I encountered a situation yesterday that made me think there’s a need to clarify the relationship (such as it is) between compliance with Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and the discovery provisions of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). In the case I encountered, a survey for NHPA purposes had revealed a “prehistoric” site whose surface and immediate subsurface expression amounted to a few flakes and a fragmentary projectile point. The site was determined not eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, so it was not further considered under NHPA. It was also not further considered under NAGPRA, and therein lies a problem.
The NAGPRA regulations, at 43 CFR 10.3(c), say:
(1) The Federal agency official must take reasonable steps to determine whether a planned activity may result in the excavation of human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony from Federal lands. Prior to issuing any approvals or permits for activities, the Federal agency official must notify in writing the Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations that are likely to be culturally affiliated with any human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony that may be excavated. The Federal agency official must also notify any present-day Indian tribe which aboriginally occupied the area of the planned activity and any other Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations that the Federal agency official reasonably believes are likely to have a cultural relationship to the human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony that are expected to be found. The notice must be in writing and describe the planned activity, its general location, the basis upon which it was determined that human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony may be excavated, and, the basis for determining likely custody pursuant to Sec. 10.6. The notice must also propose a time and place for meetings or consultations to further consider the activity, the Federal agency's proposed treatment of any human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony that may be excavated, and the proposed disposition of any excavated human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, or objects of cultural patrimony. Written notification should be followed up by telephone contact if there is no response in 15 days. Consultation must be conducted pursuant to Sec. 10.5.
(2) Following consultation, the Federal agency official must complete a written plan of action (described in Sec. 10.5(e)) and execute the actions called for in it.
So in this case, should the presence of a small “prehistoric” site have caused the federal agency official to determine that the work planned at the location might “result in the excavation of human remains…” etc? I imagine that honorable people could disagree about this, and I for one would hate to see all the complicated requirements of 43 CFR 10.3(c) triggered every time an artifact, flake, or potsherd shows up in a survey; this would unreasonably complicate the lives of agencies and tribes (and Native Hawaiian groups) alike. But the point to keep in mind is that the presence or absence of a property that the agency and State Historic Preservation Officer (or Keeper of the National Register) judge eligible or not eligible for the National Register has nothing to do with NAGPRA. The two statutes are totally independent of one another. So an agency really has to make two separate, independent determinations: under NHPA it has to decide whether its project will affect anything eligible for the Register; under NAGPRA it must determine whether its project may unearth Native American graves or cultural items. Neither statutory requirement trumps the other.
Tom King’s CRM Plus -- Ruminations on "cultural resource management," environmental impact assessment, and related esoteric topics, by a curmudgeon who seldom has anything good to say about anything.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Monday, April 11, 2011
On the Preservation of our Timeless Words of Wisdom
A current Facebook discussion of the topic compells me to re-post the following, which I think I posted some time ago (but have lost track.....)
Those concerned about what seems the inevitable transition from paper books to kindle-ware and Google-scanning may be interested in the recently translated text of a cuneiform tablet allegedly found in the ruins of Ninevah in Iraq. Like most antiquities in that country that have been found since the American invasion destroyed its historic preservation infrastructure and drove its residents to dig up and sell their heritage for food and clothing, it was unearthed by looters and sold on the black market, so its provenance is unsure. However, it appears to date to about 1000 BCE, when papyrus scrolls – long used along the Nile but new in Mesopotamia – were beginning to replace clay tablets as the popular writing medium. Like many such tablets, it has lost its first and last lines of script to erosion, but it appears to be a personal letter from one scribe to another. Loosely translated from the Akkadian, it goes like this:
“Yea, Inkidont, mark my words; the teaching of scribbling on flattened grass bodes ill for literacy and its pleasures. Soon, I fear, the calming smell of drying clay tablets will disappear from our writing chambers, together with the satisfaction one feels in the resistance of clay to stylus. In the reading chamber, the soft click-click of tablet on tablet will be no more, replaced by the crackling cacophony of “scrolls” being rolled and unrolled, and the stink of the “ink” slathered on the papyrus in imitation of script. Our children will lose all respect for literature when it is slothfully “written” in black liquid on rolled-up mats, to say nothing of the loss in dexterity that will come from unfamiliarity with the stylus! And oh, Inkidont, I shudder for the effect on our household economies! Clay is everywhere, and easy to acquire and make into fine tablets, but papyrus must be bought from those thieving Phoenician and Hebrew merchants! The transfer of wealth from east to west will be as a great sucking sound rolling across the desert. And what to do with this papyrus when it wears out? Leave it to litter the streets? Unlike tablets, it has no re-use as a building material, a doorstop, to throw at one’s child or pig….. And the stuff is useless if you spill beer on it…..”
Those concerned about what seems the inevitable transition from paper books to kindle-ware and Google-scanning may be interested in the recently translated text of a cuneiform tablet allegedly found in the ruins of Ninevah in Iraq. Like most antiquities in that country that have been found since the American invasion destroyed its historic preservation infrastructure and drove its residents to dig up and sell their heritage for food and clothing, it was unearthed by looters and sold on the black market, so its provenance is unsure. However, it appears to date to about 1000 BCE, when papyrus scrolls – long used along the Nile but new in Mesopotamia – were beginning to replace clay tablets as the popular writing medium. Like many such tablets, it has lost its first and last lines of script to erosion, but it appears to be a personal letter from one scribe to another. Loosely translated from the Akkadian, it goes like this:
“Yea, Inkidont, mark my words; the teaching of scribbling on flattened grass bodes ill for literacy and its pleasures. Soon, I fear, the calming smell of drying clay tablets will disappear from our writing chambers, together with the satisfaction one feels in the resistance of clay to stylus. In the reading chamber, the soft click-click of tablet on tablet will be no more, replaced by the crackling cacophony of “scrolls” being rolled and unrolled, and the stink of the “ink” slathered on the papyrus in imitation of script. Our children will lose all respect for literature when it is slothfully “written” in black liquid on rolled-up mats, to say nothing of the loss in dexterity that will come from unfamiliarity with the stylus! And oh, Inkidont, I shudder for the effect on our household economies! Clay is everywhere, and easy to acquire and make into fine tablets, but papyrus must be bought from those thieving Phoenician and Hebrew merchants! The transfer of wealth from east to west will be as a great sucking sound rolling across the desert. And what to do with this papyrus when it wears out? Leave it to litter the streets? Unlike tablets, it has no re-use as a building material, a doorstop, to throw at one’s child or pig….. And the stuff is useless if you spill beer on it…..”
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Nominating TCPs to the National Register
A few years ago, during one of the U.S. Congress’ periodic bouts of distemper over the national historic preservation “program” (sic), one of the dyspeptic congressmen found it scandalous, just scandalous, that so many properties had been found eligible for the National Register of Historic Places in the course of review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, but never nominated for formal listing. Surely this meant that unimportant places were being blessed with the imprimatur of eligibility. The congressman’s staff asked me in to discuss this outrageous misuse of the law.
I explained, of course, that nomination usually served no useful purpose, particularly if the place you were considering was likely in the end to get blown away. I explained that there were often reasons to keep information about historic places confidential. I explained that nomination is a time-consuming, costly pain in the butt, and often a waste of time and money. I explained that there are lots of ways to protect and otherwise manage historic places that don’t require the nonsense paperwork associated with nomination. I doubt if I made much of an impression; congressional staffers, like those who employ them, tend to be much better at talking than listening, but the rhetoric about nomination did cool down a bit thereafter.
So I was mildly surprised, and deeply depressed, to see the idea laid on the table again recently, not by a raving right-wing Fool On The Hill, but by a certified liberal-type academic (LTA) who’ll remain nameless in this blog unless s/he wants to debate the matter. The LTA had polled a number of State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs) about how many traditional cultural properties (TCPs) had been nominated to the National Register, and found the answers to range from “none” to “very few.” The same poll revealed much SHPO uncertainty about how many TCPs had been treated as eligible for the Register in the course of Section 106 review without detailed documentation. This, the LTA suggested, was a pretty Bad Thing.
Of course, I think precisely the opposite. As I’ve pointed out far too often in too many venues, with regard not only to TCPs but all kinds of historic properties:
1. Nominating stuff to the Register is not required by law.
2. Nominating stuff to the Register is expensive and troublesome.
3. Nominating stuff to the Register can require eliciting information that people (especially indigenous groups and their elders) often don’t want to reveal.
4. Section 106 requires equal consideration of places that are included in the Register and places that are eligible for it.
5. Agencies and SHPOs/THPOs can simply agree to treat a place as eligible for the Register, and go on to consult about how best to manage impacts on it.
6. This is usually (though not necessarily always) more efficient for the agency and more respectful toward those who value the property than going through an elaborate process of eligibility determination or nomination.
So why did the LTA think it was bad that more TCPs hadn’t been nominated? Well, he said, if they’re not nominated, then there’s no record of them with the SHPO, and if there’s no record of them, project proponents and their consultants will assume they don’t exist and proceed with their projects without considering them or consulting anyone.
I suppose that could happen, and maybe it happens more often than it should, but when it does happen it’s a pretty stark violation of the Section 106 regulations. Since the LTA didn’t seem aware of what those regulations say, maybe others aren’t either, so let’s take a look. Here’s the relevant section from 36 CFR 800:
§ 800.4 Identification of historic properties.
(a) Determine scope of identification efforts. In consultation with the SHPO/THPO, the agency official shall:
(1) Determine and document the area of potential effects, as defined in § 800.16(d);
(2) Review existing information on historic properties within the area of potential effects, including any data concerning possible historic properties not yet identified;
(3) Seek information, as appropriate, from consulting parties, and other individuals and organizations likely to have knowledge of, or concerns with, historic properties in the area, and identify issues relating to the undertaking's potential effects on historic properties; and
(4) Gather information from any Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization identified pursuant to § 800.3(f) to assist in identifying properties, including those located off tribal lands, which may be of religious and cultural significance to them and may be eligible for the National Register, recognizing that an Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization may be reluctant to divulge specific information regarding the location, nature, and activities associated with such sites. The agency official should address concerns raised about confidentiality pursuant to § 800.11(c).
(b) Identify historic properties. Based on the information gathered under paragraph (a) of this section, and in consultation with the SHPO/THPO and any Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization that might attach religious and cultural significance to properties within the area of potential effects, the agency official shall take the steps necessary to identify historic properties within the area of potential effects.
(1) Level of effort. The agency official shall make a reasonable and good faith effort to carry out appropriate identification efforts, which may include background research, consultation, oral history interviews, sample field investigation, and field survey. The agency official shall take into account past planning, research and studies, the magnitude and nature of the undertaking and the degree of Federal involvement, the nature and extent of potential effects on historic properties, and the likely nature and location of historic properties within the area of potential effects. The Secretary's Standards and Guidelines for Identification provide guidance on this subject. The agency official should also consider other applicable professional, State, tribal and local laws, standards and guidelines. The agency official shall take into account any confidentiality concerns raised by Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations during the identification process.
So one does not – or should not, if one wants to be legal – just waltz into the SHPO’s files, look around, and if one doesn’t see anything on the list, waltz out again and fire up the bulldozers. But to the LTA, that is apparently what “really happens,” and instead of trying to do anything about it, the LTA proposes that more TCPs should be nominated to the Register.
Let me suggest that academics and others who would like to see better consideration given to TCPs – or anything else – under 106 ought to focus on the above regulatory language and hold agencies, project proponents, and SHPOs accountable for its implementation. Filling out paperwork is not the point. Good planning and respectful consultation, as the regulations require, is.
I explained, of course, that nomination usually served no useful purpose, particularly if the place you were considering was likely in the end to get blown away. I explained that there were often reasons to keep information about historic places confidential. I explained that nomination is a time-consuming, costly pain in the butt, and often a waste of time and money. I explained that there are lots of ways to protect and otherwise manage historic places that don’t require the nonsense paperwork associated with nomination. I doubt if I made much of an impression; congressional staffers, like those who employ them, tend to be much better at talking than listening, but the rhetoric about nomination did cool down a bit thereafter.
So I was mildly surprised, and deeply depressed, to see the idea laid on the table again recently, not by a raving right-wing Fool On The Hill, but by a certified liberal-type academic (LTA) who’ll remain nameless in this blog unless s/he wants to debate the matter. The LTA had polled a number of State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs) about how many traditional cultural properties (TCPs) had been nominated to the National Register, and found the answers to range from “none” to “very few.” The same poll revealed much SHPO uncertainty about how many TCPs had been treated as eligible for the Register in the course of Section 106 review without detailed documentation. This, the LTA suggested, was a pretty Bad Thing.
Of course, I think precisely the opposite. As I’ve pointed out far too often in too many venues, with regard not only to TCPs but all kinds of historic properties:
1. Nominating stuff to the Register is not required by law.
2. Nominating stuff to the Register is expensive and troublesome.
3. Nominating stuff to the Register can require eliciting information that people (especially indigenous groups and their elders) often don’t want to reveal.
4. Section 106 requires equal consideration of places that are included in the Register and places that are eligible for it.
5. Agencies and SHPOs/THPOs can simply agree to treat a place as eligible for the Register, and go on to consult about how best to manage impacts on it.
6. This is usually (though not necessarily always) more efficient for the agency and more respectful toward those who value the property than going through an elaborate process of eligibility determination or nomination.
So why did the LTA think it was bad that more TCPs hadn’t been nominated? Well, he said, if they’re not nominated, then there’s no record of them with the SHPO, and if there’s no record of them, project proponents and their consultants will assume they don’t exist and proceed with their projects without considering them or consulting anyone.
I suppose that could happen, and maybe it happens more often than it should, but when it does happen it’s a pretty stark violation of the Section 106 regulations. Since the LTA didn’t seem aware of what those regulations say, maybe others aren’t either, so let’s take a look. Here’s the relevant section from 36 CFR 800:
§ 800.4 Identification of historic properties.
(a) Determine scope of identification efforts. In consultation with the SHPO/THPO, the agency official shall:
(1) Determine and document the area of potential effects, as defined in § 800.16(d);
(2) Review existing information on historic properties within the area of potential effects, including any data concerning possible historic properties not yet identified;
(3) Seek information, as appropriate, from consulting parties, and other individuals and organizations likely to have knowledge of, or concerns with, historic properties in the area, and identify issues relating to the undertaking's potential effects on historic properties; and
(4) Gather information from any Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization identified pursuant to § 800.3(f) to assist in identifying properties, including those located off tribal lands, which may be of religious and cultural significance to them and may be eligible for the National Register, recognizing that an Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization may be reluctant to divulge specific information regarding the location, nature, and activities associated with such sites. The agency official should address concerns raised about confidentiality pursuant to § 800.11(c).
(b) Identify historic properties. Based on the information gathered under paragraph (a) of this section, and in consultation with the SHPO/THPO and any Indian tribe or Native Hawaiian organization that might attach religious and cultural significance to properties within the area of potential effects, the agency official shall take the steps necessary to identify historic properties within the area of potential effects.
(1) Level of effort. The agency official shall make a reasonable and good faith effort to carry out appropriate identification efforts, which may include background research, consultation, oral history interviews, sample field investigation, and field survey. The agency official shall take into account past planning, research and studies, the magnitude and nature of the undertaking and the degree of Federal involvement, the nature and extent of potential effects on historic properties, and the likely nature and location of historic properties within the area of potential effects. The Secretary's Standards and Guidelines for Identification provide guidance on this subject. The agency official should also consider other applicable professional, State, tribal and local laws, standards and guidelines. The agency official shall take into account any confidentiality concerns raised by Indian tribes or Native Hawaiian organizations during the identification process.
So one does not – or should not, if one wants to be legal – just waltz into the SHPO’s files, look around, and if one doesn’t see anything on the list, waltz out again and fire up the bulldozers. But to the LTA, that is apparently what “really happens,” and instead of trying to do anything about it, the LTA proposes that more TCPs should be nominated to the Register.
