The OBP article titled: Cleaning Up Toxic Contaminants in the Willamette River was more background on the issues of the Willamette and the clean up process, including the central questions, “what should the clean up entail, and who should pay for it?” Various involved parties discuss their beliefs on the plans, and engage with the community as we await the EPA’s National Review Board to review the plans. I think one of the major concerns is that concept of clean and what to trust is clean enough, and who is setting that standard. The EPA comments to the Lower Willamette Group, “statements regarding population...should not be designed to protect organisms on an individual basis...but to protect local populations and communities of biota,”(EPA 3:2009) further confuse the concept of what denotes clean especially if humans depend on the environment and vice versa. Decisions on how to clean up of the Willamette River seem to have to unravel and define many concepts.
The known history of legacy contamination, and the exact types of chemicals in the sediments are considered in the various types of cleanup. Another central debate occurring is the amount of clean necessary to reduce risk to both humans and the environment, “ there are clear criteria we have to achieve to actually protect human health and the environment. And so there, our goals are based on targets that reduce it to a certain level that we deem to be acceptable.” (Frost 2015) But reading about the EPA’s chemical regulation last week how “tests are typically conducted or funded by a pesticide's manufacturer.” (Boone et al. 917:2014), there seems to be a conflict of interest in what these chemicals actually do outside of the laboratory; the EPA has concerns that the Lower Willamette River Group (LWG) dismissed the chemicals of concern from evidence in the risk characterization sections of BERA. It seems like there is already a lot of mistrust and over complication in the complex decision containing many variables on how to approach the cleanup which can be a dividing process and a process that forces people to look at their values. -Katie Boone, M. et al . 2014 Pesticide Regulation amid the Influence of Industry. BioScience, 64, 917-922. doi:10.1093/biosci/biu138 EPA 2009 Preliminary EPA Comments on the Baseline Human Health and Ecological Risk Assessments 1-13. Frost, A. 2015 Cleaning Up Toxic Contaminants In The Willamette River. OPB. Retrieved from http://www.opb.org/news/article/cleaning-up-toxic-contaminants-in-the-willamette-river/
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