After 20 years, Superfund has evolved from a risk-based, technically oriented, litigation-driven site cleanup program to an effort that places greater emphasis on negotiated settlements, voluntary cleanups, and community involvement The USEPA's environmental justice initiative reflects this adjustment and sometimes presents unexpected difficulties for both agency personnel and affected community members. Superfund sites, such as the New Orleans Agriculture Street Landfill, assume qualities of what geographer Kenneth Foote refer to as “landscapes of tragedy.” Despite the merging of technical and community approaches to resolving Superfund problems, attachments to place sometimes defy agency efforts. The Agriculture Street situation suggests an additional assessment of community ties to the neighborhood could facilitate remediation and resolution.

This article uses the history of a Superfund site—the Torch Lake site in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan—to suggest that the risk-based decision-making process of Superfund sends mixed messages, frustrating public participation even when some level of involvement is appropriate and desirable. In this case, Superfund-related conflicts in the community remained unresolved even after the USEPA issued its Superfund Record of Decision. Only after a public advisory council reviewed the beneficial uses of the waterway as part of a decision-making process required by the joint US-Canadian Area of Concern program did the community have a mechanism to reach some consensus on these issues. Rather than reducing a complex problem to a set of numbers that discouraged discussion, the review of beneficial uses facilitated discussions that allowed non-experts to place the various impairments in perspective. The implication for regulators who are required to make risk-based decisions is that, where public involvement in the decision-making process is appropriate, indicator-based discussions of beneficial uses are likely to be more productive than discussions centered around risk.

The Technical Outreach Services for Communities (TOSC) program is a unique university-based community outreach and “hybrid” technical assistance program designed to assist communities affected by hazardous waste problems. A distinct feature of the TOSC program is that it provides an alternate, independent source of technical assistance on demand, that is flexible and tailored to the identified needs of the community. Highlighted are two case studies depicting the challenges that the TOSC team faces in providing “neutral” technical assistance to communities. The results of these experiences demonstrate that scientists, engineers, and others working with communities first must be willing to engage in interdisciplinary teamwork, as problems are highly complex, often political, and require expertise across disciplines. Second, TOSC technical assistance efforts have been more successful when the scientific issues are framed in a community-specific cultural context. Third, it is necessary for the technical assistance team to improve their understanding of how communities work, to develop relationships with a broad base of affected stakeholders, and to gather the residents' perspectives of the issues and concerns facing the community. Finally, it is important that those providing technical assistance resist the temptation to offer generic scientific or engineering solutions for highly local problems, but rather focus on educating and empowering the community to make its own decisions regarding environmental cleanup.

Small urban watersheds are difficult to characterize in terms appropriate to ecological assessment They are typically larger than the study areas common to ecological assessments, typically measuring in tens of square kilometers in area, even for a small urban stream. They are also more variable and fragmented than natural ecosystems, since they reflect socioeconomic and historical, as well as natural, factors. We have traditionally relied on land use/land cover classifications to characterize such areas, but these record a mixture of natural and socioeconomic variables, and they typically reflect neither the high diversity nor the extreme fragmentation of the urban environment. Doan Brook is a small urban stream on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio. Thematic Mapper (TM) and ½-m resolution Digital Aerial Photography were used together to characterize its roughly 60 km2 area in terms of ecologically meaningful gradients such as percent canopy closure and percent perviousness of the ground. Field checking was used to verify the consistency of the class definition and to correct the parameters. In the process, we found several patterns with ecological significance that would have been overlooked in a more standard classification of the satellite image. The approach used in this study provides an alternative to land-cover analysis that may be broadly applicable to environmental assessments in urban areas, including ecological simulation modeling, assessment of park resources, and analysis of the environmental change in heterogeneous regions.