This article analyzes the environmental crisis in Ghana and what contributions religious resources from the intellectual traditions of African Traditional Religion can make towards addressing it. This study was based on an extensive review and interpretation of existing textual materials on the subject matter, supplemented by general field observations. It identified the following: the environmental problem in Ghana has national and international root causes; the modern environmental management model employed in Ghana lacks resources, in terms of finance, personnel, and other associated logistics, rendering it inefficient. This article warns that the cumulative effect of environmental degradation is a boomerang, and suggests that the modern and traditional methods of environmental conservation be merged to form a more efficient system. This research is important because its findings may contribute to the development of a more efficient model for conserving and protecting Ghana’s environment. It also contributes to local and global cultural theories on the conservation and protection of the environment.

Environmental Practice 18: 137–147 (2016)

This article is about socio-cultural expertise and knowledge in the context of environmental hearings in Alberta, Canada, to determine whether or not new oil sands projects should be approved. It identifies serious problems with cultural assessments about potential impacts on Aboriginal peoples done by consultants for oil sands hearings in Alberta and proposes that consultants doing cultural assessments should have qualifications equivalent to those of expert witnesses for the courts. It also raises the concern that the review panel members who preside over such hearings and their staffs may also lack expertise in socio-cultural matters concerning Aboriginal people. Both gaps impact directly on the recommendations made by review panels to the governments that make final decisions.

Environmental Practice 18: 148–165 (2016)

Several United States (US) federal agencies have developed visual resource inventory (VRI) and management systems that reflect specific agency missions and visual resource management objectives. These programs have varied in the degree to which they incorporate historic and cultural elements and values into the scenic inventory process. The recent nationwide expansion of renewable energy and associated transmission development is causing an increase in visual impacts on both scenic and historic/cultural resources. This increase has highlighted the need for better integration of visual and historic/cultural resource assessment and management activities for land use planning purposes. The US Department of the Interior National Park Service (NPS), in response to concerns arising from potential scenic impacts from renewable energy, electric transmission, and other types of development on lands and waters near NPS units, has developed a VRI process for high-value views both within and outside NPS unit boundaries. The NPS VRI incorporates historic and cultural elements and values into the scenic resource inventory process and provides practical guidance and metrics for successfully integrating historic and cultural concerns into the NPS’s scenic resource conservation efforts. This article describes the NPS VRI process and compares it with the VRI processes of the US Department of the Interior Bureau of Land Management and the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service, with respect to the incorporation of historic and cultural values. The article discusses why a scenic inventory approach that more robustly integrates the historic and cultural values of the landscape is essential for NPS landscapes, and for fulfillment of NPS’s mission. Inventories are underway at many NPS units, and the results indicate that the VRI process can be used successfully to capture important historic and cultural resource information and incorporate that information into the assessment of the scenic values of views within and outside NPS units.

Environmental Practice 18: 166–179 (2016)

The management of developer-led pressures on the marine environment is archaeology’s last frontier. Long inaccessible and invisible offshore, advances in technology have today propelled the sunken past into the consciousness of commercial archaeology. Arguably among no other form of heritage assets are archaeology and environment so complexly embedded. Lessons from the recent past have increasingly compelled developers to incorporate surveys of maritime seascapes into environmental impact assessments (coastal construction, sealane deepening, aggregate dredging, wind farms, and oil and gas pipeline and fiber-optic cable laying). Qualitative decisions about what to protect in situ, avoid, or excavate requires an objective understanding of significance assessment in relation to risk. The high profile of the United Nations Organization for Education, Science and Culture (UNESCO) Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage exerts increasing pressures on governments worldwide to seek sustainable development. Demersal bottom fishing, World War II shipwreck hull oil leakage, and global warming are newly emerged risks that require expanded heritage recognition.

