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Healing Whole Communities_Tar Creek GTH08.doc

Developing a complex of solutions through discipline of 'applied industrial ecology' and integrative planning/design, fully engaging an eco-centric and culturally compassionate worldview to repairing places we have collectively made to be environmental sacrifice zones. The Tar Creek Superfund area is largely inhabited by 8 Native American tribes, with most of the severely damaged land on that of a single tribe. Once extremely productive ecologically and biologically, the area can't even be developed by neighboring urbanizing communities (it's that bad). Before it is, because of the national legacy of war and the history of metals extraction for munitions, we owe the people and the land a chance to choose how and where the land will be regenerated to create economies that can sustain those who will sustain the place: 'Sustain-Ability.'

Other 'environmental sacrifice zones' exist in shameful abundance, some the result of governmental negligence, some the result of corporate abuse. EPA and the primary environmental administrative agencies of state and local government, including tribes, can work in concert with public-interest economic and ecological planners to halt damage like that at Tar Creek, strategically remediate the threats to health and environment, and create sustainable economic drivers through renewable energy (solar, wind, biomass) and regionally-responsive entrepreneurship (e.g., sustainable agriculture and sustainable building materials manufacture), generating jobs for long-term residents, in the process.

Appalachia, the Great Lakes region, mining and forestry areas of the West, rusted-out industrial towns, depleted agricultural communities, communities impacted by closed (and active, sometimes) military bases, and soon the communities that are casualties of climate change --- all need to take stock of what's around them, where opportunities and resources are for a new, sustainable economy, and commence building consensus about the pathway toward a designed eco-economic future.