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.

The United States Department of Defense has promoted adaptive ecosystem management principles in their land management practices. This application of adaptive ecosystem management in a military environment presents special problems that the author analyzes through a case study of the efforts at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The evaluation reveals the progress and challenges of applying adaptive ecosystem management at military installations. The main areas of progress have been the employment of a multiscalar ecological focus in land management and the development of open dialog with local stakeholders. The primary challenge is the specification of democratic processes and decision rules that meaningfully consider stakeholder input. This challenge reflects the major tension of employing adaptive ecosystem management in the military: the integration of bureaucratic and democratic decision processes. Military installations can alleviate this tension by vertically integrating decision making such that all military stakeholders—including national policy makers affecting local land management—are included in open dialog with local stakeholders, and by clearly specifying the modes and influence of stakeholder input. Failure to do so may force local stakeholders to revert to more adversarial means of influence such as litigation, the threat of litigation, and political intervention.

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.

Our industrial legacy has left the nation with thousands of contaminated land parcels, known as brownfields, that must be rehabilitated and reintegrated into today's productive urban land inventory. This article presents a framework for site identification based upon the historical record, urban morphology, and hazard assessment. An eight-stage methodology is presented and applied to Keene, NH, a typical medium-sized industrial community in the Northeast. The framework proceeds where: (a) the industrial legacy is temporally demarcated; (b) the industrial legacy is spatially located; (c) relict hazards are identified; (d) quantities of waste produced are estimated; (e) toxicily is classified; (f) waste impacts are determined; and (g) a summative relict hazard waste map is produced as the initial input into a planning model, which project proponents/developers employ to determine the viability of site remediation and redevelopment. The framework's application in Keene, NH, demonstrates the viability of the methodology in delimiting potentially hazardous sites and thus advances predevelopment site identification and its position in brownfields planning.

The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) has been hailed as one of the most successful environmental statutes ever written, and has been used as a model for environmental stewardship throughout the world. One of the primary objectives of this act is to provide citizens with a voice in governmental decisions. However, recent efforts to make the NEPA process more efficient, less costly, and less time-consuming threaten to undermine achievements in public participation and participatory policy making gained during the last 30 years. This article examines public participation under NEPA and demonstrates that the recent rise in the use of the Environmental Assessment (EA) as the primary document for NEPA compliance, and the corresponding decrease in the use of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS), is due to efforts to streamline NEPA as part of the overall movement to reinvent government. The article examines recent trends in NEPA implementation and public involvement requirements for EISs and EAs, and concludes that the increased use of Environmental Assessments significantly limits the public's ability to respond to environmental impacts caused by federal actions, thereby damaging one of the most effective vehicles for citizen participation in government. Finally recommendations are provided to increase opportunities for public involvement in the EA process without sacrificing improvements in efficiency.

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.