists walking the ground – sometimes augmented by shovel testing (digging holes).


Why was hearing this so depressing? Well….

First, when my colleagues and I came up with the idea of APEs, during the mid-1980s rework of the Section 106 regulations, I feared that the deadhead archaeologists who even then were coming to dominate practice under the law would interpret it as meaning “duh, where you’re gonna disturb th’ artifacts.” So we tried to make it pretty clear, in the regs and in various pieces of guidance, that the term means just what it says. The area of potential effects is the area (or areas) where a project may have effects on historic properties. Physical effects, sure, but also visual effects, auditory effects, olfactory effects, socioeconomic effects – effects of any kind. The reason we define APEs is – I thought, back then – so we’ll think through what effects are likely, make projections, and try to examine the potentially affected environment in a thoughtful way. It was clear from the presentation in L.A. that this simple, obvious notion – the only one that relates plausibly to the purposes of laws like NEPA and the National Historic Preservation Act – has been entirely lost on the mindless automatons that pass today for “cultural resource consultants.”


Second, while pedestrian survey is one way to identify archaeological sites (though not the only way; see below), it is at best a very poor way to identify quite a wide range of other types of historic property – notably cultural landscapes and traditional cultural properties. It is even worse as a means of identifying “cultural resources,” which by any sensible definition may include culturally valued animals, vegetables, and minerals, water, viewsheds, atmospheric phenomena, and such wholly intangible things as language, songs, and stories. Sure, some of these “resource” types may not be much prone to effect by pipelines or power lines, but some of them very likely are, and they’re supposed to be considered under NEPA. And an archaeologist strolling along digging holes isn’t going to find them.


How do you find them? First by defining your APE broadly enough to allow them to be sought – for example, by including areas from which your transmission line will be visible, or your pumping plant will be audible. Second, by recognizing that some “resources” – like water, and songs – may not have very point-specific geographic references but still may be affected by changes in the landscape. At least from the perspectives of some people, some citizens – for whom, after all, Congress made laws like NEPA and Section 106.


And third, by talking with people! The tribes, the ranchers, the artifact collectors, the hunters, the local archaeological and historical societies, the residents. Asking them what they think of a pipeline or a row of transmission towers running through their viewshed, or along their country road, or across their swimming stream or through their forest. Asking them what, if anything, they know or think about the area’s historic resources, and what, if anything, they value in the affected environment. Asking people about their concerns, and about what constitute “resources” in their eyes, is a fundamental part of Section 106 review, and good practice under NEPA.


So I asked a couple of questions.

1. Did the presenter have some regulatory or other basis for his definition of APE (since it certainly didn't have anything to do with NEPA or Section 106)? Well, he responded, it wasn’t for him, the consultant, to question the responsible agency. Odd, somehow I thought the business of expert professional consultants was to apply their expertise to the formulation of advice to their clients. Counsel, as it were. Somehow I’ve allowed myself to be misled into thinking that a consultant ought to know the regulations he’s being paid to help implement, and act as his or her client’s expert advisor. Silly me.


2. Had he talked with anybody? He smiled a bit lopsidedly and said that while federal agencies were usually OK with his talking to the public, private clients generally weren’t; his team’s job was to walk their routes and dig their holes in secret. Thus defeating the public purposes of the laws, and depriving themselves and their clients of the data they would need in order actually to comply with those laws, but oh well.


I know, sadly, that there’s nothing new or unusual in what I’ve just reported. Surveys by pedestrian archaeologists in narrowly defined APEs are standard practice, widely if stupidly thought to satisfy the regulatory requirement for a “reasonable and good faith effort” to identify historic properties (never mind “cultural resources”). And this, I suppose, is the more personal reason the NAEP/AEP session left me so discouraged. Because since 1998 I’ve published some six books and who knows how many journal articles, government guidelines, and internet postings about Section 106 review, many if not most of which explore what an APE ought to be, and what constitutes a reasonable and good faith identification effort, and almost all of which rail on and on about the importance of consultation. And here we are in 2013, with well-dressed consulting archaeologists explaining to NEPA consultants that the law’s really satisfied through the conduct of secret surveys by pedestrian archaeologists in narrow little corridors. Books? Papers? Guidelines? Who reads any of that stuff? We consultants know what the law really requires – it really requires whatever it is that we’re comfortable doing, that makes us a lot of money, and that facilitates our clients’ projects. Ours is not to question what our clients tell us to do, or to advise them about how best to comply with the laws – or even to know what the laws require. Ours is to receive our orders, walk our APEs, dig our holes, keep secrets, and collect money.

