Perspectives from the Field: Cultural Resources in Environmental Impact Assessment
Cultural resource is a term that means different things to different people. In the United States, it is commonly conflated with the legally defined term historic property, but this conflation can deny consideration to a wide range of culturally valued aspects of the environment. In impact assessment, the jobs of identifying cultural resources and impacts on them are typically assigned to archaeologists and architectural historians, who often apply their own even narrower definitions of the term. This can result in systematically failing to analyze the most important impacts on the most culturally sensitive aspects of the environment. People responsible for environmental impact assessment should think carefully about how to address all kinds of potentially affected cultural resources. This usually involves making sure that those with cultural connections to an environment are involved productively in the assessment and its outcomes.