Let me suggest that academics and others who would like to see better consideration given to TCPs – or anything else – under 106 ought to focus on the above regulatory language and hold agencies, project proponents, and SHPOs accountable for its implementation. Filling out paperwork is not the point. Good planning and respectful consultation, as the regulations require, is.
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Consultants: Finding a Donut Hole May Not Be In Your Client’s Best Interests
I’ve recently found myself reviewing a number of archaeological survey reports (usually mis-titled “cultural resource inventories”) prepared by consulting firms for agencies that propose to build things with the potential for churning up archaeological sites. I’ve been dismayed, though not especially surprised, to find a pattern of reportage that I have to think is designed to conceal potential archaeological problems and allow the consultants’ clients to find that their projects will have no effect on archaeological sites.
For example, in one case from southern California, construction is proposed on a bluff overlooking the ocean – a classic location for prehistoric occupation. The consultants’ report, in the section on “previous archaeological investigations,” presents a table showing all the archaeological sites previously recorded within a mile or so of the project location. A dozen or more – ranging from small deposits of mollusk shells, flakes, and fire-cracked rock to a large village/burial complex that’s been the source of considerable controversy over the years – lie within about 2-300 meters of the project location. The project location is completely covered by mid-20th century buildings, parking lots, sidewalks and landscaping. The consultants’ archaeologists duly walked the sidewalks and reported finding nothing. So, they reported, there’s nothing there and a finding of “no historic properties affected” is appropriate under Section 106. They say nothing about the topographic/environmental predictors of probable site location, and the fact that sites crowd the project location on every hand does not, it seems, suggest anything to them. And they evince no knowledge of the many cases in which more or less intact archaeological deposits and things like cemeteries have been found under modern buildings and landscaping.
In another case, from Oregon, the project site is a golf course on a riverbank, proposed for conversion to housing. The consultants’ report has a section on “ethnography” that is so general it fails to mention that tribes in the area tended to set up villages on riverbanks. In its section on “previous archaeological investigations” it reports one site, thought to have a lot of housepits and to be particularly important in understanding local prehistory, on the riverbank east of a sewer treatment plant; it fails to note that the proposed construction site is on the same riverbank, east of the same plant. From the project location map it appears that it’s maybe 150 to 200 meters from the sewage plant to the project site, so presumably the recorded site is somewhere on that intervening stretch of riverbank. Another possibly important site is reported just to the east; a bit of digging through the report and comparing it with Mapquest street maps reveals that it’s probably across the river from the project site, though the report doesn’t make this clear.
The Oregon project site, being a golf course, was a little more accessible than the California site, though its surface was obscured by turf. So the archaeologists walked transects across it and dug five or six test holes. In these they found a very light scatter of both prehistoric (flakes) and historic (bottle glass, etc.) artifacts. On the strength of this relatively negative data, they conclude that there’s nothing there.
Now, it may be that in both cases there really is nothing there, and undoubtedly it made the client happy in each case to learn that there were no archaeological impediments to the proposed project. The trouble, of course, is that this clean bill of health is not necessarily truthful. Prehistoric people, in my experience anyhow, were no respecters of site boundaries as defined by archaeologists (“No, no, Big Eagle, you can’t bury grandma over there; that’s outside the boundaries of site BS-2397!”). The presence of a “site” as defined by archaeologists simply means that people did stuff in the general area that produced something on that specific location that archaeologists can recognize. They may have done lots of other things in the broader area that archaeologists can’t recognize, or can’t recognize as well as they can other things. Burying dead people is one of those things. So the fact that your project footprint ju-u-ust misses the archaeologist-defined boundary of site BS-2397 doesn’t mean you’re not going to find grandma – maybe lots of grandmas – buried there. Or other things. And if the client doesn’t find out about those possible grandmas from your report, he or she may very well find out about them when they come up in a power shovel’s bucket. And living people start throwing things and seeking injunctions.
So, however much the client may want it, a determination that there’s nothing to worry about in a project area may not be in the client’s best interests. Such a determination can lull the client into thinking that all’s well, that he has nothing to worry about. Which is fine if it’s true, but a real problem if it’s not. And if there’s evidence that it’s not, and a consultant effectively covers it up, the consultant is setting the client up for a last-minute discovery situation that can be costly and embarrassing.
The reason to do background research in contract archaeology is not to find donut holes in which things can be built, but to make overall sense of what’s found in the transects fieldworkers walk and the test pits they dig. Contract archaeologists ought to take the results of background research, put them together with first-hand field observations, and give the client as realistic picture as possible of what archaeological problems his or her project may face. In the two cases I’ve outlined above, it seems obvious to me from the combination of topographic/environmental, ethnographic and archaeological data that the project sites may contain significant archaeological resources, and ought to be treated accordingly. My client may not be happy to have this advice from me, but he or she will be a lot less happy with a multi-million dollar work stoppage at the eleventh hour, and just may wonder why I didn’t mention the possibility early enough to let him or her do something about it.
For example, in one case from southern California, construction is proposed on a bluff overlooking the ocean – a classic location for prehistoric occupation. The consultants’ report, in the section on “previous archaeological investigations,” presents a table showing all the archaeological sites previously recorded within a mile or so of the project location. A dozen or more – ranging from small deposits of mollusk shells, flakes, and fire-cracked rock to a large village/burial complex that’s been the source of considerable controversy over the years – lie within about 2-300 meters of the project location. The project location is completely covered by mid-20th century buildings, parking lots, sidewalks and landscaping. The consultants’ archaeologists duly walked the sidewalks and reported finding nothing. So, they reported, there’s nothing there and a finding of “no historic properties affected” is appropriate under Section 106. They say nothing about the topographic/environmental predictors of probable site location, and the fact that sites crowd the project location on every hand does not, it seems, suggest anything to them. And they evince no knowledge of the many cases in which more or less intact archaeological deposits and things like cemeteries have been found under modern buildings and landscaping.
In another case, from Oregon, the project site is a golf course on a riverbank, proposed for conversion to housing. The consultants’ report has a section on “ethnography” that is so general it fails to mention that tribes in the area tended to set up villages on riverbanks. In its section on “previous archaeological investigations” it reports one site, thought to have a lot of housepits and to be particularly important in understanding local prehistory, on the riverbank east of a sewer treatment plant; it fails to note that the proposed construction site is on the same riverbank, east of the same plant. From the project location map it appears that it’s maybe 150 to 200 meters from the sewage plant to the project site, so presumably the recorded site is somewhere on that intervening stretch of riverbank. Another possibly important site is reported just to the east; a bit of digging through the report and comparing it with Mapquest street maps reveals that it’s probably across the river from the project site, though the report doesn’t make this clear.
The Oregon project site, being a golf course, was a little more accessible than the California site, though its surface was obscured by turf. So the archaeologists walked transects across it and dug five or six test holes. In these they found a very light scatter of both prehistoric (flakes) and historic (bottle glass, etc.) artifacts. On the strength of this relatively negative data, they conclude that there’s nothing there.
Now, it may be that in both cases there really is nothing there, and undoubtedly it made the client happy in each case to learn that there were no archaeological impediments to the proposed project. The trouble, of course, is that this clean bill of health is not necessarily truthful. Prehistoric people, in my experience anyhow, were no respecters of site boundaries as defined by archaeologists (“No, no, Big Eagle, you can’t bury grandma over there; that’s outside the boundaries of site BS-2397!”). The presence of a “site” as defined by archaeologists simply means that people did stuff in the general area that produced something on that specific location that archaeologists can recognize. They may have done lots of other things in the broader area that archaeologists can’t recognize, or can’t recognize as well as they can other things. Burying dead people is one of those things. So the fact that your project footprint ju-u-ust misses the archaeologist-defined boundary of site BS-2397 doesn’t mean you’re not going to find grandma – maybe lots of grandmas – buried there. Or other things. And if the client doesn’t find out about those possible grandmas from your report, he or she may very well find out about them when they come up in a power shovel’s bucket. And living people start throwing things and seeking injunctions.
So, however much the client may want it, a determination that there’s nothing to worry about in a project area may not be in the client’s best interests. Such a determination can lull the client into thinking that all’s well, that he has nothing to worry about. Which is fine if it’s true, but a real problem if it’s not. And if there’s evidence that it’s not, and a consultant effectively covers it up, the consultant is setting the client up for a last-minute discovery situation that can be costly and embarrassing.
The reason to do background research in contract archaeology is not to find donut holes in which things can be built, but to make overall sense of what’s found in the transects fieldworkers walk and the test pits they dig. Contract archaeologists ought to take the results of background research, put them together with first-hand field observations, and give the client as realistic picture as possible of what archaeological problems his or her project may face. In the two cases I’ve outlined above, it seems obvious to me from the combination of topographic/environmental, ethnographic and archaeological data that the project sites may contain significant archaeological resources, and ought to be treated accordingly. My client may not be happy to have this advice from me, but he or she will be a lot less happy with a multi-million dollar work stoppage at the eleventh hour, and just may wonder why I didn’t mention the possibility early enough to let him or her do something about it.
Friday, March 11, 2011
SHPOs: Wimping Out Doesn’t Help
I imagine it’s expectable, in these stressful times, but it seems to me that every time I’ve turned around lately, I’ve found another State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPOs) wimping out and letting an agency run roughshod over the Section 106 process and the (presumed) historic and cultural interests of his or her state’s citizenry. Recurrent issues include (but certainly aren’t limited to):
SHPOs, I realize that you’re under pressure; your staffs are being eviscerated, you get no help from NPS or the Advisory Council, your governor and legislature are on your backs, but for heaven’s sake, if you're going to accept any old piece of paper that anybody throws at you as evidence of compliance with Section 106, you're rendering the whole business -- and a large part of your existence -- meaningless. And you're not helping anyone. You’re not helping the agencies, or the taxpayers who pay for them, by nodding and winking at their violations of law and regulation; you’re undercutting the efforts of anyone in an agency who’s trying to promote effective compliance, and you’re setting the agencies up for successful litigation. You’re certainly not helping your states’ historic resources, or the citizens who care about them. Going along with BS “compliance” doesn’t help resolve the problems you’re facing; if anything it makes them worse. You’re helping make the Section 106 process worthless, and in the long (or maybe short) run that won’t help you or anybody else. If you can’t or won’t do your jobs, why don’t you just stop pretending to?
- Consulting firms contacting SHPOs and making/seeking (on the assumption that the SHPO awards such things) determinations of “no historic properties affected” or “no adverse effect,” sometimes based on the promised implementation of conditions, with no evidence that the responsible federal agency even knows what’s being determined and promised. This truly reduces the 106 process to a paperwork exercise, since there’s no reason to think that the consulting firm’s statements mean anything once the firm has collected its money and gone.
- Agencies (or consulting firms) initiating 106 review by filing determinations of eligibility or effect (or petitioning the SHPO to award them with such determinations) without any prior consultation at all – thus eliminating the guts of the process.
- Determinations of effect that address only historic buildings when the project under “review” clearly has the potential for effect on archaeological sites, landscapes, and other kinds of properties that don’t happen to have four walls and a roof, with no evidence that anybody has considered these other kinds of properties.
- “Consultation” only with the SHPO, with no effort whatever to identify and engage other consulting parties.
- Unrationalized areas of potential effect (APE) – sometimes nonsensically big, sometimes absurdly small – that have nothing to do with the actual likely effects of the project.
- Evaluations of individual buildings that are in fact parts of complexes, without any attention to the overall context of which the building is a part. I’ve lately seen one whole federal installation that’s literally been picked to pieces, with each piece – judged solely on its own out-of-context merits – judged insignificant, even though the whole installation was almost certainly eligible for the Register.
SHPOs, I realize that you’re under pressure; your staffs are being eviscerated, you get no help from NPS or the Advisory Council, your governor and legislature are on your backs, but for heaven’s sake, if you're going to accept any old piece of paper that anybody throws at you as evidence of compliance with Section 106, you're rendering the whole business -- and a large part of your existence -- meaningless. And you're not helping anyone. You’re not helping the agencies, or the taxpayers who pay for them, by nodding and winking at their violations of law and regulation; you’re undercutting the efforts of anyone in an agency who’s trying to promote effective compliance, and you’re setting the agencies up for successful litigation. You’re certainly not helping your states’ historic resources, or the citizens who care about them. Going along with BS “compliance” doesn’t help resolve the problems you’re facing; if anything it makes them worse. You’re helping make the Section 106 process worthless, and in the long (or maybe short) run that won’t help you or anybody else. If you can’t or won’t do your jobs, why don’t you just stop pretending to?
Friday, March 04, 2011
A Quiz for Cultural Resource Management Students
I understand that this blog is being used in some university CRM classes, so here's a little educational application.
The following quote is from a U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management environmental impact statement:
A Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) is an area of traditional importance that has been determined eligible for listing or has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places based on established definitions and criteria.
Relative to published U.S. government definitions, the above text is factually incorrect in at least two related ways.
Can you identify how it is erroneous?
For extra credit:
1. What are the public policy implications of these errors?
2. Why do you suppose BLM has perpetrated them?
The following quote is from a U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Land Management environmental impact statement:
A Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) is an area of traditional importance that has been determined eligible for listing or has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places based on established definitions and criteria.
Relative to published U.S. government definitions, the above text is factually incorrect in at least two related ways.
Can you identify how it is erroneous?
For extra credit:
1. What are the public policy implications of these errors?
2. Why do you suppose BLM has perpetrated them?
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
106: The Loneliest Number
In reviewing agency (and other) proposals for the treatment of historic properties in response to the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA), I’m astonished (or would be if I hadn’t become jaded by it all) at the agencies’ inability – shared, it seems, with State Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs), the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP), historic preservation consultants, and even litigants seeking to protect historic places – to count beyond 106.
Agencies seem quite routinely to decide that they will demolish, relocate, or otherwise muck about with historic properties (whether known to be historic or not) without considering the following rather explicit provisions of law:
Prior to acquiring, constructing, or leasing buildings for purposes of carrying out agency responsibilities, each Federal agency shall use, to the maximum extent feasible, historic properties available to the agency… (NHPA Section 110(a)(1) [16 U.S.C. 470h-2(a)]
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any Federal agency …..shall, to the extent practicable, establish and implement alternatives for historic properties, including adaptive use, that are not needed for current or projected agency purposes… (NHPA Section 111, [16 U.S.C. 470h-3(a)]
In simple language, with these two sections of law Congress directed federal agencies to (1) use historic buildings to house agency operations before deciding to go build new ones, and (2) figure out creative things to do with historic properties of all kinds under their control when they become surplus to their needs. But agencies quite routinely don’t do either thing, and nobody seems to do anything about it. Yes, the National Trust for Historic Preservation occasionally brings the matter up, and I suppose the ACHP talks about it in its general advice columns, but does it come up in the course of Section 106 review? Do SHPOs or the ACHP ever ask agencies about Sections 110 and 111 when the agencies come screaming in with proposals to knock down old buildings so they can build new ones? Does anybody bring it up during NEPA scoping? Not that I’ve seen. The attitude seems to be: “well, we can’t really expect the agencies to do that kind of proactive stuff.”
Maybe we can’t, but Congress did, and pretty directly told them to do it, and it strikes me that it wouldn’t hurt, from time to time, to throw that fact up in the faces of agencies that expect their consultants, SHPOs, the ACHP, and the concerned public to twist themselves into pretzels to help them fast-track their projects through the Section 106 process. I wonder what terrible things would happen if agencies were regularly reminded that NHPA continues on beyond Section 106.
