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In the late 1970’s, residents of Niagara Falls, New York began to experience the effects of decisions made by one company three decades earlier. The Hooker Chemical Company dumped over 21,000 tons of chemicals, including dioxin, into a nearby canal. No one had reason to suspect that the dumping occurred until one day, the substances began to seep into the basements of homes and schools. The public outcry that followed the Love Canal incident led to passage of the most advanced hazardous waste cleanup program in the world, which to date has generated more than twelve billion dollars in commitments to remedy affected sites. Known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, or “Superfund,” after its funding mechanisms), the legislation gave the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) the authority to clean up contamination from past disposal practices that are found to pose risks to human health or the environment.

Beginning in the nineteenth century, modern science and industry introduced compounds into the environment not found in nature but useful for their new properties, such as persistence and ability to control pests. Unfortunately, these same properties make these materials potential hazardous contaminants. As industrial processes in the United States grew in size and began to use greater amounts of hazardous substances, contemporary waste management practices, described as “cheap and casual” by Andrews (1999: 245), were applied to hazardous materials as well. However, the effects of hazardous substances could be very different from those of traditional wastes, for which odor and infectious disease were the principal problems, so these practices resulted in significant potential health and environmental risks (, Ch. 6). Up through the 1960s, the lack of awareness of the potential risks of hazardous wastes resulted in many abandoned hazardous waste sites ().

Over the last three decades adaptive management has emerged as one of the most promising innovations in natural resource management and environmental regulation. Yet the possible benefits of this approach for Superfund, which is among the nation’s most expensive and controversial environmental programs, have not been comprehensively explored. A 2003 study by the National Research Council (NRC) represented the first serious effort to apply adaptive management principles to cleanup of contaminated sites, with specific attention to contaminated Navy facilities under Superfund, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and state regulatory statutes (NRC 2003; NRC et al. 2003). This chapter examines adaptive management for Superfund as a whole, including the privately owned sites that predominate within the Superfund universe. It elaborates the principles of adaptive management, explains how these principles might work within the legal and policy framework of Superfund, and explores their implications for managing individual Superfund sites as well as for administering the entire inventory of these sites. In the process, it sheds further light on the potential usefulness of adaptive management, which was developed for management of complex natural ecosystems, for a program dealing with local site contamination in largely urban settings.

Conventional management practice has traditionally focused on finding the best available policy option. Given the uncertain and ever-changing nature of environmental and social conditions, however, this has proven to be a daunting task. Adaptive management acknowledges that no single policy can be selected, but rather a set of alternatives should be dynamically tracked to reveal the best course of action at any given time. Although adaptive management concepts were introduced more than twenty years ago, their implementation is generally piecemeal; fully developed adaptive planning and procedural frameworks have been limited to large-scale projects in long-term natural management, where uncertainty is often overwhelming. Nevertheless, even conventional managers of smaller projects are confronted with the same problems and may go through the frustrating experience of changing their management strategy when it fails. In this chapter, we review regulatory policies and adaptive management implementations across a wide range of projects and application areas. Our review indicates a need to integrate adaptive management with a set of decision-making tools that will allow it to build on current management approaches. We are thus proposing a solution in which we choose a strong adaptive management framework, for which there exist many support tools in the literature, and integrate it with multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) as a method for dealing with uncertainty when selecting a management option. The two methods complement each other and fit together smoothly, forming a comprehensive management framework.

This chapter develops a methodology to aid remedial project managers and senior management at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in handling cleanup strategies and determining future reuse options at Superfund sites. The goal is achieved through the completion of four objectives: 1) avoiding back engineering and decisions that limit future reuse options; 2) understanding all contingencies in the cleanup process; 3) accounting for costs and benefits from cleanup and reuse for all stakeholders including future generations through the creation of an index of reusability; and 4) maximizing the opportunity for learning. Development of the method stems from concepts in risk and policy management previously applied in diverse disciplines. First, reuse contingency trees are developed to describe the potential deviations in the cleanup process that cause increased costs, increased time to reuse, or decreased future use options for a site. Second, a reusability influence diagram is developed to identify the impacts of the contingencies on the various actions and outcomes of the Superfund cleanup process. Third, an index of reusability is developed in order to compare the reuse benefits to cleanup costs and to herd portfolios of sites along different reuse strategies. The methodology is unique to any existing study of the Superfund process and the idea of the contingency binds the multiple methods. This chapter can lead to an initiative by the Environmental Protection Agency to move from the regional handling of sites to a broader national approach. Furthermore, the methodology has general importance not limited to Superfund sites but applicable to all environmentally impaired land.

In 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) in response to a particularly unfortunate incident in the Love Canal area of Niagara Falls, New York, in which numerous schoolchildren were exposed to toxic chemicals from an abandoned waste disposal site. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was charged with establishing, administering, and enforcing policies and procedures through which the nation’s worst hazardous waste sites (i.e., those posing the greatest risks to human health) might be identified, remediated, and returned to productive use. Further, the Act established an endowment, nicknamed “Superfund,” to assist with cleanup costs and imposed substantial liability on owners, transporters, and generators of hazardous waste materials.

Communities in almost every state are affected by brownfield sites, from small rural towns to dense urban areas. Left untouched, brownfields pose environmental, legal, and financial burdens on communities and their taxpayers. When cleaned up, these sites can become powerful engines for economic growth and community vitality. Creativity and innovation at the local level promote collaboration between all levels of government, businesses, and nonprofit organizations to transform brownfields into economically productive and environmentally beneficial sites.

Many citizens and communities are continuously buffeted by forces outside of their control that can dramatically impair their quality of life. The decisions of people with little or no stake in a particular neighborhood or community — agencies of state and federal government, developers of property, leaders of multi-national industries and banks — affect the choice and affordability of the housing in which community members live, the transportation they use, the food they put on their table, the way they communicate with the outside world, the means to educate their children, the work they pursue, and, especially, their health, through the quality of the air they breathe and the water they drink.

The urgent effort to clean and reclaim blasted landscapes — EPA Superfund sites and other polluted brownfields — often involves an unfortunate exercise of cultural and historical amnesia. The sites are cleaned of their toxic substances but they are also scrubbed of their history. This need not be the case. If former buildings and landscapes on Superfund sites were adapted to new uses and interpreted for the public, rather than destroyed during redevelopment, we would retain an important material framework for better understanding both the sites themselves and their surrounding communities. Moreover, with tangible traces of former uses left in place, we would have an important venue for learning about the human use, abuse, and stewardship of the built and natural landscape. On Superfund and brownfield sites where traces of industrial use and pollution are removed entirely, the landscape makes less sense to residents and visitors alike. People whose lives and livelihoods were bound up with these places lose important landmarks from their locality. We have pursued cleanup and redevelopment policies that fail to recognize the power and possibilities of the historical memories that hover over these sites.

Tar Creek in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, a former lead mining area and part of the Tri-State Mining Area of Oklahoma, Kansas, and Missouri, represents the failure at multiple levels of administration and overview to address decades of environmental degradation, toxic land conditions, and environmental injustice. Communities and environmental officers, in collaboration with local agencies and academic research groups, have started to address the long-term remediation, planning and regeneration of vast mining soil heaps, polluted waterways and rivers, and land subsidence and mineshaft sinkholes that characterize the Superfund site’s landscape and surrounding waste territories (see Figure 9.1).