I met Paul Kilburn at the turn-off into the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, decommissioned a few years before. Paul and his volunteers had permission to collect native seeds from the buffer zone around the facility that had been created to provide both a security barrier from outside intrusion and physical separation from what was […]
Category Archives: remediation
Idle hands are the devil’s workshop ~ Proverbs 16:27 The pandemic seems to have exacerbated a whole raft of social and economic problems. Personally, as a retiree, I find myself limited in the things I normally would do, such as shopping, travel, eating out, visiting friends, and even my volunteer activities. I can’t imagine being […]
“A little water clears us of this deed.” ~ Lady Macbeth With the current loosening of restrictions on water quality and pollution discharges to streams and rivers, it’s worth thinking about what clean water actually means. We should all be familiar with the hydrologic cycle, where water evaporates into the atmosphere, condenses and falls to […]
“Prior to the late 19th century, night air was considered dangerous in most Western cultures …” ~ Wikipedia “Wherever the cloud of pollution travels, crime increases.” ~ Sefi Roth The idea has been rebuffed by modern science and our understanding of contagion (not withstanding anti-vaxxers), but according to Wikipedia: “Based on “zymotic” theory, people believed […]
“But what about the plutonium?” he said, “If you breathe in even one atom, you’ll get cancer and die.” It was a chat over breakfast with the old guys, and the subject of Rocky Flats, the nearby old nuclear weapons plant, came up. Following clean up, it was scheduled to become a wildlife refuge open […]
And what was even more striking to me, and what I really got hung up on, was that the world inside the screen seemed to have no physical reality of its own. ~ Andrew Blum “It was just waste. Nobody wanted it and it cost too much to recondition, so we just dumped it.” He […]
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. — John Keats “What’s the minimum we need to do to be in compliance with the law?” the client asked. Their groundwater contamination was only on-site and no one was using the water. I […]
I grew up in a family that hunted and fished and valued the natural world. My father was an amateur naturalist and passed those tendencies on to us kids. As an attorney, he had a close relationship with many of his clients who were ranchers and farmers, and he shared with us what he understood […]
The water was dark and murky, nearly black in the dense shade. The surface, nearly still, slightly rippled by unseen small fish or insects, and vegetation crept out from the muddy shore. A small flat wooden bridge spanned a twenty foot reach of the swamp, connecting rutted dirt roads. The jungle vegetation and likelihood of […]
Every spring, several Stinkhorn mushrooms appear in the tree lawn on our block. They are repulsive-looking and smell bad, hence the name. A tall white shaft rises several inches through the soil, and becomes capped with a black, gelatinous tip, containing the spores. The rotten carrion stench attracts insects, and the the spores stick to […]
Writes of Nature 