Agencies seem quite routinely to decide that they will demolish, relocate, or otherwise muck about with historic properties (whether known to be historic or not) without considering the following rather explicit provisions of law:
Prior to acquiring, constructing, or leasing buildings for purposes of carrying out agency responsibilities, each Federal agency shall use, to the maximum extent feasible, historic properties available to the agency… (NHPA Section 110(a)(1) [16 U.S.C. 470h-2(a)]
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, any Federal agency …..shall, to the extent practicable, establish and implement alternatives for historic properties, including adaptive use, that are not needed for current or projected agency purposes… (NHPA Section 111, [16 U.S.C. 470h-3(a)]
In simple language, with these two sections of law Congress directed federal agencies to (1) use historic buildings to house agency operations before deciding to go build new ones, and (2) figure out creative things to do with historic properties of all kinds under their control when they become surplus to their needs. But agencies quite routinely don’t do either thing, and nobody seems to do anything about it. Yes, the National Trust for Historic Preservation occasionally brings the matter up, and I suppose the ACHP talks about it in its general advice columns, but does it come up in the course of Section 106 review? Do SHPOs or the ACHP ever ask agencies about Sections 110 and 111 when the agencies come screaming in with proposals to knock down old buildings so they can build new ones? Does anybody bring it up during NEPA scoping? Not that I’ve seen. The attitude seems to be: “well, we can’t really expect the agencies to do that kind of proactive stuff.”
Maybe we can’t, but Congress did, and pretty directly told them to do it, and it strikes me that it wouldn’t hurt, from time to time, to throw that fact up in the faces of agencies that expect their consultants, SHPOs, the ACHP, and the concerned public to twist themselves into pretzels to help them fast-track their projects through the Section 106 process. I wonder what terrible things would happen if agencies were regularly reminded that NHPA continues on beyond Section 106.
Monday, February 14, 2011
Beefing up Protection for Graves
Tribes and others interested in enhanced protection for ancestral graves might want to take a look at the bill currently being considered in the Guam legislature; it's on the web at http://www.guamlegislature.com/Bills_Introduced_31st/Bill%20No.%20B001-31%20%28LS%29.pdf. I've only skimmed it, but it certainly looks like a serious effort to put some teeth into burial protection.
Wednesday, February 09, 2011
It’s Not Easy Being a Statistic
A few days ago, the historic preservation lists flashed an urgent appeal. We were warned that the U.S. Congress might be about to make drastic cuts in the Historic Preservation Fund (which supports the State and Tribal Historic Preservation Officers (SHPOs, THPOs), zero out the “Save America’s Treasures” and perhaps the “Preserve America” special grant funds, and make deep cuts in funding for Heritage Areas. We were all urged to contact our Senators and Congresspeople insisting that they resist any such cuts.
Naturally, I immediately sent the following message to both my Senators (Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin) and my Congressperson, Donna Edwards:
As a long-time professional in historic preservation and environmental impact assessment, I am being urged to contact you opposing the proposed cuts in funding for such Department of the Interior programs as "Save America's Treasures" and "Preserve America," as well as funding for State Historic Preservation Officers. I want you to know that I SUPPORT these proposed cuts, and more. The Historic Preservation Fund program administered by the National Park Service has become bloated, swollen, and divorced from any apparent purpose. It badly needs through re-thinking and re-design, which MIGHT result from a deliberate kick in its fiscal pants. I urge you to support such a kick.
The ensuing silence has been deafening from Senator Cardin and Representative Edwards, but I very promptly received the following robo-response from Senator Mikulski:
I share your support for preserving our national heritage. Historic preservation projects such as the Save America's Treasures, Preserve America, and National Heritage Areas programs help ensure that our historic landmarks and buildings will be there for future generations. These valuable resources give people the opportunity to appreciate our national heritage and learn about America's history. Once gone, these resources will be lost forever.
As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I have worked aggressively for programs that benefit Maryland and our country and will continue to do so. Knowing of your support for historic preservation will be helpful to me as the appropriations process moves forward. You can be sure that I will give your request for full funding for these worthy programs every consideration.
I drafted the following rejoinder before I realized that the Senator’s system provided no way for me to send it:
Senator Mikulski -- Your staffer who prepared the response to my post must not have read what I sent. AS a dedicated preservationist, I support CUTTING the wasteful fat out of the federal preservation program; I do NOT follow the mindless party line of supporting every federal program in historic preservation. Based on 45 years experience inside and outside the federal historic preservation establishment, I am appalled at the waste of money allocated particularly to NPS historic preservation programs and such feel-good grant programs as "Save America's Treasures." There is a real need to rethink the national historic preservation program, and I can only hope that a significant reduction in happy money would force the preservation powers that be to undertake it.
We can, of course, argue about the substantive utility or inutility of cutting NPS historic preservation funding, but it’s not my intent here to promote that argument. My purpose instead is to express the sadness and frustration I feel upon learning that even a legislator as experienced and thoughtful as Senator Mikulski automatically assumes that anyone identifying himself as a preservation specialist, or writing about preservation, must want to support throwing federal money at NPS, the SHPOs, and the various grant programs.
Is it, to members of Congress, unimaginable that someone involved in preservation might also engage in independent thought?
Naturally, I immediately sent the following message to both my Senators (Barbara Mikulski and Ben Cardin) and my Congressperson, Donna Edwards:
As a long-time professional in historic preservation and environmental impact assessment, I am being urged to contact you opposing the proposed cuts in funding for such Department of the Interior programs as "Save America's Treasures" and "Preserve America," as well as funding for State Historic Preservation Officers. I want you to know that I SUPPORT these proposed cuts, and more. The Historic Preservation Fund program administered by the National Park Service has become bloated, swollen, and divorced from any apparent purpose. It badly needs through re-thinking and re-design, which MIGHT result from a deliberate kick in its fiscal pants. I urge you to support such a kick.
The ensuing silence has been deafening from Senator Cardin and Representative Edwards, but I very promptly received the following robo-response from Senator Mikulski:
I share your support for preserving our national heritage. Historic preservation projects such as the Save America's Treasures, Preserve America, and National Heritage Areas programs help ensure that our historic landmarks and buildings will be there for future generations. These valuable resources give people the opportunity to appreciate our national heritage and learn about America's history. Once gone, these resources will be lost forever.
As a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, I have worked aggressively for programs that benefit Maryland and our country and will continue to do so. Knowing of your support for historic preservation will be helpful to me as the appropriations process moves forward. You can be sure that I will give your request for full funding for these worthy programs every consideration.
I drafted the following rejoinder before I realized that the Senator’s system provided no way for me to send it:
Senator Mikulski -- Your staffer who prepared the response to my post must not have read what I sent. AS a dedicated preservationist, I support CUTTING the wasteful fat out of the federal preservation program; I do NOT follow the mindless party line of supporting every federal program in historic preservation. Based on 45 years experience inside and outside the federal historic preservation establishment, I am appalled at the waste of money allocated particularly to NPS historic preservation programs and such feel-good grant programs as "Save America's Treasures." There is a real need to rethink the national historic preservation program, and I can only hope that a significant reduction in happy money would force the preservation powers that be to undertake it.
We can, of course, argue about the substantive utility or inutility of cutting NPS historic preservation funding, but it’s not my intent here to promote that argument. My purpose instead is to express the sadness and frustration I feel upon learning that even a legislator as experienced and thoughtful as Senator Mikulski automatically assumes that anyone identifying himself as a preservation specialist, or writing about preservation, must want to support throwing federal money at NPS, the SHPOs, and the various grant programs.
Is it, to members of Congress, unimaginable that someone involved in preservation might also engage in independent thought?
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review: The President's New Executive Order and Historic Preservation
Introduction
On January 18, 2011, President Obama issued an executive order (which doesn’t seem yet to have been assigned a number) entitled “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review.” The order articulates some excellent principles that I’ll get to in a moment, but first let’s skip toward the order’s end and look at its action-forcing paragraphs. These are found in Section 6, and speak to all executive branch agencies:
Sec. 6. Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules. (a) To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned. Such retrospective analyses, including supporting data, should be released online whenever possible.
(b) Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.
So agencies, within 120 days, are to initiate plans to examine their regulations and fix them up to make them “more effective or less burdensome” – or, presumably, both.
This requirement is as applicable to the two federal agencies responsible for rulemaking (that is, regulation-issuance) under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) as it is to the rest of the federal establishment. Pursuant to the executive order those two agencies – the National Park Service (NPS) and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something creative and responsible with their regulations – but almost certainly will resist doing so. They will argue either that their regulations don’t really regulate anything (the obvious out for NPS), or that they’re just fine as they are (the ACHP’s likely angle).
This is too bad, because in fact the interlinked, overlapping NHPA-based regulations overseen by the two agencies create many inefficiencies and are not very effective at achieving their purposes. They cost millions if not billions of unnecessary dollars, and place undue burdens on a considerable cross-section of the American public, including a range of industries and businesses large and small, local and state governments, Indian tribes and other indigenous groups, low-income and minority groups, property owners, and just plain citizens – including citizens who support historic preservation.
The ACHP and NPS ought to develop and implement review plans in cooperation with one another (as well as with all us stakeholders), because many of the gross inefficiencies of their regulatory systems, much of their undue complexity, much of the burden they place on industry and citizenry alike, result from interactions between the systems.
Complexity and Burdens: a Hypothetical Example
As noted above, NPS and ACHP will doubtless claim that they’re not really regulatory agencies and don’t need to do anything, and that besides, their regulations are just fine and everyone’s happy with them. To understand why they’re wrong, and why they (or better, someone else who isn’t deeply invested in the status quo) ought to perform the review the President orders, consider a hypothetical project – say, a small energy-production facility that requires a federal license or funding, or uses federal land. This project requires review under Section 106 of NHPA and the regulations of the ACHP (36 CFR 800). Let’s assume that the project proponent – call her Polly – is a responsible sort, as interested in doing right by the law, the environment, and the public interest as she is in the project’s bottom line. So she sets out to comply with 36 CFR 800 (and the National Environmental Policy Act – NEPA – but that’s another whole can of regulatory worms).
But the proponent in fact can’t comply with 36 CFR 800, because Section 106 of NHPA applies only to federal agencies. There may or may not be a federal agency clearly involved when Polly Proponent begins to develop her plans, or there may be several – or some may be involved at the outset while others are waiting in the wings. The result is that review of Polly’s project may be delayed until a federal agency is unambiguously involved, and by the time this happens Polly may have invested a lot of time and money in her project, limiting her ability or willingness to consider alternatives if it turns out her preferred approach will have serious impacts.
So here’s Problem #1 – Ambiguous, uncertain, or late federal involvement: Section 106 review was invented back when many if not most federal projects were directly undertaken by federal agencies. Today, many if not most projects in which the federal government is involved are actually planned and promoted by private parties or local/state governments. Federal agencies may become involved in a project rather late in planning. The Section 106 regulations quite reasonably insist that the law be complied with early in planning, when there’s lots of room for adjustment and consideration of alternatives, but at that early stage, there may be no federal agency involved. As a result, review may be delayed until many alternatives have been foreclosed, and there’s little wiggle room left.
Let’s suppose a federal agency gets involved in Polly’s project – or maybe a couple of Federal agencies do, and they initiate review. Polly may at this point run into another problem – call it Problem #1a – in that the agencies involved may have understandings and interpretations of their Section 106 responsibilities that are unique to themselves, and these understandings may conflict with one another, confusing and complicating review of Polly’s project. This isn’t exactly the ACHP’s or NPS’s fault, so let’s just note it and skip over it – though it’s certainly imaginable that thoughtful review of the regulatory system could help relieve the confusion.
The agency responsible for Polly’s project – let’s call it the Agency for Federal Assistance (AFA) -- now seeks to initiate Section 106 review. The Section 106 regulations say that it’s to do so by contacting the relevant State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) , coordinating with other reviews (e.g. NEPA review) and identifying other parties – stakeholders – with which it should consult. Under some circumstances the agency consults with one or more Tribal Historic Preservation Officers in lieu of or in addition to the SHPO, but to keep the discussion relatively simple (sic), let's stick with the SHPO.
And in consulting the SHPO, the agency is likely to be quite systematically misled as a result of NPS regulations and practice. NPS partly funds the SHPOs, and hence oversees how they perform their functions – including their consultation with agencies under Section 106. But NPS regulations (36 CFR 61) and procedures (extensive and obscure) dealing with SHPO operations go into loving detail about SHPO duties relating to things of interest to NPS (notably the National Register of Historic Places – see below), while largely ignoring SHPO responsibilities vis-à-vis Section 106. To the extent NPS procedures do touch on Section 106-related SHPO responsibilities, they are out of date; the Section 106 regulations have changed several times, and practice under Section 106 has evolved considerably, over the two decades or so since NPS last re-thought its SHPO review procedures.
So the agency holding the SHPO’s purse-strings – NPS – does little or nothing to encourage SHPOs to advise agencies about how to comply with Section 106 in a manner that’s consistent with the ACHP’s regulations. An SHPO may do so without such encouragement, of course, but he or she will not be rewarded for doing so when NPS doles out its grant moneys.
This is Problem #2: The interaction between ACHP and NPS procedures, via the SHPOs, does not encourage early, thoughtful initiation of Section 106 review in coordination with NEPA and in consultation with stakeholders.
The AFA, if it is like most federal agencies, wants to consult with just as few people as possible, and do the least work it can, in reviewing Polly’s project. AFA very likely believes – this belief is quite widespread, though utterly inconsistent with the regulations – that Section 106 simply requires them to seek “clearance” or approval for Polly’s project from the SHPO, or that the SHPO will tell them if the project presents any historic preservation issues.
So AFA drops the plans for Polly’s project on the SHPO and asks what the SHPO thinks – expecting to be told definitively whether Polly has any historic preservation problems. Under the Section 106 regulations, what the SHPO ought to do at this point is provide AFA with recommendations about how to identify any potentially affected historic properties, caution AFA to make sure it coordinates its 106 consultation with review under NEPA, and point AFA toward any other parties who ought to be brought into consultation. The SHPO may do these things, but since he or she gets no encouragement to do so from NPS, there’s no guarantee.
The SHPO may just tell AFA what’s in the “state inventory” – the list of places the state has identified that may have historic value. The inventory is very incomplete; no state has had the money to “complete” its inventory, and since history marches on, and discoveries are made all the time, and historic significance is in the minds of evaluators, the very notion of a “complete” historic property inventory is something of an oxymoron. But one possibility is that AFA assumes that the inventory is complete, notes that there’s nothing recorded in any of the locations that Polly’s considering, and tells Polly she has nothing to worry about when it comes to Section 106. This, of course, may be true but it probably isn’t; the reason there’s nothing in the inventory is probably that nobody’s looked at Polly’s potential project sites.
More likely, the SHPO will tell AFA that it doesn’t know of anything in the areas Polly’s looking at, and recommends that a survey be done to find out what is there. The SHPO quite likely has detailed standards for survey work – NPS encourages the development of such standards. The standards probably go into some detail about having archaeologists walk over every foot of the ground, digging holes every so often, while architectural historians look at and photograph all the buildings, and everybody does background research. What they almost certainly do not say much about is finding out what living people in the potentially affected areas (or elsewhere) think about those areas – unless those people are archaeologists, architectural historians, or perhaps Indian tribes – because NPS doesn’t encourage SHPOs to worry about that kind of thing (except where tribes are involved, based on a large corpus of action-forcing law).
Polly – a responsible sort, remember – has several possible alternative locations for her energy project, and some of them are quite large. She doesn’t have access to all of them yet. It will cost her a great deal of money to contract for surveys of them all, done to the SHPO’s standards. She objects, and the AFA takes her objection to the SHPO. They decide that Polly can get by with background study at this point, and put off full scale survey until a final project site has been identified.
So Polly’s historic preservation contractor does a vague general paper on the history and prehistory of the region, which goes in the project’s NEPA documents, but does nothing more about impacts on historic properties until Polly and AFA have selected a preferred alternative. By this time Polly has invested quite a lot of money in project planning. Now, at the eleventh hour, her consultants finally get out on the ground in the preferred alternative area, and – whoops! – they find something. Or – this is not uncommon – the consultants don’t find something, but others (those folks whose views haven’t been sought during earlier phases of planning), learn about the project because its NEPA document has been distributed or it’s gotten into the local papers or been touted on the internet, and they raise concerns. Maybe these concerns are about, say, an ancestral burial place an Indian tribe says will be disturbed, or maybe local people who really like the pristine views across the proposed project site raise aesthetic arguments. Whatever the concerns, they’re raised late in the planning process, when it’s going to cost Polly megabucks to do anything about them – if she can do anything at all.
