Essay Revision

Cristina Posilovic
October 14, 2007
Superfund and Onondaga Lake
The industrial age in America resulted in many consequences, one of which is toxic pollution. Thousands of areas such as lakes, rivers, and pieces of land were polluted by the waste of many companies. These areas pose problems to human health and safety, animal health and safety, and the cleanliness of our environment. In 1980, a government program called Superfund was created to help clean up the most polluted areas in America.

According to the EPA website, Superfund is an environmental program that was established to provide funding to clean up hazardous waste sites (EPA). It was established by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, which taxes oil and chemical companies and gave “authority to respond directly to releases or threatened releases of hazardous substances that may endanger public health or the environment” (EPA). The money from the taxes was the main source of income for Superfund to clean up the waste sites (EPA). The act also holds the companies that dumped the pollution responsible for payment of the cleanup, and uses the money in the trust fund for places where the polluter has since abandoned the area or gone bankrupt (EPA). Ultimately, Superfund exists to remove toxic waste in our environment to protect the lives of people and animals and make the world a safer place.

On November 4, 2003 an article came out in the Christian Science Monitor by Brian Knickerbocker called “Superfund Program: A Smaller Cleanup Rag” that addressed problems with Superfund. It begins by saying that the fund is now virtually bankrupt, and that it is becoming more difficult to clean up other sites. It also states that the amount of sites cleaned per year by Superfund has been declining for the past three years. Since the program began, 886 sites have been cleaned up, but 1,203 still remain on their list (Knickerbocker). The article talks about Superfund’s policy of making the polluter pay, but also mentions about the large number of so called “orphan sites” where the companies responsible are now bankrupt or have since abandoned the area (Knickerbocker). Knickerbocker writes about the tax placed on oil and chemical companies that was once the main contributor to the fund, but that the tax has not been reinstated since 1995. Taxpayers are now contributing 53% of the cost compared to 18% when the taxes were still in place (Knickerbocker). Many still agree with the polluter pays policy, but it does have its drawbacks. The companies tagged to a site are given full responsibility of the cleanup, and in some cases they go and sue other companies that they can find that tie into the polluted area in one way or another (Knickerbocker). Oftentimes, more money is being spent for legal purposes rather than to clean up toxic waste sites (Knickerbocker). These problems are inhibiting the cleanup of numerous toxic pollution sites in the United States.

One such polluted area is Onondaga Lake, considered by many to be the most polluted lake in America (Landers 64). The 4.6 square mile lake is found just north of the city of Syracuse and is contaminated with numerous substances that were discharged by a few companies in the late 1800s to the mid 1900s (Landers 64). In the late 1800s, the Solvay Process Company produced soda ash, with “1.1 pounds of sodium chloride and 2.2 pounds of calcium chloride produced for every 2.2 pounds of soda ash”, which was pumped into waste beds along the shore of the lake (Landers 64). The wastes increased the salinity of the lake, which has killed many forms of marine life (Landers 64, 65). Between 1917 and 1970, Allied Chemical further contaminated the lake by adding contaminants such as mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls, which are considered to be carcinogenic, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are also known carcinogens, and chlorinated benzenes, which can affect the health of humans and fish (Landers 65). The Metropolitan Syracuse Wastewater Treatment Plant also added to the pollution of the lake. Since 1920 they have discharged chemicals such as phosphorus and nitrogen into the lake, which caused a rapid growth of algae in the lake, and reduce the amount of dissolved oxygen into the lake, which can kill marine animals (Landers 69).

In 1994 Onondaga Lake was added to the National Priorities List, also known as Superfund (Landers 65). In 2005, the cleanup plan for the lake, known as the ROD, was finalized (Landers 66). According to the ROD, “2.7 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment and waste” will be dredged from the lake and “disposed of at an off-site facility” or in a sediment consolidation area (Landers 66). These sediments will go through a new water treatment plant and decontaminated until it fulfills discharge limits and then returned to the lake (Landers 67). 425 acres of shallower areas of the lake will be covered in a multilayered isolation cap to prevent “upward migration of contamination” (Landers 67). In deeper areas of the lake, a total of 154 acres will be covered in a thin-layer cap for the same purposes as the isolation cap (Landers 67). Deeper lake areas will only have a thin cap, while shallower areas will have a thicker cap due to erosion (Landers 67). In addition, barrier walls will be built to collect groundwater to be sent to a treatment plant before entering the lake. The total cost of this plan is 451 million dollars.

