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Show 64 The Grouse Creek Cultural Survey The treatment of cultural forms other than properties, however, is a more difficult matter, and brings us to a consideration of cultural conservation. A planner might ask, "What actions would encourage the continuation of a community's culture into the future?" The question presupposes prior identification of elements of culture, and a view of culture as a living, renewable resource. The process of documentation, description, and assessment may itself encourage cultural conservation by heightening self-awareness and self-esteem within the community, and offering greater recognition of the community by outsiders who learn about it from publications, exhibits, and the like. But equally important is the effect of identification and evaluation on larger economic and political forces. Grouse Creek's Mormon cowboy culture will continue only as long as ranches remain profitable and governmental activities do not adversely affect them. One opportunity to influence policy and economic factors in Grouse Creek emerged too late for the survey team to grasp, but the example is instructive and worthy of discussion. In April 1985, just before the fieldwork in Grouse Creek began (and long before the survey's results had been written up), the Salt Lake City District of the Bureau of Land Management-the federal agency responsible for overseeing public land, including grazing land-circulated a draft of the Box Elder [County] Resource Management Plan and Environmental Impact Statement (Bureau of Land Management 1985). The 180-page document outlined four options for managing more than one million acres of public land in Box Elder County, including the area around Grouse Creek, and assessed the impact of each option on natural and cultural resources. The conception of the county's cultural resources in the Management Plan differs from the one set forth in this report. Five paragraphs under the heading Cultural Resources describe prehistoric archeological sites and historic sites associated with the early fur trade and the California emigrant trail, concluding with the assertion that the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Point was the most significant event in the county's history. (For an alternate analysis of cultural resources in land use planning, see Hufford 1986.) The plan does not mention Grouse Creek's Mormon cowboys. Ranching appears only in the section titled Socioeconomics, which describes the overall economic situation of four typical (but hypothetical) cattle and sheep operations and assesses the impact of the four management options on their income and capital value. The Management Plan was drafted before the Grouse Creek Cultural Survey took place and could not take advantage of its findings, but its thin view of cultural resources does resemble that of its predecessors. Most of the plan consists of the reports of the naturalists who studied the county's plants, wildlife, and minerals. In a paper written in 1986, Grouse Creek fieldworker Hal Cannon portrayed these scientists as advocates for their subject matter, concerned to protect flora, fauna, and significant geological formations. Cannon spoke for the entire team when he compared the Bureau of Land Management naturalists' interest in conservation to that of the folklorists and historians, writing that "talking to ranchers every |