So, Problem #3: By failing to ensure that stakeholders are involved early in the process, by failing to provide effectively for coordination with NEPA and similar reviews, and by imposing standards that promote delay in the identification of affected historic properties until alternatives have been foregone, the interaction between NPS and ACHP regulations almost guarantees late-breaking conflicts that waste money and time.
But it gets worse. Now that something has been identified in the area to be affected by the project, the Section 106 regulations require that its eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places be determined. Never mind that the tribe is deeply concerned about impacts on its ancestors’ burial place; never mind that the local aesthetic society is wild about what’s going to happen to the viewshed; we can’t consider impacts on such a place under Section 106 unless it’s eligible for the Register. And conversely, even if the only thing found is a pile of tin cans on the edge of the project site, and nobody gives a damn about it, it has to be evaluated for Register eligibility.
And here the ACHP and NPS regulations part company rather dramatically. The ACHP regulations (at 36 CFR 800.4(c)(2)) permit an agency and SHPO simply to decide that something is or is not eligible for the Register and move on, with provision for resolving objections raised by others. But NPS regulations (36 CFR 63) require that if an agency and SHPO decide that a property is eligible, the agency must submit detailed documentation to NPS, in the person of the Keeper of the National Register, who makes a final decision. If the agency and SHPO decide that the property is not eligible, though, they can treat it as such with no further review; in other words AFA can let Polly blow it away, and never mind the tribe or the aesthetes.
In determining eligibility, agencies, consultants, SHPOs and others apply criteria set forth in NPS regulations at 36 CFR 60.4. These criteria are very abstract and subject to interpretation by professional historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists – who are, for all practical purposes, the only people allowed by NPS and ACHP regulations to interpret them. Applying them can become the subject of intense, abstruse argumentation, taking up more time with little practical utility. SHPOs and NPS also commonly demand a great deal of documentation to support a determination of eligibility, grounding their demands (if they bother to explain them at all) in a considerable corpus of NPS guidance (based ultimately on regulations at 36 CFR 60) relating to the formal nomination of properties to the Register. This sort of documentation is often unnecessary for purposes of eligibility determination, but is insisted upon anyway as a matter of consistency (See Ralph Waldo Emerson for a succinct comment on this kind of consistency).
This is Problem #4: The ACHP and NPS regulations together focus attention on properties that meet abstract criteria interpretable only by professionals in specified academic disciplines, employing unduly complicated processes and generating unnecessary paperwork. The evaluation system is virtually impenetrable by outsiders, and can be very time-consuming. It can elevate the “official,” government-sanctioned significance of things that no one cares much about, while denigrating the significance of places about which people are deeply concerned. The character of the criteria, and the divergence between the ACHP and NPS regulations, create many opportunities for time-wasting arguments over petty technical and procedural issues.
Assuming something is found eligible for the National Register, the next step in the process is to determine whether the project will affect it, and if so, how. Here the regulations of the ACHP (36 CFR 800.5) hold sway, but the SHPO is an important interpreter of those regulations, and is held to account by NPS. The regulations allow for projects to fall into any of four categories – no historic properties subject to effect, no adverse effect, no adverse effect with conditions, and adverse effect. If there will be an adverse effect, the agency, SHPO, and others consult further, seeking agreement about how to “resolve” the adversity. There is much room for argument over how to interpret the regulations. Although the regulations do not say so, there is a widespread perception that it is wrong to have an adverse effect, so agencies tend to seek “no adverse effect” determinations. SHPOs tend to resist concurring in such determinations. SHPO and ACHP staff also tend to interpret the language of the regulations to require a rigidly sequential process of first exploring alternatives to avoid adverse effects, then alternatives to minimize them, and only if these prove infeasible, alternatives to mitigate them somehow – regardless of the severity of the impact or the significance of the property. Arguments over such petty issues can take up a great deal of time, including time spent by pricy consultants.
Thus, Problem 5: The overall effect of the Section 106 regulations, interacting with NPS regulations and procedures, is to reduce consideration of effects on historic properties to technical argumentation over petty points of regulatory interpretation and professional preference, with little opportunity for the public to become fruitfully involved.
Conclusion: Fixing the Problems
For those unfamiliar with the Section 106 process, I should say that Polly will probably get her project constructed – regardless of its effects on historic properties or the broader environment. She’ll probably wind up spending a good deal of money on “resolving” its impacts through such things as archaeological data recovery – on top of what she’s spent struggling through the review process. If worst comes to worst, if the project will have adverse effects and the AFA, Polly,and the SHPO can’t agree on what to do about them, the ACHP will comment to the head of AFA, who will make its final decision.
All that said, and despite all the problems outlined above, there is much that is worthwhile in the Section 106 process. Notably, it’s very nearly the only regulatory process in the federal government that emphasizes getting concerned parties together to consult over and work out their differences about how impacts on an aspect of the environment should be characterized and dealt with. It could be a model for other such review processes, had it not been allowed to evolve into such a petty, impenetrable, unnecessarily cumbersome and ill-focused enterprise.
What can be done? That remains to be seen, but I hope someone in the administration can and will force the ACHP and NPS to get off their self-satisfied duffs and reconsider the whole regulatory complex with reference to the excellent principles the President set out in the introduction to his executive order – to wit:
“Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation. It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas. It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty. It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative. It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand. It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.”
I want especially to point to the third and seventh sentences in this statement of principles. The complex of regulations surrounding and structuring Section 106 review give lip service (and even that only sometimes) to public participation and the exchange of ideas, but they do not really facilitate either, and they are a long, long way from being accessible, consistent, written in plain language, or easy to understand (The NEPA regulations, I should mention, are even worse). They could be made very much better. I hope – but don’t expect – that President Obama’s executive order will trigger a process that leads to such improvements.
On January 18, 2011, President Obama issued an executive order (which doesn’t seem yet to have been assigned a number) entitled “Improving Regulation and Regulatory Review.” The order articulates some excellent principles that I’ll get to in a moment, but first let’s skip toward the order’s end and look at its action-forcing paragraphs. These are found in Section 6, and speak to all executive branch agencies:
Sec. 6. Retrospective Analyses of Existing Rules. (a) To facilitate the periodic review of existing significant regulations, agencies shall consider how best to promote retrospective analysis of rules that may be outmoded, ineffective, insufficient, or excessively burdensome, and to modify, streamline, expand, or repeal them in accordance with what has been learned. Such retrospective analyses, including supporting data, should be released online whenever possible.
(b) Within 120 days of the date of this order, each agency shall develop and submit to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs a preliminary plan, consistent with law and its resources and regulatory priorities, under which the agency will periodically review its existing significant regulations to determine whether any such regulations should be modified, streamlined, expanded, or repealed so as to make the agency's regulatory program more effective or less burdensome in achieving the regulatory objectives.
So agencies, within 120 days, are to initiate plans to examine their regulations and fix them up to make them “more effective or less burdensome” – or, presumably, both.
This requirement is as applicable to the two federal agencies responsible for rulemaking (that is, regulation-issuance) under the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) as it is to the rest of the federal establishment. Pursuant to the executive order those two agencies – the National Park Service (NPS) and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP) have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something creative and responsible with their regulations – but almost certainly will resist doing so. They will argue either that their regulations don’t really regulate anything (the obvious out for NPS), or that they’re just fine as they are (the ACHP’s likely angle).
This is too bad, because in fact the interlinked, overlapping NHPA-based regulations overseen by the two agencies create many inefficiencies and are not very effective at achieving their purposes. They cost millions if not billions of unnecessary dollars, and place undue burdens on a considerable cross-section of the American public, including a range of industries and businesses large and small, local and state governments, Indian tribes and other indigenous groups, low-income and minority groups, property owners, and just plain citizens – including citizens who support historic preservation.
The ACHP and NPS ought to develop and implement review plans in cooperation with one another (as well as with all us stakeholders), because many of the gross inefficiencies of their regulatory systems, much of their undue complexity, much of the burden they place on industry and citizenry alike, result from interactions between the systems.
Complexity and Burdens: a Hypothetical Example
As noted above, NPS and ACHP will doubtless claim that they’re not really regulatory agencies and don’t need to do anything, and that besides, their regulations are just fine and everyone’s happy with them. To understand why they’re wrong, and why they (or better, someone else who isn’t deeply invested in the status quo) ought to perform the review the President orders, consider a hypothetical project – say, a small energy-production facility that requires a federal license or funding, or uses federal land. This project requires review under Section 106 of NHPA and the regulations of the ACHP (36 CFR 800). Let’s assume that the project proponent – call her Polly – is a responsible sort, as interested in doing right by the law, the environment, and the public interest as she is in the project’s bottom line. So she sets out to comply with 36 CFR 800 (and the National Environmental Policy Act – NEPA – but that’s another whole can of regulatory worms).
But the proponent in fact can’t comply with 36 CFR 800, because Section 106 of NHPA applies only to federal agencies. There may or may not be a federal agency clearly involved when Polly Proponent begins to develop her plans, or there may be several – or some may be involved at the outset while others are waiting in the wings. The result is that review of Polly’s project may be delayed until a federal agency is unambiguously involved, and by the time this happens Polly may have invested a lot of time and money in her project, limiting her ability or willingness to consider alternatives if it turns out her preferred approach will have serious impacts.
So here’s Problem #1 – Ambiguous, uncertain, or late federal involvement: Section 106 review was invented back when many if not most federal projects were directly undertaken by federal agencies. Today, many if not most projects in which the federal government is involved are actually planned and promoted by private parties or local/state governments. Federal agencies may become involved in a project rather late in planning. The Section 106 regulations quite reasonably insist that the law be complied with early in planning, when there’s lots of room for adjustment and consideration of alternatives, but at that early stage, there may be no federal agency involved. As a result, review may be delayed until many alternatives have been foreclosed, and there’s little wiggle room left.
Let’s suppose a federal agency gets involved in Polly’s project – or maybe a couple of Federal agencies do, and they initiate review. Polly may at this point run into another problem – call it Problem #1a – in that the agencies involved may have understandings and interpretations of their Section 106 responsibilities that are unique to themselves, and these understandings may conflict with one another, confusing and complicating review of Polly’s project. This isn’t exactly the ACHP’s or NPS’s fault, so let’s just note it and skip over it – though it’s certainly imaginable that thoughtful review of the regulatory system could help relieve the confusion.
The agency responsible for Polly’s project – let’s call it the Agency for Federal Assistance (AFA) -- now seeks to initiate Section 106 review. The Section 106 regulations say that it’s to do so by contacting the relevant State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) , coordinating with other reviews (e.g. NEPA review) and identifying other parties – stakeholders – with which it should consult. Under some circumstances the agency consults with one or more Tribal Historic Preservation Officers in lieu of or in addition to the SHPO, but to keep the discussion relatively simple (sic), let's stick with the SHPO.
And in consulting the SHPO, the agency is likely to be quite systematically misled as a result of NPS regulations and practice. NPS partly funds the SHPOs, and hence oversees how they perform their functions – including their consultation with agencies under Section 106. But NPS regulations (36 CFR 61) and procedures (extensive and obscure) dealing with SHPO operations go into loving detail about SHPO duties relating to things of interest to NPS (notably the National Register of Historic Places – see below), while largely ignoring SHPO responsibilities vis-à-vis Section 106. To the extent NPS procedures do touch on Section 106-related SHPO responsibilities, they are out of date; the Section 106 regulations have changed several times, and practice under Section 106 has evolved considerably, over the two decades or so since NPS last re-thought its SHPO review procedures.
So the agency holding the SHPO’s purse-strings – NPS – does little or nothing to encourage SHPOs to advise agencies about how to comply with Section 106 in a manner that’s consistent with the ACHP’s regulations. An SHPO may do so without such encouragement, of course, but he or she will not be rewarded for doing so when NPS doles out its grant moneys.
This is Problem #2: The interaction between ACHP and NPS procedures, via the SHPOs, does not encourage early, thoughtful initiation of Section 106 review in coordination with NEPA and in consultation with stakeholders.
The AFA, if it is like most federal agencies, wants to consult with just as few people as possible, and do the least work it can, in reviewing Polly’s project. AFA very likely believes – this belief is quite widespread, though utterly inconsistent with the regulations – that Section 106 simply requires them to seek “clearance” or approval for Polly’s project from the SHPO, or that the SHPO will tell them if the project presents any historic preservation issues.
So AFA drops the plans for Polly’s project on the SHPO and asks what the SHPO thinks – expecting to be told definitively whether Polly has any historic preservation problems. Under the Section 106 regulations, what the SHPO ought to do at this point is provide AFA with recommendations about how to identify any potentially affected historic properties, caution AFA to make sure it coordinates its 106 consultation with review under NEPA, and point AFA toward any other parties who ought to be brought into consultation. The SHPO may do these things, but since he or she gets no encouragement to do so from NPS, there’s no guarantee.
The SHPO may just tell AFA what’s in the “state inventory” – the list of places the state has identified that may have historic value. The inventory is very incomplete; no state has had the money to “complete” its inventory, and since history marches on, and discoveries are made all the time, and historic significance is in the minds of evaluators, the very notion of a “complete” historic property inventory is something of an oxymoron. But one possibility is that AFA assumes that the inventory is complete, notes that there’s nothing recorded in any of the locations that Polly’s considering, and tells Polly she has nothing to worry about when it comes to Section 106. This, of course, may be true but it probably isn’t; the reason there’s nothing in the inventory is probably that nobody’s looked at Polly’s potential project sites.
More likely, the SHPO will tell AFA that it doesn’t know of anything in the areas Polly’s looking at, and recommends that a survey be done to find out what is there. The SHPO quite likely has detailed standards for survey work – NPS encourages the development of such standards. The standards probably go into some detail about having archaeologists walk over every foot of the ground, digging holes every so often, while architectural historians look at and photograph all the buildings, and everybody does background research. What they almost certainly do not say much about is finding out what living people in the potentially affected areas (or elsewhere) think about those areas – unless those people are archaeologists, architectural historians, or perhaps Indian tribes – because NPS doesn’t encourage SHPOs to worry about that kind of thing (except where tribes are involved, based on a large corpus of action-forcing law).
Polly – a responsible sort, remember – has several possible alternative locations for her energy project, and some of them are quite large. She doesn’t have access to all of them yet. It will cost her a great deal of money to contract for surveys of them all, done to the SHPO’s standards. She objects, and the AFA takes her objection to the SHPO. They decide that Polly can get by with background study at this point, and put off full scale survey until a final project site has been identified.
So Polly’s historic preservation contractor does a vague general paper on the history and prehistory of the region, which goes in the project’s NEPA documents, but does nothing more about impacts on historic properties until Polly and AFA have selected a preferred alternative. By this time Polly has invested quite a lot of money in project planning. Now, at the eleventh hour, her consultants finally get out on the ground in the preferred alternative area, and – whoops! – they find something. Or – this is not uncommon – the consultants don’t find something, but others (those folks whose views haven’t been sought during earlier phases of planning), learn about the project because its NEPA document has been distributed or it’s gotten into the local papers or been touted on the internet, and they raise concerns. Maybe these concerns are about, say, an ancestral burial place an Indian tribe says will be disturbed, or maybe local people who really like the pristine views across the proposed project site raise aesthetic arguments. Whatever the concerns, they’re raised late in the planning process, when it’s going to cost Polly megabucks to do anything about them – if she can do anything at all.
So, Problem #3: By failing to ensure that stakeholders are involved early in the process, by failing to provide effectively for coordination with NEPA and similar reviews, and by imposing standards that promote delay in the identification of affected historic properties until alternatives have been foregone, the interaction between NPS and ACHP regulations almost guarantees late-breaking conflicts that waste money and time.