What a fine industry we’ve created.

Roll On, International Rivers!

I’m really glad to see the latest issue of World Rivers Review devoted largely to what’s wrong with Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA).  See:

http://www.internationalrivers.org/world-rivers-review/world-rivers-review-%E2%80%93-march-2013-focus-on-environmental-impact-assessments,

http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/wrr-commentary-from-the-technical-to-the-fundamental-7881

http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/why-environmental-impact-assessments-fail-to-protect-rivers-7885, and

http://www.internationalrivers.org/resources/talking-to-the-experts-can-we-improve-the-esia-process-7886

A lot of what the Review – the newsletter of the international NGO International Rivers – discusses in an international and mostly dam/reservoir context is much like what I’ve railed about domestically but with reference to all kinds of projects for the last several years, particularly in Unprotected Heritage (Left Coast Press 2009):


• Highly technical analyses that dodge the big issues;

• Impermeability to the public;

• Failure to consider broad community/cultural concerns (in the US, substituting a narrow focus on compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act);

• EIA performed by servants of development interests, who can be fired if they don’t whitewash a project’s impacts;

• And more.

I hope International Rivers keeps up the campaign, and that more groups joint suit.

Friends in the upper echelons of the mainstream EIA community express fear of acknowledging the problems with EIA, thinking that if we do we may “lose it all.” I don’t buy it. We’ll lose it all if we let the system continue to erode. 

Smart reforms – that create an honest EIA regime that’s simpler and more accountable than the present one – ARE possible if we put our minds to it, and might even find broad political support if carefully designed.

Bulletin 38 vs. Brief 36

A few days ago, I spent the afternoon on a phone/internet connection waiting to testify in a case before the California Energy Commission (CEC). The project in question, the Hidden Hills Solar Solar Electric Project – just across the state line from Pahrump, Nevada – will if approved plant solar collectors in a valley that is reported (by Paiute people and ethnographers) to lie athwart the Paiute Salt Song Trail corridor. It’s also a landscape that’s valued for other spiritual/cultural reasons by the Pahrump Paiute and others. And it’s in the viewshed of the Old Spanish Trail/Mormon Road, a prehistoric/historic travel route associated with, among other things, the enslavement of Paiute by early white settlers, and that’s the subject of a management plan being developed by the National Park Service (NPS).


Obligatory caveat here: I have no beef with solar power, and in fact support it, but I don’t think solar (or wind, or other “green”) projects ought to be put in without honestly considering their environmental impacts, including their sociocultural impacts. Or without considering alternatives that may have smaller impacts. And if in the end it’s necessary in the public interest to screw up a tribe’s (or anyone else’s) culturally valued landscapes, the government ought to be honest enough to acknowledge that this is what it’s doing, rather than determining on esoteric administrative grounds that the landscape isn’t truly important to the people, or that the impacts of the project aren’t really serious (c.f. pee-snow on the San Francisco Peaks).

I (as disembodied telephone voice) was on a “cultural resources” panel with tribal representatives and two professional experts – Tom Gates representing the CEC staff and Lynne Sebastian speaking for the applicant. I can hardly recall a discussion that’s left me more profoundly depressed than did the exchange of views between my two colleagues.

Lynne did her usual shtick – shucks, folks, it’s too bad, but however sincerely these poor benighted tribal people might believe in their cultural landscape, it just doesn’t meet the rigorous standards of the National Park Service, so it’s not a National Register-eligible traditional cultural property (TCP). She went into considerable detail, citing National Register Bulletin (NRB) 15 as the “bible” on which she relied, with occasional out-of-context quotes from NRB 38 – the Register’s guideline on TCPs, drafted back in the 1980s by Pat Parker and me.

And Tom did something I’ve heard him do before and have yet to understand – saying that in essence he didn’t want to talk about the landscape as a TCP but as an “ethnographic landscape,” per NPS Preservation Brief 36. He went into considerable detail about how this qualified the landscape as an “area” as opposed to a “place” under standards he said had been promulgated for evaluating things for the California Register of Historic Resources (CRHR).

Confused yet? I would have been if I hadn’t seen this tired ground tilled altogether too often before. I felt pretty sure that the eyes of the Commissioners receiving the testimony were rolling back in their heads, so when it came to be my turn to talk, I just said how disappointing and depressing it was to hear such a lot of meaningless nitpickery masquerading as expert testimony on cultural resource management.

