Members of the National Association of Environmental Professionals (NAEP) particularly concerned about practice under the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) comprise a NEPA Practice Subcommittee. The Subcommittee, recognizing that questions exist about how to address “cultural resources” in environmental impact assessment, formulated the idea for this special issue. The editors of Environmental Practice—with my help in the latter stages of the enterprise—have tried to assemble articles reflecting a diversity of backgrounds, interests, and perspectives on cultural resources (also often called “heritage resources” or just “heritage”). The articles in this issue certainly do not exhaust the topic, but we hope they give a taste of what can be involved in assessing impacts on such resources.

My own paper—“Cultural Resources in Environmental Impact Assessment”—is designed to set the stage and to provide an overview of what cultural resources are and are not and how they are (and too often are not) dealt with in the impact-assessment process. Articles by Michael Moratto, Fred McGhee, Kathleen Hayden, Sean Kingsley, and Robert Sullivan deal with particular types of cultural resource—again by no means exhausting the roster. McGhee’s article, in particular, is also a critique of the processes by which resources are included in or excluded from review. Ned Kauffman also provides a critique of processes, concepts, and methods, as do Kathleen Hayden, Patricia McCormack, Sean Kingsley, and Claudia Nissley, each from their own perspective. The article by Heather Kendall-Miller and me is very much a critique of process, with an emphasis on issues that tend to be important to indigenous communities, not only in the United States (US), but around the world. Perspectives relevant beyond the US are also represented by McCormack (Canada), Ian Lilley (Australia), and Kingsley (the deep sea).

Cultural resources are aspects of the environment to which people and communities are deeply attached. Impacts on them cannot be assessed without deeply engaging those who value them, and failure to assess them well can be a critical deficiency in any impact analysis. We hope that this issue will help advance discussion of how best to address impacts on the environment’s cultural aspects.