Environmental Practice 18: 184–191 (2016)

In the late 20th century history of American historic preservation, public or social/council housing occupies a unique space. For over 20 years, American policy in this area, representing an investment of billions of taxpayer dollars, has been dominated by high-profile efforts to “transform” the downtowns of major American cities such as Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston by demolishing public housing projects that were located in the city outskirts when originally built. These efforts have engendered significant debates about historic preservation at every level of government and have produced federal policy decisions on the part of the United States (US) Departments of Housing and Urban Development and the Interior, which have facilitated the demolition of hundreds of thousands of units of public housing in America, which in most cases has not been replaced on a one-for-one basis and which is no longer affordable for the poor or near-poor. In the majority of cases, the National Park Service has supported extensive demolition of historic public housing projects, or at best, only token preservation of them. The role of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has never listed a public housing project in its annual list of “endangered” historic sites, has, at best, been to remain organizationally silent and, at worst, to partner with organizations such as the US Green Building Council and the Congress for the New Urbanism, organizations that would not exist in their present form without the use of public housing as a petri dish for their condescending neoliberal conceptions about how other people, particularly poor people, ought to live.

Environmental Practice 18: 192–204 (2016)

This brief article sketches the current situation regarding cultural heritage, community engagement, and environmental impact assessment in Australia. The country is by no means perfect when it comes to heritage management in the impact-assessment process. Yet, practitioners have evolved a set of common understandings concerning social value and community engagement that characteristically (though, of course, not inevitably) produce mutually-acceptable outcomes for all stakeholders. These understandings rest largely on the internationally-renowned “Burra Charter,” which applies to all cultural heritage in Australia, but are given added legal weight with regard to Indigenous heritage by Native Title legislation giving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a significant say in land use. The centrality of social value and community engagement is clear in the codes of ethics of professional organizations managing heritage in impact assessment, such as the Australian Archaeological Association and the Australian Association of Consulting Archaeologists Inc.

Environmental Practice 18: 205–208 (2016)

Federal agencies are made responsible for managing the historic properties under their jurisdiction by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended. A component of this responsibility is to mitigate the effect of a federal undertaking on historic properties through mitigation often through documentation. Providing public access to this documentation has always been a challenge. To address the issue of public access to mitigation information, personnel from Argonne National Laboratory created the Box Digital Display Platform, a system for communicating information about historic properties to the public. The platform, developed for the US Army Dugway Proving Ground, uses short introductory videos to present a topic but can also incorporate photos, drawings, GIS information, and documents. The system operates from a small, self-contained computer that can be attached to any digital monitor via an HDMI cable. The system relies on web-based software that allows the information to be republished as a touch-screen device application or as a website. The system does not connect to the Internet, and this increases security and eliminates the software maintenance fees associated with websites. The platform is designed to incorporate the products of past documentation to make this information more accessible to the public; specifically those documentations developed using the Historic American Building Survey/ Historic American Engineering Record (HABS/HAER) standards. Argonne National Laboratory’s Box Digital Display Platform can assist federal agencies in complying with the requirements of the National Historic Preservation Act.

Environmental Practice 18: 209–213 (2016)

This article presents an overview of archaeological resources and methods in the context of environmental impact assessment (EIA). Archaeological best practices in the EIA process are summarized and examples of deficient work are provided so that readers—particularly those who are responsible for review and approval of environmental studies—will be able to judge the adequacy and professional quality of archaeological work performed for their clients or agencies.

Environmental Practice 18: 214–218 (2016)

Cultural impact assessments (CIAs) are rare in environmental practice in the United States. This paper explores the use and integration of CIAs into environmental assessments with respect to cultural resources of communities and American Indian tribes. It notes the shortcomings of consultation under Section 106 of National Historic Preservation Act and public comment under the National Environmental Policy Act and recommends employing CIAs to fill the gaps, decrease time and costs, and possibly limit lawsuits.

Environmental Practice 18: 222–226 (2016)

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.

Environmental Practice 18: 227–231 (2016)