But it gets worse. Now that something has been identified in the area to be affected by the project, the Section 106 regulations require that its eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places be determined. Never mind that the tribe is deeply concerned about impacts on its ancestors’ burial place; never mind that the local aesthetic society is wild about what’s going to happen to the viewshed; we can’t consider impacts on such a place under Section 106 unless it’s eligible for the Register. And conversely, even if the only thing found is a pile of tin cans on the edge of the project site, and nobody gives a damn about it, it has to be evaluated for Register eligibility.
And here the ACHP and NPS regulations part company rather dramatically. The ACHP regulations (at 36 CFR 800.4(c)(2)) permit an agency and SHPO simply to decide that something is or is not eligible for the Register and move on, with provision for resolving objections raised by others. But NPS regulations (36 CFR 63) require that if an agency and SHPO decide that a property is eligible, the agency must submit detailed documentation to NPS, in the person of the Keeper of the National Register, who makes a final decision. If the agency and SHPO decide that the property is not eligible, though, they can treat it as such with no further review; in other words AFA can let Polly blow it away, and never mind the tribe or the aesthetes.
In determining eligibility, agencies, consultants, SHPOs and others apply criteria set forth in NPS regulations at 36 CFR 60.4. These criteria are very abstract and subject to interpretation by professional historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists – who are, for all practical purposes, the only people allowed by NPS and ACHP regulations to interpret them. Applying them can become the subject of intense, abstruse argumentation, taking up more time with little practical utility. SHPOs and NPS also commonly demand a great deal of documentation to support a determination of eligibility, grounding their demands (if they bother to explain them at all) in a considerable corpus of NPS guidance (based ultimately on regulations at 36 CFR 60) relating to the formal nomination of properties to the Register. This sort of documentation is often unnecessary for purposes of eligibility determination, but is insisted upon anyway as a matter of consistency (See Ralph Waldo Emerson for a succinct comment on this kind of consistency).
This is Problem #4: The ACHP and NPS regulations together focus attention on properties that meet abstract criteria interpretable only by professionals in specified academic disciplines, employing unduly complicated processes and generating unnecessary paperwork. The evaluation system is virtually impenetrable by outsiders, and can be very time-consuming. It can elevate the “official,” government-sanctioned significance of things that no one cares much about, while denigrating the significance of places about which people are deeply concerned. The character of the criteria, and the divergence between the ACHP and NPS regulations, create many opportunities for time-wasting arguments over petty technical and procedural issues.
Assuming something is found eligible for the National Register, the next step in the process is to determine whether the project will affect it, and if so, how. Here the regulations of the ACHP (36 CFR 800.5) hold sway, but the SHPO is an important interpreter of those regulations, and is held to account by NPS. The regulations allow for projects to fall into any of four categories – no historic properties subject to effect, no adverse effect, no adverse effect with conditions, and adverse effect. If there will be an adverse effect, the agency, SHPO, and others consult further, seeking agreement about how to “resolve” the adversity. There is much room for argument over how to interpret the regulations. Although the regulations do not say so, there is a widespread perception that it is wrong to have an adverse effect, so agencies tend to seek “no adverse effect” determinations. SHPOs tend to resist concurring in such determinations. SHPO and ACHP staff also tend to interpret the language of the regulations to require a rigidly sequential process of first exploring alternatives to avoid adverse effects, then alternatives to minimize them, and only if these prove infeasible, alternatives to mitigate them somehow – regardless of the severity of the impact or the significance of the property. Arguments over such petty issues can take up a great deal of time, including time spent by pricy consultants.
Thus, Problem 5: The overall effect of the Section 106 regulations, interacting with NPS regulations and procedures, is to reduce consideration of effects on historic properties to technical argumentation over petty points of regulatory interpretation and professional preference, with little opportunity for the public to become fruitfully involved.
Conclusion: Fixing the Problems
For those unfamiliar with the Section 106 process, I should say that Polly will probably get her project constructed – regardless of its effects on historic properties or the broader environment. She’ll probably wind up spending a good deal of money on “resolving” its impacts through such things as archaeological data recovery – on top of what she’s spent struggling through the review process. If worst comes to worst, if the project will have adverse effects and the AFA, Polly,and the SHPO can’t agree on what to do about them, the ACHP will comment to the head of AFA, who will make its final decision.
All that said, and despite all the problems outlined above, there is much that is worthwhile in the Section 106 process. Notably, it’s very nearly the only regulatory process in the federal government that emphasizes getting concerned parties together to consult over and work out their differences about how impacts on an aspect of the environment should be characterized and dealt with. It could be a model for other such review processes, had it not been allowed to evolve into such a petty, impenetrable, unnecessarily cumbersome and ill-focused enterprise.
What can be done? That remains to be seen, but I hope someone in the administration can and will force the ACHP and NPS to get off their self-satisfied duffs and reconsider the whole regulatory complex with reference to the excellent principles the President set out in the introduction to his executive order – to wit:
“Our regulatory system must protect public health, welfare, safety, and our environment while promoting economic growth, innovation, competitiveness, and job creation. It must be based on the best available science. It must allow for public participation and an open exchange of ideas. It must promote predictability and reduce uncertainty. It must identify and use the best, most innovative, and least burdensome tools for achieving regulatory ends. It must take into account benefits and costs, both quantitative and qualitative. It must ensure that regulations are accessible, consistent, written in plain language, and easy to understand. It must measure, and seek to improve, the actual results of regulatory requirements.”
I want especially to point to the third and seventh sentences in this statement of principles. The complex of regulations surrounding and structuring Section 106 review give lip service (and even that only sometimes) to public participation and the exchange of ideas, but they do not really facilitate either, and they are a long, long way from being accessible, consistent, written in plain language, or easy to understand (The NEPA regulations, I should mention, are even worse). They could be made very much better. I hope – but don’t expect – that President Obama’s executive order will trigger a process that leads to such improvements.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
"Tribal Monitoring"
A posting on ACRA-L reminds me that Indian tribes in California continue to be hoodwinked into thinking that the cultural resource laws require, and require only, "tribal monitoring" of construction projects. Here's a paper I did several years ago for a class I took part in at the request of Reba Fuller of Tuolumne Rancheria, that tries to explain why tribes should not get fixated on monitoring, even in California where (sadly) it's become common practice.
Project proponents, government agencies, and environmental consulting firms in California often propose “monitoring” as a means of mitigating the effects of construction and other land-modifying activities on ancestral sites.
“Monitoring” means watching the bulldozing and recording or salvaging whatever may be found (graves, artifacts, etc.). Sometimes it’s done by tribal representatives, sometimes by archaeologists, sometimes by both.
Monitoring may often be necessary, but it should not be the first or primary option a tribe accepts, for at least the following reasons:
• The environmental and cultural resource laws are planning laws; they give tribes and others the opportunity to influence project planning. When you opt for monitoring, you give up your influence on planning.
• Accepting monitoring means you accept that the project as planned will go forward. The streets will go here, the houses will go there, the shopping mall will go over there – perhaps with some room for shifting things a little bit this way or that, but usually not much.
• If monitors find something important, practically speaking it is very unlikely that they’re going to be able to stop destruction of the place where that something lies. The best they’re likely to be able to do is delay destruction for awhile, while someone removes whatever has been found and puts it in a safe place.
• Monitoring can be applied only to small, discrete things like artifacts and graves; it cannot work to protect sites and natural areas.
Simply put, monitoring is one tool that may be agreed on as part of a plan to manage and protect cultural resources, but it should seldom if ever be the only tool, or the first thing discussed. Tribes should insist that project proponents and agencies first fully explore ways actually to protect ancestral places without disturbing them, and ways to compensate for loss or damage to such places, before considering monitoring.
WHY “MONITORING”
IS NOT NECESSARILY A GOOD IDEA
Thomas F. King: Prepared for a class at the Tuolumne Rancheria, 2007
Project proponents, government agencies, and environmental consulting firms in California often propose “monitoring” as a means of mitigating the effects of construction and other land-modifying activities on ancestral sites.
“Monitoring” means watching the bulldozing and recording or salvaging whatever may be found (graves, artifacts, etc.). Sometimes it’s done by tribal representatives, sometimes by archaeologists, sometimes by both.
Monitoring may often be necessary, but it should not be the first or primary option a tribe accepts, for at least the following reasons:
• The environmental and cultural resource laws are planning laws; they give tribes and others the opportunity to influence project planning. When you opt for monitoring, you give up your influence on planning.
• Accepting monitoring means you accept that the project as planned will go forward. The streets will go here, the houses will go there, the shopping mall will go over there – perhaps with some room for shifting things a little bit this way or that, but usually not much.
• If monitors find something important, practically speaking it is very unlikely that they’re going to be able to stop destruction of the place where that something lies. The best they’re likely to be able to do is delay destruction for awhile, while someone removes whatever has been found and puts it in a safe place.
• Monitoring can be applied only to small, discrete things like artifacts and graves; it cannot work to protect sites and natural areas.
Simply put, monitoring is one tool that may be agreed on as part of a plan to manage and protect cultural resources, but it should seldom if ever be the only tool, or the first thing discussed. Tribes should insist that project proponents and agencies first fully explore ways actually to protect ancestral places without disturbing them, and ways to compensate for loss or damage to such places, before considering monitoring.
Friday, January 21, 2011
Enforcing Section 106
I understand that at the recent meeting in Palm Springs, California to discuss tribal cultural issues with energy development, some tribes were particularly vehement about the need for Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) and maybe the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to be enforced more vigorously.
This is an interesting issue, and not as straightforward as one might think. For a very insightful discussion, let me recommend "Two Shades of Green," issued some years ago by the Rand Corporation. “Two Shades” compared how the Army complies with environmental laws that feature outside enforcement (Clean Air Act [CAA], Clean Water Act [CWS], etc.) and those that are supposed to be self-enforcing (NEPA, 106, etc.). It found, not surprisingly, that the Army did a helluva lot better with the former than with the latter. The report's downloadable at http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R4220.html, and worth reading.
BUT it's a lot easier to enforce such hard-edged laws like CAA and CWA, which say things like "thou shalt not pump more than X ppm of gunk into the environment," than it is to enforce soft, squishy, process-oriented laws like 106 and NEPA, and even CAA/CWA enforcement doesn't work perfectly (See, for example, Our Unprotected Heritage [Left Coast Press 2009], pp 47-48, 135-6). AND such enforcement requires a largish bureaucracy (at USEPA and the state EPAs) to carry out.
And most importantly, I think it's an unavoidable rule that the tighter the enforcement of an environmental law, the more narrowly and nit-pickingly the subject of the law will be defined. If you think we have problems now with issues like “how big is your traditional cultural property,” just wait till you start trying to enforce legal protections for such properties.
I don’t mean to discourage tribes or anyone else from considering how to enforce the laws, or to otherwise make them work better. I’m just saying that it’s something of a trick to imagine how enforcement could be built into NEPA or 106 without greatly restricting the scope of their application. It'd be interesting to try, but would need to be undertaken with considerable care and creativity.
This is an interesting issue, and not as straightforward as one might think. For a very insightful discussion, let me recommend "Two Shades of Green," issued some years ago by the Rand Corporation. “Two Shades” compared how the Army complies with environmental laws that feature outside enforcement (Clean Air Act [CAA], Clean Water Act [CWS], etc.) and those that are supposed to be self-enforcing (NEPA, 106, etc.). It found, not surprisingly, that the Army did a helluva lot better with the former than with the latter. The report's downloadable at http://www.rand.org/pubs/reports/R4220.html, and worth reading.
BUT it's a lot easier to enforce such hard-edged laws like CAA and CWA, which say things like "thou shalt not pump more than X ppm of gunk into the environment," than it is to enforce soft, squishy, process-oriented laws like 106 and NEPA, and even CAA/CWA enforcement doesn't work perfectly (See, for example, Our Unprotected Heritage [Left Coast Press 2009], pp 47-48, 135-6). AND such enforcement requires a largish bureaucracy (at USEPA and the state EPAs) to carry out.
And most importantly, I think it's an unavoidable rule that the tighter the enforcement of an environmental law, the more narrowly and nit-pickingly the subject of the law will be defined. If you think we have problems now with issues like “how big is your traditional cultural property,” just wait till you start trying to enforce legal protections for such properties.
I don’t mean to discourage tribes or anyone else from considering how to enforce the laws, or to otherwise make them work better. I’m just saying that it’s something of a trick to imagine how enforcement could be built into NEPA or 106 without greatly restricting the scope of their application. It'd be interesting to try, but would need to be undertaken with considerable care and creativity.
Thursday, January 20, 2011
A Devilish Definition
I’ve just become aware of a draft Department of the Interior (DOI) tribal consultation policy that’s been posted on the web at http://www.doi.gov/governments/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&pageid=119393 . The status of this document is not clear to me, but it’s being reviewed and commented on by tribes and, I take it, some DOI agencies. Whether, how, and when it will be made available for public review and comment is a mystery to me.
At a glance, the policy looks like a well-meaning document whose devils are, as usual, in the details. One detail that jumped out at me on first reading is at Section III.D, the definition of “Departmental Action with Tribal Implications.” This is a very important definition, DATIs are the things that DOI agencies are directed to consult about. If it’s a DATI you consult; if it’s not a DATI you don’t have to. Here’s the definition:
Departmental Action with Tribal Implications – Regulation, rulemaking, policy, guidance, legislative proposal made by the Department, grant funding formula changes, or operational activity that may have a substantial direct effect on Tribe or Tribal members’ traditional way of life, Tribal lands, Tribal resources, or access to traditional areas of cultural or religious importance on Federally-managed lands; or the ability of the Tribe to govern its members or to provide services to its members; or that may impact the Tribe(s) relationship with the Department or the distribution of responsibilities between the Department and Indian Tribes. This term does not include matters that are the subject of litigation or in settlement negotiations, or matters that undertaken in accordance with an administrative or judicial order.
Right off the bat, I see several problems with this definition.
One is its very existence. What earthly business does the Department of the Interior have deciding what does and does not have “tribal implications?” Surely only a tribe can decide what has implications for it and its people. Is it sensible, or fair, for the actor – the one contemplating an action – to decide whether it has implications for those acted upon, without even talking with them?
Now, of course, pragmatically a line has to be drawn somewhere; it would be absurd to have, say, the U.S. Park Police consulting with tribes about what fuel mix to use in their helicopters. But there’s got to be a better way than issuing this sort of peremptory definition.
And insult is added to injury – or maybe it’s vice versa, by the language “that may have a substantial direct effect.” Who, pray, is going to decide what’s “substantial” as opposed to “insubstantial?” Or “direct” as opposed to “indirect,” or maybe “cumulative?” Nit-picky lawyers will have a field day with this. And what’s the rationale for NOT considering indirect effects, or the contribution of an action to cumulative effects? We consider such impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) – and in the latter case we even consult about them. Are we now going to have DOI agencies saying “well, we consult with everybody ELSE about indirect and cumulative effects, but our policy is NOT to consult with tribes?
Then there’s the language about “areas of cultural or religious importance on Federally-managed lands.” So DOI agencies don’t have to talk with tribes about impacts on areas of cultural and religious importance unless they’re on Federally-managed lands? So if DOI is, say, going to permit implantation of a vast bank of solar arrays on a chunk of public land that’s within the viewshed of a tribal sacred mountain that happens to be on private land, that action has no tribal implications? Give us a break!
Finally, there’s the perfectly wonderful exclusion for “matters that are the subject of litigation or in settlement negotiations, or matters that undertaken in accordance with an administrative or judicial order.” This one discriminates not only against tribes, but against the English language. We’re talking, here, about a definition of “action with tribal implications.” It ought to be offensive to any rational English speaker to see matters of litigation – in which, one has to assume, a tribe might often be a litigant – defined as having no tribal implications. So we have a tribe fighting the Department tooth and claw over, say, a project affecting a spiritual place, or culturally important plants or animals, and as soon as they go to court the matter stops having tribal implications?