According to the Onondaga Nation, a tribe of Native Americans who hold the Onondaga Lake as sacred, the plan is nowhere near suitable. There is an additional 18 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment that will not be dredged under the ROD. The plan only dredges in certain areas, instead of removing the entire in lake waste deposit (Onondaga Nation). They also say that caps are not reliable, because at some point the cap will move or erode and the chemicals will be re-released (Onondaga Nation). Viewing the diagram in the New Life For Onondaga Lake article, caps will only cover a very small area of the lake, while the rest of it will hopefully be covered by clean sediment. This is an unrealistic approach, to hope that one day uncontaminated sediment will cover the entire lake bottom and will always contain the chemicals in the sediment beneath it. It will never happen. The Nation says that the entire lake bottom is contaminated with mercury, and unless it is removed or fully contained it will continue to be in the lake’s ecosystem (Onondaga Nation). In addition, the plan involves treating water according to certain discharge limits (Onondaga Nation). This means that not all of the pollution will be removed from the water and sediments, and some of it will be re-released right back into the lake. This plan will only slightly reduce the amount of pollution in the lake and hope that the caps installed will contain the chemicals, instead of finding real solutions to get rid of all of the contaminants or to contain them properly in a way that will not fail in years to come. The cost of a real cleanup, according to the Nation, would be around 2.16 billion dollars (Onondaga Nation).

The plan outlined by the ROD cuts corners, takes shortcuts, and hopes that the problem of contamination in the lake will be resolved. A thorough cleanup is possible for the lake, however it seems that money is the reason why Onondaga Lake will not receive a worthy cleanup. Due to the lack of funding received by Superfund, Onondaga Lake is not getting the proper cleanup it should, and this is probably the case with numerous other sites around the country. According to an article in the Washington Post, Superfund’s budget has “declined by 34 percent over the past decade”, adjusting for inflation (Eilperin). With budget shortfalls, the lack of the tax on chemical and oil companies, Superfund will never be able to offer timely and worthy cleanup plans for the many toxic waste sites around the country, and it will be the people, whose taxes now pay for a large portion of Superfund projects and those that live near sites that are given inadequate cleanup, that will suffer.



Works Cited

"Basic Information." Superfund. 21 Sep 2007. EPA. 8 Oct 2007
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/about.htm.

"CERCLA Overview." Superfund. 17 July 2007. EPA. 8 Oct 2007
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/policy/cercla.htm.

Eilperin, Juliet. "Lack of Funding Slows Cleanup Of Hundreds of Superfund Sites."
Washington Post 25 Nov 2004 A01. 14 Oct 2007 http://www.washingtonpost.com/
ac2/wp-dyn/A11246-2004Nov24?language=printer.

Knickerbocker, Brian. "Superfund Program: A Smaller Cleanup Rag." Christian Science
Monitor 14 Nov 2003 07 Oct 2007 http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1114/p02s01-
usgn.html?related.

Landers, Jay. "New Life for Onondaga Lake." Civil Engineering (American Society of Civil Engineers) 76.5 (2006): 64,71, 86.
"Onondaga Lake ‘Clean-up’ Plan." Onondaga News. 11 Dec 2006. Onondaga Nation. 14 Oct 2007 http://www.onondaganation.org/news.cleanup1.html.

New Source

Here is a link for a new source that I can use in my essay
Link

CSM summary

The article is basically about the government program called Superfund, which helps to clean up heavily polluted bodies of water, and how it is going bankrupt. The fund was based on the idea that the polluter should pay the price to clean up the damage, but in recent years money has not been coming from corporations but from common taxpayers. Many of the companies that caused the pollution are now currently closed down or bankrupt, so Superfund has been unable to receive money from them. On top of this, Congress never renewed the extra income tax on oil and chemical companies, which up until 1995 provided much of the funding for the program. In recent years, the amount of pollution cleaned up per year has decreased drastically due to the lack of income, and there are still a lot more high priority areas that desperately need cleaning. With little money left in Superfund, and no way to raise more money, the future for many highly polluted areas looks grim.