I said I did not believe that Congress enacted the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in order to provide opportunities for quasi-academic specialists to engage in pedantic debates about words use in technical publications. NHPA was enacted, I think, to ensure within reason that government would respect the cultural values citizens ascribe to their surroundings. In the 1980s, seeing such values becoming subordinated to the narrow interests of archaeologists and architectural historians, Pat Parker and I proposed, and with the support of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) and ultimately NPS, wrote what became NRB 38. A few years later, another arm of the NPS cultural resource program (an organism with many arms but no brain) issued Preservation Brief 36 about the care and feeding of cultural landscapes. Unsurprisingly, nobody in NPS tried to coordinate anything about the two publications, which created a fruitful field in which to grow pickable nits and splittable hairs. So now we are back again to a situation in which specialists can expend their often well-remunerated time expounding on technical irrelevancies, while the public and its representatives nod off or grope for understanding.

So what’s the relationship between Bulletin 38 and Brief 36? They describe overlapping types of historic property. Some TCPs are cultural landscapes; some aren’t. Some cultural landscapes are TCPs; others aren’t. This shouldn’t require dissertation research to sort out.

There’s some good stuff in Brief 36 that we didn’t think to cover in Bulletin 38 – notably the acknowledgement that plants and animals, both wild and domesticated, can contribute to the significance of a place. If one is evaluating a landscape that’s likely to have traditional cultural significance, it’s wise to derive guidance from both publications.

There seems to be some perception that TCPs are smaller than cultural landscapes, but there’s nothing in either Bulletin 38 or Brief 36 that says that. Since some of the examples discussed in Bulletin 38 are pretty expansive chunks of land (e.g. mountains), one might think it obvious that a landscape can be a TCP, and vice versa. If it’s not obvious, let me clarify: there is no specified size limit for a TCP, and there is nothing to keep a landscape from having traditional cultural significance.

I told the CEC, in essence, that they ought to ignore the nitpicking and recognize the obvious fact that in the Hidden Hills landscape they had a place of great expressed cultural significant to Paiute people and others. This is what they should factor into their decision making about whether to allow the solar project to be built. Whether it’s called a place, an area, a property, a district, a landscape, a TCP or a pink rabbit is beside the point. Tribal representatives then took the floor and spoke eloquently about the area’s significance and the impacts of the proposed project. Whether any of this resonated with the Commissioners remains to be seen.

Gang Green

People concerned about the impacts of wind and solar energy projects on the environment have, I understand, coined a term for the cabal of developers, Big Enviro organizations, and Obama administration lackeys pushing industrial solar and wind energy development on our public lands, offshore, and elsewhere:

“Gang Green.”

I realize that the term also refers to a 1980s hard rock group and to fans of the New York Jets, but it seems especially appropriate when applied to the self-interested sunny-windy enterprises busy industrializing some of the nation’s most pristine environments. Especially, perhaps, to the president and his erstwhile Secretary of the Interior, who mouth platitudes about respect for Indian tribes and then pretend that they’ve addressed tribal concerns through sham "consultation" and by “avoiding” archaeological sites. Not a bad name, either, for the environmental impact assessment and cultural resource management companies that enrich themselves by abetting this enterprise, or for the major environmental organizations that buy into the game with never a peep of protest, suppressing the objections of their own members.

Gangrene, Wikipedia tells us, is “a serious and potentially life-threatening condition that arises when a considerable mass of body tissue dies.” Not a bad metaphor for what’s being perpetrated on the California desert and other places thought ripe for wind and solar development.

Maybe it’s necessary; maybe it’s the only way to get out from under our dependence on fossil fuels. The trouble is, we don’t know that. We haven’t tried, or even seriously considered, such seemingly simpler, less destructive, less expensive alternatives as:

• Subsidized (or not) large-scale deployment of high capacity solar arrays on the flat roofs of warehouses, industrial facilities, and parking structures;

• Placement of such arrays over canals, as is being done in India, thus gaining extra bangs for the buck by cutting down on evaporation;

• Shading parking lots with solar arrays, again multiplying advantages by gaining relief for people parking there from the sun and weather;

• Construction of wind and solar facilities in highway medians;

There are probably lots of other possibilities. But despite the seeming requirements of law and regulations, agencies like the Bureau of Land Management stonily refuse to consider such alternatives when they pretend to analyze the impacts of wind and solar projects on public lands.  As far as I know they’re not being considered elsewhere, either – except perhaps in other countries that still have functional, semi-honest, and intellectually viable environmental impact assessment systems. Ours has become a joke, perpetuated as usual on us.