Of course, it’s perfectly understandable that when a case goes to court, it’s going to have a chilling effect on other forms of interaction between the parties, and DOI is perfectly justified in not wanting to create a policy that will limit its maneuvering room in the conduct of litigation. That has to be addressed, and I’m sure ways can be found to do so, but the sort of gross misuse of the language that’s reflected in this definition is simply not the way.
I don’t doubt the good-faith intent of the Department of the Interior to consult with tribes, but this kind of pettifogging definition mongering is not going to help advance that intent. “Departmental action with tribal implications” ought to be defined to mean whatever an agency of DOI does that a tribe thinks has implications for it, and agencies ought to consult programmatically with tribes to decide what they’re going to consult about and what they aren’t.
At a glance, the policy looks like a well-meaning document whose devils are, as usual, in the details. One detail that jumped out at me on first reading is at Section III.D, the definition of “Departmental Action with Tribal Implications.” This is a very important definition, DATIs are the things that DOI agencies are directed to consult about. If it’s a DATI you consult; if it’s not a DATI you don’t have to. Here’s the definition:
Departmental Action with Tribal Implications – Regulation, rulemaking, policy, guidance, legislative proposal made by the Department, grant funding formula changes, or operational activity that may have a substantial direct effect on Tribe or Tribal members’ traditional way of life, Tribal lands, Tribal resources, or access to traditional areas of cultural or religious importance on Federally-managed lands; or the ability of the Tribe to govern its members or to provide services to its members; or that may impact the Tribe(s) relationship with the Department or the distribution of responsibilities between the Department and Indian Tribes. This term does not include matters that are the subject of litigation or in settlement negotiations, or matters that undertaken in accordance with an administrative or judicial order.
Right off the bat, I see several problems with this definition.
One is its very existence. What earthly business does the Department of the Interior have deciding what does and does not have “tribal implications?” Surely only a tribe can decide what has implications for it and its people. Is it sensible, or fair, for the actor – the one contemplating an action – to decide whether it has implications for those acted upon, without even talking with them?
Now, of course, pragmatically a line has to be drawn somewhere; it would be absurd to have, say, the U.S. Park Police consulting with tribes about what fuel mix to use in their helicopters. But there’s got to be a better way than issuing this sort of peremptory definition.
And insult is added to injury – or maybe it’s vice versa, by the language “that may have a substantial direct effect.” Who, pray, is going to decide what’s “substantial” as opposed to “insubstantial?” Or “direct” as opposed to “indirect,” or maybe “cumulative?” Nit-picky lawyers will have a field day with this. And what’s the rationale for NOT considering indirect effects, or the contribution of an action to cumulative effects? We consider such impacts under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) – and in the latter case we even consult about them. Are we now going to have DOI agencies saying “well, we consult with everybody ELSE about indirect and cumulative effects, but our policy is NOT to consult with tribes?
Then there’s the language about “areas of cultural or religious importance on Federally-managed lands.” So DOI agencies don’t have to talk with tribes about impacts on areas of cultural and religious importance unless they’re on Federally-managed lands? So if DOI is, say, going to permit implantation of a vast bank of solar arrays on a chunk of public land that’s within the viewshed of a tribal sacred mountain that happens to be on private land, that action has no tribal implications? Give us a break!
Finally, there’s the perfectly wonderful exclusion for “matters that are the subject of litigation or in settlement negotiations, or matters that undertaken in accordance with an administrative or judicial order.” This one discriminates not only against tribes, but against the English language. We’re talking, here, about a definition of “action with tribal implications.” It ought to be offensive to any rational English speaker to see matters of litigation – in which, one has to assume, a tribe might often be a litigant – defined as having no tribal implications. So we have a tribe fighting the Department tooth and claw over, say, a project affecting a spiritual place, or culturally important plants or animals, and as soon as they go to court the matter stops having tribal implications?
Of course, it’s perfectly understandable that when a case goes to court, it’s going to have a chilling effect on other forms of interaction between the parties, and DOI is perfectly justified in not wanting to create a policy that will limit its maneuvering room in the conduct of litigation. That has to be addressed, and I’m sure ways can be found to do so, but the sort of gross misuse of the language that’s reflected in this definition is simply not the way.
I don’t doubt the good-faith intent of the Department of the Interior to consult with tribes, but this kind of pettifogging definition mongering is not going to help advance that intent. “Departmental action with tribal implications” ought to be defined to mean whatever an agency of DOI does that a tribe thinks has implications for it, and agencies ought to consult programmatically with tribes to decide what they’re going to consult about and what they aren’t.
Wednesday, January 12, 2011
Who Gives a Rat’s Patootie?
Once again, I find myself being asked about how to resolve a Section 106 question in which both the responsible agency and the State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) seem to be agonizing over obscure abstractions without asking the obvious, first-order, real-world question of whether anybody thinks the issue is a matter of concern.
The case involves rather minor new construction on a federal facility, marginal to a complex of buildings long ago determined eligible for the National Register, and adjacent to a seemingly rather ordinary building that may (or may not) be just barely old enough to be part of the complex’s defined “period of significance.” There is great angst over whether the proposed site (a parking lot) is or is not within the “district” and whether the building “contributes to the district’s significance.”
What nobody has asked, and nobody seems to have the mother wit TO ask, is “who cares?” Despite the fact that the Section 106 regulations clearly establish that one of the very first things an agency is supposed to do in initiating review is to “identify other (than the SHPO) consulting parties” (36 CFR 800.3(f)), defined as people with “legal or economic relation to the undertaking or affected properties, or … concern with the undertaking's effects on historic properties” (36 CFR 800.2(c)(5)). Neither agency nor SHPO, it appears, has even given thought to the question of whether anybody cares if the construction occurs on the proposed site, or about the historical/architectural character of the location. When I ask about this, the response I get is “we don’t think anyone gives a damn,” and that, I would guess, is almost certainly true, but absent some effort to DETERMINE whether anyone gives a damn, the agency has, at best, a flawed administrative record. What we PROBABLY have here is a fairly easy “no adverse effect” situation, but if the agency makes that determination, without SOME effort to identify and talk with people who may be concerned, then in the perhaps unlikely event there IS someone out there who’s concerned, the agency can get caught with its pants loosely draped around its quivering ankles.
I don’t blame the agency in this case; it’s trying to juggle lots of variables that need to be addressed in planning a needed facility, and it’s just doing what it’s been long instructed to do (albeit misguidedly) to comply with 106: “go to the SHPO and ask if it’s OK.” But I DO blame the SHPO, and the National Park Service that’s supposed to be overseeing how SHPOs do their business. By not giving the agencies straight advice about what they really need to do to comply with Section 106, the SHPOs encourage agencies to blunder on and waste everyone's time building molehill issues into mountainous unnecessary complexities.
NPS needs to acquaint itself with the Section 106 regulations, which it’s shown no evidence of having read since approximately 1988, and then it needs to remind the SHPOs (who shouldn’t need it, but apparently do) that the bottom line in Section 106 review is determining the public interest, and that you can’t do that without talking to people. Which is why – yes, there IS a reason! – the regulations call for identifying consulting parties at the very beginning of the review process.
Sheesh, people, why is this so hard?
The case involves rather minor new construction on a federal facility, marginal to a complex of buildings long ago determined eligible for the National Register, and adjacent to a seemingly rather ordinary building that may (or may not) be just barely old enough to be part of the complex’s defined “period of significance.” There is great angst over whether the proposed site (a parking lot) is or is not within the “district” and whether the building “contributes to the district’s significance.”
What nobody has asked, and nobody seems to have the mother wit TO ask, is “who cares?” Despite the fact that the Section 106 regulations clearly establish that one of the very first things an agency is supposed to do in initiating review is to “identify other (than the SHPO) consulting parties” (36 CFR 800.3(f)), defined as people with “legal or economic relation to the undertaking or affected properties, or … concern with the undertaking's effects on historic properties” (36 CFR 800.2(c)(5)). Neither agency nor SHPO, it appears, has even given thought to the question of whether anybody cares if the construction occurs on the proposed site, or about the historical/architectural character of the location. When I ask about this, the response I get is “we don’t think anyone gives a damn,” and that, I would guess, is almost certainly true, but absent some effort to DETERMINE whether anyone gives a damn, the agency has, at best, a flawed administrative record. What we PROBABLY have here is a fairly easy “no adverse effect” situation, but if the agency makes that determination, without SOME effort to identify and talk with people who may be concerned, then in the perhaps unlikely event there IS someone out there who’s concerned, the agency can get caught with its pants loosely draped around its quivering ankles.
I don’t blame the agency in this case; it’s trying to juggle lots of variables that need to be addressed in planning a needed facility, and it’s just doing what it’s been long instructed to do (albeit misguidedly) to comply with 106: “go to the SHPO and ask if it’s OK.” But I DO blame the SHPO, and the National Park Service that’s supposed to be overseeing how SHPOs do their business. By not giving the agencies straight advice about what they really need to do to comply with Section 106, the SHPOs encourage agencies to blunder on and waste everyone's time building molehill issues into mountainous unnecessary complexities.
NPS needs to acquaint itself with the Section 106 regulations, which it’s shown no evidence of having read since approximately 1988, and then it needs to remind the SHPOs (who shouldn’t need it, but apparently do) that the bottom line in Section 106 review is determining the public interest, and that you can’t do that without talking to people. Which is why – yes, there IS a reason! – the regulations call for identifying consulting parties at the very beginning of the review process.
Sheesh, people, why is this so hard?
Thursday, January 06, 2011
Contents: Wiley-Blackwell Companion to CRM
In response to requests (well, a request), here's the table of contents of the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Cultural Resource Management, scheduled for publication in the UK and US this spring.
Introduction
Thomas F. King
Part I. General Classes of Cultural Resources
Chapter 1 – Studying and Evaluating the Built Environment
Kate Kuranda
Chapter 2 – Principles of Architectural Preservation
David Ames & Leila Hamroun
Chapter 3 – Archaeology of the Distant Past
Michael J. Moratto
Chapter 4 – Archaeology of the Recent Past
Thomas F. King
Chapter 5 -Geographies of Cultural Resource Management: Space, Place and Landscape
William M. Hunter
Chapter 6 - Culturally Significant Natural Resources: Where Nature and Culture Meet
Anna J. Willow
Chapter 7 – History as a Cultural Resource
Deborah Morse-Kahn
Chapter 8 - Portable Cultural Property: “This Belongs in a Museum?”
Wendy Teeter
Chapter 9 - "Intangible" Cultural Resources: Values are in the Mind
Sheri Murray Ellis
Chapter 10 – Religious Belief and Practice
Michael D. McNally
Chapter 11 - Language as an Integrated Cultural Resource
Bernard Perley
Part II. Special Types of Cultural Resources
Chapter 12 - Challenges of Maritime Archaeology: In Too Deep
Sean Kingsley
Chapter 13 - Historic Watercraft: Keeping Them Afloat
Susan B.M. Langley
Chapter 14 - Historic Aircraft and Spacecraft: Enfants TerriblesRic Gillespie
Chapter 15 - Studying and Managing Aerospace Crash Sites
Craig Fuller and Gary Quigg
Chapter 16 - Evaluating and Managing Technical and Scientific Properties: Rockets, Tang™, and Telescopes
Paige M. Peyton
Chapter 17 – Historic Battlefields: Studying and Managing Fields of Conflict
Nancy Farrell
Chapter 18 - Managing Our Military Heritage
D. Colt Denfeld
Chapter 19 - Linear Resources and Linear Projects: All in Line
Charles W Wheeler
Chapter 20 - Rock Art as Cultural Resource
Linea Sundstrom and Kelley Hays-Gilpin
Part III. Perspectives on Cultural Resource Management
Chapter 21 – Consultation in Cultural Resource Management: An Indigenous Perspective
Reba Fuller
Chapter 22 - A Displaced People’s Perspective on Cultural Resource Management: Where We’re From
David Nickell
Part IV. Legal, Administrative, and Practical Contexts
Chapter 23 – Cultural Resource Laws: The Legal Mélange
Thomas F. King
Chapter 24 – International Variety in Cultural Resource Management
Thomas J. Green
Chapter 25 – Consultation and Negotiation in Cultural Resource Management
Claudia Nissley
Chapter 26 – Being a U.S. Government Cultural Resource Manager
Russell L. Kaldenberg
Chapter 27 – Making a Living in Private Sector Cultural Resource Management
Tom Lennon
Chapter 28 - The Historic Built Environment: Preservation and Planning
Diana Painter
Chapter 29 – CRM and the Military: Cultural Resource Management at War
Michael K. Trimble and Susan Malin-Boyce
Chapter 30 - A Future for Cultural Resource Management?
Thomas F. King
Introduction
Thomas F. King
Part I. General Classes of Cultural Resources
Chapter 1 – Studying and Evaluating the Built Environment
Kate Kuranda
Chapter 2 – Principles of Architectural Preservation
David Ames & Leila Hamroun
Chapter 3 – Archaeology of the Distant Past
Michael J. Moratto
Chapter 4 – Archaeology of the Recent Past
Thomas F. King
Chapter 5 -Geographies of Cultural Resource Management: Space, Place and Landscape
William M. Hunter
Chapter 6 - Culturally Significant Natural Resources: Where Nature and Culture Meet
Anna J. Willow
Chapter 7 – History as a Cultural Resource
Deborah Morse-Kahn
Chapter 8 - Portable Cultural Property: “This Belongs in a Museum?”
Wendy Teeter
Chapter 9 - "Intangible" Cultural Resources: Values are in the Mind
Sheri Murray Ellis
Chapter 10 – Religious Belief and Practice
Michael D. McNally
Chapter 11 - Language as an Integrated Cultural Resource
Bernard Perley
Part II. Special Types of Cultural Resources
Chapter 12 - Challenges of Maritime Archaeology: In Too Deep
Sean Kingsley
Chapter 13 - Historic Watercraft: Keeping Them Afloat
Susan B.M. Langley
Chapter 14 - Historic Aircraft and Spacecraft: Enfants TerriblesRic Gillespie
Chapter 15 - Studying and Managing Aerospace Crash Sites
Craig Fuller and Gary Quigg
Chapter 16 - Evaluating and Managing Technical and Scientific Properties: Rockets, Tang™, and Telescopes
Paige M. Peyton
Chapter 17 – Historic Battlefields: Studying and Managing Fields of Conflict
Nancy Farrell
Chapter 18 - Managing Our Military Heritage
D. Colt Denfeld
Chapter 19 - Linear Resources and Linear Projects: All in Line
Charles W Wheeler
Chapter 20 - Rock Art as Cultural Resource
Linea Sundstrom and Kelley Hays-Gilpin
Part III. Perspectives on Cultural Resource Management
Chapter 21 – Consultation in Cultural Resource Management: An Indigenous Perspective
Reba Fuller
Chapter 22 - A Displaced People’s Perspective on Cultural Resource Management: Where We’re From
David Nickell
Part IV. Legal, Administrative, and Practical Contexts
Chapter 23 – Cultural Resource Laws: The Legal Mélange
Thomas F. King
Chapter 24 – International Variety in Cultural Resource Management
Thomas J. Green
Chapter 25 – Consultation and Negotiation in Cultural Resource Management
Claudia Nissley
Chapter 26 – Being a U.S. Government Cultural Resource Manager
Russell L. Kaldenberg
Chapter 27 – Making a Living in Private Sector Cultural Resource Management
Tom Lennon
Chapter 28 - The Historic Built Environment: Preservation and Planning
Diana Painter
Chapter 29 – CRM and the Military: Cultural Resource Management at War
Michael K. Trimble and Susan Malin-Boyce
Chapter 30 - A Future for Cultural Resource Management?
