Away

There's a marvelous little song that has been running through my head this week. It puts into playful verse one of the core principles of environmental awareness:

     There's no such place as Away, Away,
     There's no such place as Away.
     You can dump it, you can burn it,
            you can sink it in the bay,
     But there's no such place as Away.

Songwriter Joyce Rouse wove that, and two other verses, into a round that soaks its message deep into our spirits. This weekend, we'll be using her song at the Iliff School of Theology in the opening worship for a 2-day course on Environmental Justice.

Some sections of the seminary course will look carefully at biblical ethics and practical questions of how to engage congregations in environmental justice issues. Other parts of the seminar will be experiential, as we do on-site case studies of two neighborhoods in Denver (Colorado, USA) that know all too well that dangerous waste doesn't go away.

One of those communities is circled by toxic sites: an oil refinery; a highly-polluting power plant; a metal smelter that rained lead, arsenic and cadmium dust on the neighborhood for decades; chemical and industrial sites that ooze contamination into the ground and water. The community is in, or adjoins, three federal Superfund sites that have been identified as high-risk and high priority for clean-up efforts.

The other neighborhood circles the location of a company that extracted radium from uranium ore. The ground and water are polluted with a mix of radioactive chemicals. The Environmental Protection Agency decided that the best strategy to "clean up" the site was to mix the contaminated soil with concrete and "entomb" it in the middle of an urban neighborhood -- a mound covering four city blocks. Hardworking community activists have won a reversal of that plan, and the soil (and concrete) will be moved out of the city -- "Away" to a facility in Utah.

Environmental justice is concerned with the dispersion and disposal of all those nasty things that won't go away, that remain toxic and harmful. All too often, those wastes end up in the communities that don't have the political and financial resources to fight business and government. The waste dumps and contaminated sites usually are in neighborhoods that are predominantly non-white and/or low-income. The costs, burdens, and risks are disproportionately imposed on people of color, the poor, the marginalized. When my "Away" is in someone else's yard, there is a serious ethical problem.

The issues are not just local or short-term. Two news stories this week -- both dealing with the storage of highly radioactive waste -- show the growing problems and awareness of things that won't go "Away."

* The Governor of Nevada has vetoed the federal proposal to build a nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. The site was recommended as the place to store spent fuel rods from nuclear reactors -- materials that will be toxic and radioactive for 250,000 years. The proposed storage facility is supposed to safeguard the waste for "only" 20,000 years. Congress may vote to override his veto.

* The Governor of South Carolina has vowed to block the shipment of plutonium into his state (from Colorado's closed nuclear weapons plant at Rocky Flats, among other places). He has pledged to lie in the highway in front of any trucks carrying the high-level waste, unless there are guarantees that the plutonium will soon be moved back out of his state.