Link

Come On

Last Thursday I visited the Warehouse Gallery and viewed the "Come On" exhibit. The Come On exhibit featured work by Rachel Rampleman, Jo-Anne Balcaen, and Juliet Jacobson about "desire under the female gaze". I entered into a small gallery and could see three large drawings, a mass of balloons, a few smaller drawings, a video playing in a small dark room, and a couple of trays of food. Each of the large and smaller drawings were very similar; all were black and white sexual images of men duplicated once or twice across the paper. Each of the drawings had intricate backgrounds with images of either skulls, hearts, flowers, butterflies, grasses, snakes, and eyes. There were also pictures of dictionary definitions of different words juxtaposed together. The combinations were "blurt blush", "prince of darnkess, prince of peace, prince of wales", and "yearning year-round". The video, "Poison: My Sister Fucked Bret" was of Rachel Rampleman's sister and her tale of having sex with Bret Michaels, and challenging the stereotypes of hooking up with a rock star.

On one of the walls was a cluster of large, long, black balloons. These balloons were filled up the day the exhibit opened, and now you can see that some of them were deflating or deflated. The balloons represented emotions. Upon falling in love, one is filled with emotions such as desire and passion for their significant other. However, throughout time the emotions can decrease in intensity. The inflated balloons signify one being filled with emotions, and with time the balloons decrease in size. The ones already deflated represent the waning emotions that occur over time.

Across the other walls were the large drawings mentioned earlier. In "No Weak Heart Shall Prosper", the image is of two men intertwined in a passionate kiss, reflected across the paper. The background contained images of eyes, skulls, flowers, and butterflies. The two large eyes in the background really stuck out to me. The eyes are looking around two large circular structures, as if discretely taking a peek at the men in the picture. "I'll Be Your Mirror" is an image of a man lying back to back with a replication of him on grasses and skulls. Above where their heads meet is a simple heart. It sticks out because all of the other figures in the drawing use shadow and shading, but the heart is just a simple outline. "You said you hated your body, that its just a piece of meat, but I think you're wrong, I think you're beautiful" is an image of skulls in an X shape across the paper, with another image faintly drawn behind them. In the middle of the X is an intricate rose. In between the top, left side, and bottom spaces of the X are hearts where the faint image in the background becomes emphasized in that space. They serve as "holes" in which one can see what the faint image is of. The hearts and the images go along with the theme of desire and passion, while the skulls possibly represent the eventual death of desire. Finally, Narcissus is an image of two men lying on a skull and an eye, who are mirror images of each other. Most of the image is a mirror of the opposite side, with a few differences such as a pointy circular image and a part of another man. A snake goes through the entire drawing, weaving through an eye of the skull and around the men. The snake gains the most attention in the drawing, as it is darker than most of the other figures in the picture and how it weaves throughout it.

In each of the pictures the men stood out greatly, due to the uncommonness of how they are displayed. Sexual images of men are a rarity in our society. We live in a society that objectifies young, attractive, and sexual women in order to satisfy the appeal and desire of men. Juliet Jacobson created these images to show female desires of the sexuality of men and to serve as a counter for all the sexualized images of women in our society.

