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| Operating since the 1980’s, WIPP just
this past spring became the first and only resting place for transuranic
waste – debris soiled by elements heavier than uranium, such as plutonium.
Ten states, including New Mexico, currently store transuranic waste – either
above ground or just beneath it – but WIPP is the only site to pack it
away permanently deep in the ground, waiting for the half-lives of the
radioactive elements to wear themselves out over the next thousands of
years.
Praised by the government as “a critical step toward solving the nation’s nuclear waste problem” and “setting the standard for cost-effective, safe, and environmentally sound deep geologic disposal of defense-related radioactive waste,” WIPP got the OK from the Environmental Protection Agency last year. The site is reserved for the trash of the defense department, not for any commercial energy sites. And all testing of waste is completed at nationwide sites before being shipped to New Mexico, so WIPP is not a lab – just a giant garbage can. |
 last year WIPP became the nation's first transuranic waste dump. (http://www.wipp.carlsbad.nm.us) |
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an 'intangible and spiritual resource,' and said it 'can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.'
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Wallace Stegner,
writing David E. Pesonen of the Wildland Research Center in 1960, sounds
both disappointed and disgusted as he observes all the frenzied brainstorming
about the uses of the land. More important than uses, Stegner emphasizes,
is the idea of the wilderness; we cannot fully appreciate the value
of just plain leaving the land alone. Stegner calls the wilderness “an
intangible and spiritual resource,” and warned that “something will have
gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed.”
Why? The idea of the wilderness was the mold of the American dream, Stegner says; it shaped our character as a nation, and still does. If the remaining wilderness continues to be sectioned off and carved up, “never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.” Stegner goes directly against the flow of calculating, consumer-minded behavior that defines how we have come to approach the land: “We simply need that wild country available to us,” he says, “even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.” Stegner’s qualms and questions are just as important forty years down the road. They quickly prompt more. We reach the point of uestioning the very character of the west – what has changed, what is still changing, what (if anything) will never change. We wonder when the “wild” left the Wild West, where the frontier went, where the Native Americans went. We wonder whether you can even talk about the west any more as one singular idea. We wonder how networks of telecommunications have erased the unknown, and where the west fits in the global village. We wonder, in sum, just how and when we made the transition from hallowing the soil as sacred to stuffing it with radioactive rubber gloves. |
