Column: Past mistakes show importance of care for environment

Published 12:00 am Saturday, January 18, 2003

I had a chance to visit a landfill for the first time this week, and I have to say it was impressive how careful they are about keeping the garbage from contaminating anything.

Layers of practically impermeable clay, strong liners and layers of sand keep garbage juice from seeping through, and it’s all drained off and contained; dirt piled on top keeps everything packed down. It’s still acres and acres of garbage &045; you can’t sugarcoat that &045; but it’s handled about as well as can be expected.

We’ve come a long way, apparently. In the past, we have been remended recently, people haven’t been nearly as careful, back when regulations didn’t do much to protect the environment.

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It’s disturbing to read about how the old dump at what is now Edgewater Park in Albert Lea was handled &045; basically, just dump it, bury it, and forget about it.

Problem is, you can apparently only forget about it for so long. Environmental studies are planned, but for now it appears that cleanup may be necessary, to the tune of millions of dollars. Whether any grants or state help are available, we’ll have to see. But it will be another unneeded burden on this city.

I’ve heard other disturbing stories about the way trash has been disposed of in the past. I’m told they actually used to push piles out onto the frozen lakes in the winter, then watch it all disappear when the ice melted. Huh? Who thought this was a good idea?

Years later, we all know how big an issue lake cleanup has been in Albert Lea. We continue to pay, to a large extent, for the mistakes of the past.

The same is true on the Farmland/Farmstead/Wilson site. It may take years to clean up whatever ungodly stuff was left behind on that land, and that’s saying nothing about what’s in the lake. In this case, it’s justified for the city to pursue lawsuits against the insurers of the old Wilson & Co. Somebody has to pay, and why should it be the people of Albert Lea?

I wouldn’t say I’m an environmentalist, per se &045; I haven’t participating in any tree-sitting lately, for instance &045; but I did grow up in a time when environmental issues were just a standard part of the science curriculum in schools. This is thankfully producing a younger generation that should be much more conscious of the environment than some of those in the past.

At the same time, there’s still a tendency for people to push environmental problems to the back of their mind unless they are personally affected, or unless there’s a big public awareness campaign going on at the moment. It reminds me of a Simpsons episode, where Homer tells daughter Lisa that officials were there to do the thinking for us &045; &uot;Like that rainforest thing a few years ago. Our officials saw there was a problem and they fixed it, right?&uot; Or at least, he hasn’t heard much about it lately.

It’s that &uot;what you can’t see can’t hurt you&uot; syndrome, the same attitude that led people to shove garbage wherever they could and worry about it later, and bury nuclear waste somewhere deep down where we think it’s not going to hurt anything.

Nuclear energy is just one of our activities that create waste; even landfills, which may be much better than they were years ago, are still mounds of trash that will be there for years and years. Even though recycling rates are up in the United States, the volume going into landfills is also going up. The average American produces much more trash than the per capita rate in other industrialized countries, so there

must be ways to reduce. We just don’t worry about it, because after the truck comes and picks up our garbage from the curb, we’ll never see it again. Out of sight, out of mind.

So, things have changed for the better, but there’s still room for improvement. Maybe if people today work harder at being more conscious of the mark we leave, the next generation won’t have as much trouble dealing with their past as we do with ours.

Dylan Belden is the Tribune’s managing editor. His column appears Sundays. E-mail him at dylan.belden@albertleatribune.com.