Binh Danh Exhibit

Many say that a picture is worth a thousand words. In the case of Binh Danh's photos of the Viet Nam War, they definitely are. Each picture tells an untold story, and each one is different than the next. The stories told by the pictures that list some American soldiers who passed away in the war are completely different than the stories told by the images of Viet Namese men, women, and children whose faces are on the leaves.
To display these photos, Binh Danh uses a unique method. By printing them onto leaves, he intensifies the images and gives them a greater testimony to the war. When he was in Viet Nam he noticed a field area covered in documents, many of which were imprinted into the landscape. By looking at this he realized that war is a part of this landscape, just as the words of the documents became part of the landscape, and just as the people who died in the war became part of the landscape. He shows that in the way he displays the photos. The people are printed onto leaves, showing the mark that they left on the landscape of Viet Nam during the war.
Rememberance is also another way the images serve as a testimony to the war. Before Binh Danh spoke, there was a man who was in the Viet Nam war who gave a short speech. When he saw the exhibit, it brought back feelings he had from the war. To him, the faces on the leaves seemed real, and they reminded him of friends that he had lost. Binh Danh later spoke about rememberance and its ties to the theme of his exhibit. The theme of One Weeks Dead was justice. A quote he used was "Our struggle is the struggle of memory against forgetting", and it tied into his exhibit well. He viewed the memorial as a form of justice for the victims, so they would be remembered throughout time.
Binh Danh addressed how these images and his findings can serve as a reflection of current times. Currently we are involved in a war, much like the Viet Nam War. He showed a few images of the Iraq war and they bore similarities to the ones from the Viet Nam war. The photographs from the Iraq war are of people who each have their own story to tell of how the Iraq war affected their lives, just like the photos of the Viet Nam War. At one point, Binh Danh showed an image of Life Magazine and its issue where it showed photos of soldiers who died in Viet Nam as a way to honor them. He then said how the NY Times published a roster of the dead of the Iraq War. These were two different wars, but those who died in them had a similar way of being honored and remembered.

In "The Image World", Sontag writes "...a photograph is not only an image,...an interpretation of the real;it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask." This quote perfectly describes Binh Danh's photographs. They are not just an image or an interpretation, but they are a mark of what was left behind. Essentially, these photographs are "footprints" of the people whose lives were affected by the Viet Nam War. They are what was left behind. She later writes "Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history." Binh Danh's images are evidence of the people and landscape that were affected by the war. These photographs, along with many others, help to create a collection of evidence of a part of history, so it will never be forgotten. In her concluding paragraph, Sontag also states "But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them...". The photos from One Weeks Dead are images of the reality that was the Viet Nam War. These powerful images contain more information than one could imagine. They can tell about the person, the landscape, what the war meant to them, what their life was like during that time, or how they died. The images are remnants of what was left behind, and what will never be forgotten.

Art and de Duve

Art is everything that is around us that was created by someone, either to fulfill a purpose or for the artist to express themselves, that others find visually appealing or find meaning from it. In high school, I was the editor for the art and literary magazine, and one of my jobs was to select the artwork that went into the magazine. Perhaps the most difficult choice was selecting the artwork for the cover. I first saw the piece last May, hanging up with all of the other submissions for the cover. The piece is of an arm, all colorful and covered with paint, with a black and white hand holding a paintbrush to the left of the arm, painting the color onto it. It caught my eye because of its unique quality. Most of the other submissions were of art as a finished product, and this one was of art in the process, and not using traditional canvases. In total I probably spent at least an hour fixating upon this piece. Looking at it gives one the feeling of tradition while viewing the black and white hand, and spontaneity when looking at the crazy mess of color on the arm. It gave me a sense of freedom and power, that the hand was able to control the movements of the brush and which streak of color went where, and that it has full freedom of choice to do so. The artist's intention was to create a piece visually appealing that symbolizes how art can liven up the world and something that would look good as a cover for a school magazine. I feel that it was highly successful, as I found it visually appealing, the transition from black and white to color shows how art can color one's world and transform things from what it used to be into something more interesting and beautiful, and I found that it fit the theme of the magazine wonderfully.

Art Was A Proper Name was an interesting article about how one could define art. I found it interesting how de Duve tried to explain the process of figuring out what art is through the point of view of an outsider, a member, and of yourself. Each character of each point of view struggles with what is the definition of art, and in the end they come up with similar answers. According to de Duve, the martian sees that "art is everything humans call art", the member of the human race sees that art is "everything we call art" and yourself says that "it's everything I call art". The definition of art has no boundaries, and is only shaped by the opinions of people, each of which are different and unique. De Duve and I share similar opinions with our definitions of art. While each of the characters in the article had a difficult time defining what art is, I too had a difficult time defining art, especially in one sentence. I agree with the you character's definition of art, which is that everything I call art is art. Everyone will have a different opinion on what art is. We all differ on what is aesthetically appealing to us, and what is not. After reading this, I believe that the word art cannot be defined by dictionary standards, but only by the opinion of the person.