Thomas F. King
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Buried
I was just asked (by a client, unfortunately) where the hell I am, since I’ve been relatively quiet in cyberspace lately. Quick answer for anyone else who may wonder: I’m buried, but will, I am intent, dig out within the next week or so. The burial is not in snow, or even paying work, but in indexing the Companion to Cultural Resource Management, which Wiley-Blackwell will publish in March (See http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405198737.html).
Although indexing involves mostly just plowing through the manuscript (a PDF) identifying and tagging items that someone might want to refer to, and organizing these into an alphabetical list, it’s not entirely without interest. For example, can you guess how many times 32 authors of 30 chapters on CRM topics use the word “standards?” Answer: 120. Now, does one index every use of the word, or only those referring to specific standards? Answer (for me): the latter. But how specific? Does a reference to UNESCO standards in general qualify, or only a reference to a specific UNESCO recommendation? What about a comment on the relevance of SHPO-generated standards? And what about standards set forth by the Companion’s authors themselves? Sheri Ellis provides some useful standards for dealing with “intangible” cultural resources, derived from the UNESCO convention on the same; should I index these? (Answer: yes). Reba Fuller provides some thoughtful guidelines for consulting with indigenous communities, based on the UN declaration of their rights; do I index these, even though she doesn’t exactly call them standards? (Answer: yep, those too). And by the way, yes, thank you, President Obama, for bringing the U.S. into the community of responsible (or at least self-congratulatory) nations by endorsing that declaration – now will you kindly direct your *&^%$# Secretary of the Interior to get on board and do something tangible about it? Like re-thinking the give-away of the western deserts to the solar industry without meaningful tribal consultation?
Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, and my deadline for getting it done – and proofing the 565-page ms – is January 10. Don't be shy about dropping me a note between now and then, but please understand that I may be long getting back to you. And clients, yes, I certainly WILL get your work done.
Although indexing involves mostly just plowing through the manuscript (a PDF) identifying and tagging items that someone might want to refer to, and organizing these into an alphabetical list, it’s not entirely without interest. For example, can you guess how many times 32 authors of 30 chapters on CRM topics use the word “standards?” Answer: 120. Now, does one index every use of the word, or only those referring to specific standards? Answer (for me): the latter. But how specific? Does a reference to UNESCO standards in general qualify, or only a reference to a specific UNESCO recommendation? What about a comment on the relevance of SHPO-generated standards? And what about standards set forth by the Companion’s authors themselves? Sheri Ellis provides some useful standards for dealing with “intangible” cultural resources, derived from the UNESCO convention on the same; should I index these? (Answer: yes). Reba Fuller provides some thoughtful guidelines for consulting with indigenous communities, based on the UN declaration of their rights; do I index these, even though she doesn’t exactly call them standards? (Answer: yep, those too). And by the way, yes, thank you, President Obama, for bringing the U.S. into the community of responsible (or at least self-congratulatory) nations by endorsing that declaration – now will you kindly direct your *&^%$# Secretary of the Interior to get on board and do something tangible about it? Like re-thinking the give-away of the western deserts to the solar industry without meaningful tribal consultation?
Anyway, that’s what I’m up to, and my deadline for getting it done – and proofing the 565-page ms – is January 10. Don't be shy about dropping me a note between now and then, but please understand that I may be long getting back to you. And clients, yes, I certainly WILL get your work done.
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
Environmental Conflict Resolution and Section 106: a Minor Epiphany
I’m grateful to Western Cultural Resource Management, Inc. (WCRM) for making it possible for me to take part in its training last week in Reno, NV. The training was in environmental conflict resolution (ECR); the class was taught by Joan Calcagno of the U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution at the Udall Foundation, University of Arizona. I think that Tom Lennon and his colleagues are very much to be commended for trying to make WCRM into more than the usual walk-the-transect-and-dig-the-hole cultural resource management firm by getting familiar with the principles and methods of things like ECR.
As one who’s theoretically been doing ECR for decades, in the guise of project review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, I experienced a mild sort of epiphany during the training. Joan spent a good deal of time discussing what makes a case ripe for ECR – what conditions have to be present. I found myself thinking that it must be nice to be able to think about ripeness; in the 106 game we don’t have that luxury. The only game in the town of 106 review is ECR, in the form of consultation as prescribed in the regulations. Which led me to think -- here's the epiphany -- that this uniformity, this absence of options, may be the central flaw in the regulatory process.
The regulations, it occurred to me, essentially assume that there is always some kind of conflict to be resolved, requiring a more or less standard sort of multi-party (though often only bi-party) consultation. And they give little to no direction about how to decide how much consultation is necessary. The only real guidance is that if a project will have “adverse effects,” it requires some more consultation, sort of, than does a project without such effects.
And “adverse effect” is defined in a very abstract, theoretical way – you have an adverse effect if you’re going to diminish the integrity of a historic property. It doesn’t matter if you’re just going to diminish it a little bit or a lot, and more importantly it doesn’t matter whether anybody objects to the diminution. Everybody involved can be happy as clams with what you’re going to do to the place, and you’ve still got to go through the motions of consultation and execute a memorandum of agreement. On the other hand, some people can hate what’s proposed, and that doesn’t trigger any higher level of review – unless, of course, the haters are State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) staff, based on whatever technical standards they elect to apply.
Inevitably, such a system allocates unnecessary time, effort and angst to routine, non-controversial projects, while allocating insufficient resources and attention to projects that are troublesome. And there’s nothing in the system to flag troublesome projects early on, alert people to one another’s concerns, and allow people to think about whether there’s the need for some form of ECR. And because it’s so cumbersome, and mind-numbing, to try to consult about every single project, applying the abstract criteria of adverse effect (to say nothing of the National Register criteria), agencies and SHPOs get frantic to find means of “streamlining.” They negotiate programmatic agreements (PAs) to achieve this objective, but since nobody has a model other than what’s in the regulations, the PAs that get negotiated tend to be weird permutations on the standard Section 106 process that usually exacerbate its faults and dilute its strengths.
Although I think the National Trust for Historic Preservation was right, in its recent “Back to Basics” report, to call for a halt to PA development pending the establishment of better standards, it would be interesting to experiment with a PA that discriminated among projects not on the basis of their abstract effects on historical or architectural integrity but on the basis of the degree and kind of conflict they provoke. Perhaps if we could apply some of the principles that Joan Calcagno talked about in the WCRM class, we could come up with a more rational, simpler system of project review that’s more accessible to the public, more responsive to the public’s interests, and less taxing on all concerned.
As one who’s theoretically been doing ECR for decades, in the guise of project review under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, I experienced a mild sort of epiphany during the training. Joan spent a good deal of time discussing what makes a case ripe for ECR – what conditions have to be present. I found myself thinking that it must be nice to be able to think about ripeness; in the 106 game we don’t have that luxury. The only game in the town of 106 review is ECR, in the form of consultation as prescribed in the regulations. Which led me to think -- here's the epiphany -- that this uniformity, this absence of options, may be the central flaw in the regulatory process.
The regulations, it occurred to me, essentially assume that there is always some kind of conflict to be resolved, requiring a more or less standard sort of multi-party (though often only bi-party) consultation. And they give little to no direction about how to decide how much consultation is necessary. The only real guidance is that if a project will have “adverse effects,” it requires some more consultation, sort of, than does a project without such effects.
And “adverse effect” is defined in a very abstract, theoretical way – you have an adverse effect if you’re going to diminish the integrity of a historic property. It doesn’t matter if you’re just going to diminish it a little bit or a lot, and more importantly it doesn’t matter whether anybody objects to the diminution. Everybody involved can be happy as clams with what you’re going to do to the place, and you’ve still got to go through the motions of consultation and execute a memorandum of agreement. On the other hand, some people can hate what’s proposed, and that doesn’t trigger any higher level of review – unless, of course, the haters are State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) staff, based on whatever technical standards they elect to apply.
Inevitably, such a system allocates unnecessary time, effort and angst to routine, non-controversial projects, while allocating insufficient resources and attention to projects that are troublesome. And there’s nothing in the system to flag troublesome projects early on, alert people to one another’s concerns, and allow people to think about whether there’s the need for some form of ECR. And because it’s so cumbersome, and mind-numbing, to try to consult about every single project, applying the abstract criteria of adverse effect (to say nothing of the National Register criteria), agencies and SHPOs get frantic to find means of “streamlining.” They negotiate programmatic agreements (PAs) to achieve this objective, but since nobody has a model other than what’s in the regulations, the PAs that get negotiated tend to be weird permutations on the standard Section 106 process that usually exacerbate its faults and dilute its strengths.
Although I think the National Trust for Historic Preservation was right, in its recent “Back to Basics” report, to call for a halt to PA development pending the establishment of better standards, it would be interesting to experiment with a PA that discriminated among projects not on the basis of their abstract effects on historical or architectural integrity but on the basis of the degree and kind of conflict they provoke. Perhaps if we could apply some of the principles that Joan Calcagno talked about in the WCRM class, we could come up with a more rational, simpler system of project review that’s more accessible to the public, more responsive to the public’s interests, and less taxing on all concerned.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
A Visit to the Veterans Curation Project
I had a fascinating and, I might even say inspirational couple of hours yesterday visiting the Washington DC lab of the Veterans Curation Project. The VCP is the brainchild of the Corps of Engineers’ remarkable Sonny Trimble, and is currently funded with ARRA money, though a bill to give it permanent funding has passed the House and is – well, somewhere in the Senate.
The basic idea of the VCP is to train wounded veterans in the skills involved in artifact and archival curation – classification, catalogue-building, imaging, restoration of decaying documents, and so on – not with the necessary expectation that they’ll go into archaeology, museum studies, or historic preservation, but because the work teaches them things that are useful in a wide range of jobs, helps prepare them for higher education if that’s what they want, and (there’s some anecdotal evidence for this) may help overcome the effects of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PDSD). The group of veterans I visited were working with an old collection of both artifacts and records from Richard B. Russell Reservoir; they seemed to be engaged, focused, interested in the work, and having a relatively good time. They were articulate in discussing their work, and seemed to be handling it with great patience and aplomb. Their supervisors, Alexandra Jones and Amelia Chisholm of Brockington & Associates, which runs the program for the Corps, seemed to have things very much in hand and to be getting along fine with the troops. I was really impressed.
Working these days as a consultant to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), I hope we can find ways to build on the strengths of the VCP (which VA co-sponsors with the Corps) and relate it in a systemic way to the VA’s historic preservation program. And I hope other agencies, institutions, organizations and firms will look to the VCP as a source of highly trained, skilled, motivated and disciplined curators.
The basic idea of the VCP is to train wounded veterans in the skills involved in artifact and archival curation – classification, catalogue-building, imaging, restoration of decaying documents, and so on – not with the necessary expectation that they’ll go into archaeology, museum studies, or historic preservation, but because the work teaches them things that are useful in a wide range of jobs, helps prepare them for higher education if that’s what they want, and (there’s some anecdotal evidence for this) may help overcome the effects of conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder (PDSD). The group of veterans I visited were working with an old collection of both artifacts and records from Richard B. Russell Reservoir; they seemed to be engaged, focused, interested in the work, and having a relatively good time. They were articulate in discussing their work, and seemed to be handling it with great patience and aplomb. Their supervisors, Alexandra Jones and Amelia Chisholm of Brockington & Associates, which runs the program for the Corps, seemed to have things very much in hand and to be getting along fine with the troops. I was really impressed.
Working these days as a consultant to the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), I hope we can find ways to build on the strengths of the VCP (which VA co-sponsors with the Corps) and relate it in a systemic way to the VA’s historic preservation program. And I hope other agencies, institutions, organizations and firms will look to the VCP as a source of highly trained, skilled, motivated and disciplined curators.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Eruvim and TCPs
David Rotenstein has done another of his fascinating blog postings on Washington DC-area eruvim – see http://blog.historian4hire.net/2010/12/08/eruv-life/ . This one flatteringly quotes me (a dumb-as-dirt goy resident within the Silver Spring eruv) and mentions my connection with traditional cultural properties (TCPs; see for instance http://www.amazon.com/Traditional-Cultural-Properties-Resource-Management/dp/0759100713).
Before anyone starts jumping up and down about this, I wouldn’t for a moment propose that every eruv set up by an Orthodox Jewish community is a National Register eligible TCP. Some might be, I suppose, but I don’t think the mere designation of an area as an eruv would qualify it for the Register or impose any legal constraints on the activities of federal agencies in its vicinity.
The connection I found between eruvim and TCPs is this: I’ve lived within the boundaries of the Silver Spring eruv for about 30 years, and until David started publishing his research, I had no idea that this was the case. When I saw funny little sticks and strings running up utility poles, I figured they were something the power company had put in for some obscure electrical-engineering purpose – when I thought about them at all. Yesterday I saw one and thought: “Oh, a…..” and hurried home to check David’s site and remind myself that it was a lechi.
Anyway, it is much the same with, for instance, Indian tribal or Native Hawaiian spiritual places. Most of us live in, work in, travel through, view, or ignore such places without consideration of their spiritual qualities, because they aren’t marked with crosses, stars, crescents, or other such indicators of religiosity. And we never notice when we cross their boundaries, because those boundaries are marked, if they’re marked at all, in ways that only someone knowledgeable in the ways of the culture can recognize. But this general anonymity doesn’t make the places any less significant in the eyes of those who ARE within the culture. Just as a breached eruv boundary can have real effects on the perceptions and behaviors of an Orthodox Jew on the Sabbath, so a perceived violation of a tribal spiritual place’s important characteristics can affect the sociocultural integrity of a tribe – even though the violation is entirely innocent and the violator has no idea that he or she has done anything.
I doubt if knowing that I live in an eruv will alter my behavior, but if I were responsible for managing my neighborhood I’d certainly want to consult with the Orthodox Jewish community before, say, taking out a bunch of utility poles on a Friday – not because there’s a specific law requiring that I do so, but because I’d think such consultation to be the fundamental responsibility of a public servant. And I wouldn’t assume that I could determine just what actions would have impacts on the beliefs and values of my Jewish neighbors; only they could do this. In just the same way, a federal land manager ought to be careful about doing things that may impact the values, beliefs, and practices of tribes (and others) who view themselves as tied somehow to the lands being managed – not necessarily to avoid doing things, but to consult with those affected and to mitigate the effects.
Before anyone starts jumping up and down about this, I wouldn’t for a moment propose that every eruv set up by an Orthodox Jewish community is a National Register eligible TCP. Some might be, I suppose, but I don’t think the mere designation of an area as an eruv would qualify it for the Register or impose any legal constraints on the activities of federal agencies in its vicinity.
The connection I found between eruvim and TCPs is this: I’ve lived within the boundaries of the Silver Spring eruv for about 30 years, and until David started publishing his research, I had no idea that this was the case. When I saw funny little sticks and strings running up utility poles, I figured they were something the power company had put in for some obscure electrical-engineering purpose – when I thought about them at all. Yesterday I saw one and thought: “Oh, a…..” and hurried home to check David’s site and remind myself that it was a lechi.
Anyway, it is much the same with, for instance, Indian tribal or Native Hawaiian spiritual places. Most of us live in, work in, travel through, view, or ignore such places without consideration of their spiritual qualities, because they aren’t marked with crosses, stars, crescents, or other such indicators of religiosity. And we never notice when we cross their boundaries, because those boundaries are marked, if they’re marked at all, in ways that only someone knowledgeable in the ways of the culture can recognize. But this general anonymity doesn’t make the places any less significant in the eyes of those who ARE within the culture. Just as a breached eruv boundary can have real effects on the perceptions and behaviors of an Orthodox Jew on the Sabbath, so a perceived violation of a tribal spiritual place’s important characteristics can affect the sociocultural integrity of a tribe – even though the violation is entirely innocent and the violator has no idea that he or she has done anything.
I doubt if knowing that I live in an eruv will alter my behavior, but if I were responsible for managing my neighborhood I’d certainly want to consult with the Orthodox Jewish community before, say, taking out a bunch of utility poles on a Friday – not because there’s a specific law requiring that I do so, but because I’d think such consultation to be the fundamental responsibility of a public servant. And I wouldn’t assume that I could determine just what actions would have impacts on the beliefs and values of my Jewish neighbors; only they could do this. In just the same way, a federal land manager ought to be careful about doing things that may impact the values, beliefs, and practices of tribes (and others) who view themselves as tied somehow to the lands being managed – not necessarily to avoid doing things, but to consult with those affected and to mitigate the effects.
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The Federal Historic Preservation Program Task Force: a Reaction
For some months, the Usual non-federal Suspects in U.S. historic preservation – Preservation Action, the National Conference of State Historic Preservation Officers, National Trust for Historic Preservation, American Cultural Resources Association, and others – have been deliberating earnestly as the “Federal Historic Preservation Program Task Force” (See Preservationaction.org). Their task has been to examine the “external programs” in preservation managed by the National Park Service (NPS), assess their effectiveness, and come up with a “consensus plan for structural improvement,” which they will then seek to implement. The Task Force recently sent out a questionnaire to help inform its deliberations; like many others, I received a copy and amused myself for a quarter-hour or so completing it. If you haven’t gotten one yet, and want to, you can get it at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FederalPreservationSurvey.
The Task Force’s effort is timely – or rather, past-timely. NPS has neglected, ignored, twisted, and distorted the “external programs” for decades, and current NPS management has shown no evidence that it has the faintest understanding even of what these programs are supposed to do. NPS – understandably enough – looks at the world outside the National Parks as something strange, vaguely threatening, and only marginally relevant, so it has made the external programs focus inward, on parks and park resources, effectively ignoring the broader responsibilities imposed by the National Historic Preservation Act and other legal authorities. This has been going on for so long that it has come to be seen – at least within NPS – as the right and proper norm. The Task Force can be congratulated for rejecting the status quo world view, for recognizing that NPS has mismanaged its responsibilities, and for attempting to effect improvements.
Sadly, though, to judge from its questionnaire, the Task Force is unlikely to accomplish much. I say this not because I think, as is widely assumed, that under current economic and political conditions nothing can be accomplished (though there’s a good deal to be said for that assumption), but because the Task Force itself seems to be little more creative or engaged with the outside world than is NPS.
After asking, in essence, whether respondents agree that NPS has done a rotten job, and understandably assuming agreement, the Task Force’s questionnaire asks us to rank several alternative pathways to program improvement. These include:
1. Pulling the external programs out of NPS and putting them into an independent agency, together with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP);
2. Pulling the external programs out and giving them to the ACHP;
3. Coagulating the external programs, with or without the ACHP, into a new agency within the Department of the Interior;
4. Doing the same thing within NPS;
5. Gussying up the leadership of the external programs and ACHP with things like Senate ratification of appointments; and
6. Doing nothing.
Having warned about NPS proclivities and promoted option 1 above back in the mid-1970s (See Anthropology in Historic Preservation; http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Historic-Preservation-Cultures-Archeology/dp/0124082505), I suppose I should be pleased to see the mainstream historic preservation community at last come around, and of the options given us by the Task Force, I certainly think option 1 is the best. Only with an entity that’s outside the ambit of a particular land manager – be it NPS or its parent Department of the Interior – would it be possible to develop a program that addresses historic preservation interests right across the federal establishment, in partnership (or not) with a full range of governmental and non-governmental interests. This was true in the 1970s, and it’s still true – perhaps more true – now.
But what the Task Force members – devoted, self-congratulatory preservationists all – can’t see is that “historic preservation” by itself doesn’t have the political firepower to establish or operate its own government agency – nor should it.
First: the vast majority of Americans do not know what historic preservation is – except that it’s something that keeps nice (or not so nice) old buildings standing and sometimes complicates land use and development. Most of our elected representatives are no better informed. You’re not going to get political support for something that elicits at best polite nods from the bulk of the population and members of Congress – unless you have a lot more money to pay the latter than historic preservation’s Usual Suspects have in their pockets.
More importantly, the deficiencies of the national historic preservation program are not wholly ascribable to NPS mismanagement, and they are not unique to historic preservation.
Some of the preservation program’s deficiencies are built into the National Historic Preservation Act itself, or at least into how the Act was interpreted and implemented in its earliest days (1968-72 or thereabouts). The Act and its early interpreters (admittedly, mostly NPS employees) focused attention on old buildings and archaeological sites, and turned program management over to professional historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists, creating a program that systematically excluded the broad array of landscapes, landforms, plants, animals, vistas, viewsheds, soundscapes and smellscapes that encode the cultural values of many ordinary citizens and communities – to say nothing of the less tangible aspects of culture like language, song, and tradition. Some of us have tried to drag the broader aspects of culture into the program through inventions like the “traditional cultural property” or the “cultural landscape,” but with very limited success; the deck was long ago stacked against us. As a result, we live with a program that seeks to preserve places valued by narrow disciplinary professionals, a program run by narrow disciplinary professionals for the benefit of narrow disciplinary professionals. And the Usual Suspects are – surprise! – themselves mainly narrow disciplinary professionals, or at least narrowly focused on old buildings and archaeology. Generating broad public support for an independent agency to service the interests of narrow disciplinary professionals is going to be a real challenge.
But preservation’s deficiencies are not unique; the same or very similar narrow-mindedness infects virtually every other aspect of government-based environmental management. Management of the natural living environment, when not driven wholly by economic interests, is done by and essentially for professional biologists, foresters, and the like; water resources are managed by hydrologists according to their own self-contained models, and professional environmental engineers are forever insisting that they and only they can speak to management of “the environment.” In the operation of programs designed and administered by practitioners of narrow professional disciplines, the interests, values, feelings of ordinary people have no place. Just as a community’s sense of place is likely to be ignored by the historic preservation system unless a pricy consultant is retained to translate it into terms that resonate with historians or architects, the feelings of ordinary citizens for plants, animals, lakes, rivers, language, dances, or traditions go unattended unless someone makes them sensible to biologists, ecologists, or hydrologists.
Here is where opportunity lies. If preservation’s Usual Suspects could make common cause with other groups interested in preserving cultural aspects of the environment, it just might be possible to build a broad enough support base to get something done.
Who are these groups? Here are a few with which I’ve interacted over the years, many of which have tried somehow to engage the national historic preservation program and gone away shaking their heads at its petty fixations:
Indian tribes and other indigenous groups that aren’t formally recognized by the federal government;
Property owners who value the traditional use of their land;
Equestrians and outdoorspeople who value wild horses and burros on the federal estate;
Urban and suburban neighborhoods and rural villages that like their own ambience but don’t happen to meet the National Register’s criteria;
Traditional fisherpeople, hunters, trappers, whalers (consider shrimpers on the Gulf coast);
Gatherers of traditional medicinal plants or plant foods;
People struggling to preserve threatened languages and art forms;
Local communities – including but not limited to low-income and minority ones – that just want some respect from the government.
The interests of some of these groups conflict with one another from time to time, or with the interests of historic preservation’s Usual Suspects, but they all share some common ground – which they also share, to some extent, with the ill-defined grumbling masses that make up movements like the Tea Party. And the ground they share – respect for the traditional and familiar – is thickly grown with the brambles of distrust toward narrow disciplinary professionals. As Frank Fischer put it in his wise but ill-timed book Citizens, Experts, and the Environment (Duke University Press 2000:30):
Although open protests have tended to occur only sporadically, polls show a steady decline in the public’s confidence in, and respect for, professions…. Rather than a group of experts dedicated to the public good, professionals are widely perceived as a group more interested in increasing their own authority, power, and wealth.
If preservation’s Usual Suspects could only turn around and look outside their circle, their zone of comfortable interaction with one another, of reliance on crutches like the National Register, they might, with luck, find the critical mass necessary to make useful changes in the way cultural resources are managed in this country. Such engagement with the larger world would require teetering away from our crutches, though – the National Register, the Secretary’s Standards, professional expertise as the necessary prerequisite to being heard. I don’t anticipate that the Usual non-governmental Suspects are any more willing to do that than NPS or the ACHP would be.
If they can’t look out beyond their self-referential, self-reverential circle, if they can’t step away from their crutches, preservation’s Usual Suspects both outside government and within have, I think, no chance of doing anything but holding on, tenuously, to a gradually (or maybe rapidly) deteriorating status quo. I don’t think they have the guts or brains to get outside their comfort zone, so I expect that the Task Force – well-justified as its findings may be – will be just another exercise in preservation’s long history of hand-wringing and viewing with alarm.
The Task Force’s effort is timely – or rather, past-timely. NPS has neglected, ignored, twisted, and distorted the “external programs” for decades, and current NPS management has shown no evidence that it has the faintest understanding even of what these programs are supposed to do. NPS – understandably enough – looks at the world outside the National Parks as something strange, vaguely threatening, and only marginally relevant, so it has made the external programs focus inward, on parks and park resources, effectively ignoring the broader responsibilities imposed by the National Historic Preservation Act and other legal authorities. This has been going on for so long that it has come to be seen – at least within NPS – as the right and proper norm. The Task Force can be congratulated for rejecting the status quo world view, for recognizing that NPS has mismanaged its responsibilities, and for attempting to effect improvements.
Sadly, though, to judge from its questionnaire, the Task Force is unlikely to accomplish much. I say this not because I think, as is widely assumed, that under current economic and political conditions nothing can be accomplished (though there’s a good deal to be said for that assumption), but because the Task Force itself seems to be little more creative or engaged with the outside world than is NPS.
After asking, in essence, whether respondents agree that NPS has done a rotten job, and understandably assuming agreement, the Task Force’s questionnaire asks us to rank several alternative pathways to program improvement. These include:
1. Pulling the external programs out of NPS and putting them into an independent agency, together with the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation (ACHP);
2. Pulling the external programs out and giving them to the ACHP;
3. Coagulating the external programs, with or without the ACHP, into a new agency within the Department of the Interior;
4. Doing the same thing within NPS;
5. Gussying up the leadership of the external programs and ACHP with things like Senate ratification of appointments; and
6. Doing nothing.
Having warned about NPS proclivities and promoted option 1 above back in the mid-1970s (See Anthropology in Historic Preservation; http://www.amazon.com/Anthropology-Historic-Preservation-Cultures-Archeology/dp/0124082505), I suppose I should be pleased to see the mainstream historic preservation community at last come around, and of the options given us by the Task Force, I certainly think option 1 is the best. Only with an entity that’s outside the ambit of a particular land manager – be it NPS or its parent Department of the Interior – would it be possible to develop a program that addresses historic preservation interests right across the federal establishment, in partnership (or not) with a full range of governmental and non-governmental interests. This was true in the 1970s, and it’s still true – perhaps more true – now.
But what the Task Force members – devoted, self-congratulatory preservationists all – can’t see is that “historic preservation” by itself doesn’t have the political firepower to establish or operate its own government agency – nor should it.
First: the vast majority of Americans do not know what historic preservation is – except that it’s something that keeps nice (or not so nice) old buildings standing and sometimes complicates land use and development. Most of our elected representatives are no better informed. You’re not going to get political support for something that elicits at best polite nods from the bulk of the population and members of Congress – unless you have a lot more money to pay the latter than historic preservation’s Usual Suspects have in their pockets.
More importantly, the deficiencies of the national historic preservation program are not wholly ascribable to NPS mismanagement, and they are not unique to historic preservation.
Some of the preservation program’s deficiencies are built into the National Historic Preservation Act itself, or at least into how the Act was interpreted and implemented in its earliest days (1968-72 or thereabouts). The Act and its early interpreters (admittedly, mostly NPS employees) focused attention on old buildings and archaeological sites, and turned program management over to professional historians, architectural historians, and archaeologists, creating a program that systematically excluded the broad array of landscapes, landforms, plants, animals, vistas, viewsheds, soundscapes and smellscapes that encode the cultural values of many ordinary citizens and communities – to say nothing of the less tangible aspects of culture like language, song, and tradition. Some of us have tried to drag the broader aspects of culture into the program through inventions like the “traditional cultural property” or the “cultural landscape,” but with very limited success; the deck was long ago stacked against us. As a result, we live with a program that seeks to preserve places valued by narrow disciplinary professionals, a program run by narrow disciplinary professionals for the benefit of narrow disciplinary professionals. And the Usual Suspects are – surprise! – themselves mainly narrow disciplinary professionals, or at least narrowly focused on old buildings and archaeology. Generating broad public support for an independent agency to service the interests of narrow disciplinary professionals is going to be a real challenge.
But preservation’s deficiencies are not unique; the same or very similar narrow-mindedness infects virtually every other aspect of government-based environmental management. Management of the natural living environment, when not driven wholly by economic interests, is done by and essentially for professional biologists, foresters, and the like; water resources are managed by hydrologists according to their own self-contained models, and professional environmental engineers are forever insisting that they and only they can speak to management of “the environment.” In the operation of programs designed and administered by practitioners of narrow professional disciplines, the interests, values, feelings of ordinary people have no place. Just as a community’s sense of place is likely to be ignored by the historic preservation system unless a pricy consultant is retained to translate it into terms that resonate with historians or architects, the feelings of ordinary citizens for plants, animals, lakes, rivers, language, dances, or traditions go unattended unless someone makes them sensible to biologists, ecologists, or hydrologists.
Here is where opportunity lies. If preservation’s Usual Suspects could make common cause with other groups interested in preserving cultural aspects of the environment, it just might be possible to build a broad enough support base to get something done.
Who are these groups? Here are a few with which I’ve interacted over the years, many of which have tried somehow to engage the national historic preservation program and gone away shaking their heads at its petty fixations:
Indian tribes and other indigenous groups that aren’t formally recognized by the federal government;
Property owners who value the traditional use of their land;
Equestrians and outdoorspeople who value wild horses and burros on the federal estate;
Urban and suburban neighborhoods and rural villages that like their own ambience but don’t happen to meet the National Register’s criteria;
Traditional fisherpeople, hunters, trappers, whalers (consider shrimpers on the Gulf coast);
Gatherers of traditional medicinal plants or plant foods;
People struggling to preserve threatened languages and art forms;
Local communities – including but not limited to low-income and minority ones – that just want some respect from the government.
The interests of some of these groups conflict with one another from time to time, or with the interests of historic preservation’s Usual Suspects, but they all share some common ground – which they also share, to some extent, with the ill-defined grumbling masses that make up movements like the Tea Party. And the ground they share – respect for the traditional and familiar – is thickly grown with the brambles of distrust toward narrow disciplinary professionals. As Frank Fischer put it in his wise but ill-timed book Citizens, Experts, and the Environment (Duke University Press 2000:30):
Although open protests have tended to occur only sporadically, polls show a steady decline in the public’s confidence in, and respect for, professions…. Rather than a group of experts dedicated to the public good, professionals are widely perceived as a group more interested in increasing their own authority, power, and wealth.
If preservation’s Usual Suspects could only turn around and look outside their circle, their zone of comfortable interaction with one another, of reliance on crutches like the National Register, they might, with luck, find the critical mass necessary to make useful changes in the way cultural resources are managed in this country. Such engagement with the larger world would require teetering away from our crutches, though – the National Register, the Secretary’s Standards, professional expertise as the necessary prerequisite to being heard. I don’t anticipate that the Usual non-governmental Suspects are any more willing to do that than NPS or the ACHP would be.
If they can’t look out beyond their self-referential, self-reverential circle, if they can’t step away from their crutches, preservation’s Usual Suspects both outside government and within have, I think, no chance of doing anything but holding on, tenuously, to a gradually (or maybe rapidly) deteriorating status quo. I don’t think they have the guts or brains to get outside their comfort zone, so I expect that the Task Force – well-justified as its findings may be – will be just another exercise in preservation’s long history of hand-wringing and viewing with alarm.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)