The Long Run

Field Notes (Science and Environment)

Amber Wong

July 4, 2025

“Clean air, clean water, open spaces – these should once again be the birthright of every American.” ~ President Richard M. Nixon (R), 1970 State of the Union Address

Making the Invisible Visible

The typical sibling squabbles that peppered our childhoods, like who was smarter and who was the favorite, erupted into deeply divergent worldviews by the time my brother and I reached adulthood. We still love each other and try not to take it personally, but it’s especially hard when he questions my life’s work.

In 2005, we stood at the railing of a Yangtze River tourist boat heading downstream toward the Three Gorges Dam. This vacation to China had nothing to do with finding our roots – after five generations in America, we felt no personal connection to this place or its people. Still, as I peered through the morning mist at the elegantly sculpted fertile terraces that would, within the year, be swallowed by the rising water, I felt an aching sadness. Water gauges onshore marked the river’s ultimate elevation, obliterating a centuries-old, sustainable, agrarian way of life. In the long run, the river’s ecology would change forever.

“Look at that!” My brother pointed off the side of the boat. Three bloated cow carcasses, caught in eddies of Styrofoam shards, floated past, followed by a hunk of wood and a lone sneaker. My brother, a man with decidedly libertarian leanings, chuckled ruefully and finally conceded, “Well I guess the Environmental Protection Agency is good for something.”

I whacked his arm and groaned, as siblings do, and barely stopped myself from blurting out that EPA didn’t have jurisdiction over cow carcasses. I’d take his small concession, stash it like a shiny coin in my pocket, extract it to admire when I felt blue. But he had a point. The things we did regulate were invisible to most people. Parts per million of organic material, nutrients, heavy metals, and air particulates could slip into the water, the air, the soil, without much notice. It was the aftereffects – contaminated drinking water, algal blooms, asthma, lead poisoning, and cancers – that captured the general public’s attention. But would they ever concede the long-term cause and effect?

Not if you ask my brother. He and I were a house divided, perched at opposite extremes of the ecological/ideological spectrum. He was an economist; I was an environmental engineer. Our decades-long debate would never end. Environmental regulations kill jobs. Environmental regulations save lives. Pollution control should be market driven, and when pollution gets too bad, individuals will pay to clean it up. Pollution control is in everyone’s interest, and EPA works to keep pollution from getting so bad that it harms a population’s health. My brother and I were forced to agree to disagree. We hewed to vastly dissimilar philosophies, and to support them, we crammed our arsenals with opposing sets of facts.

As I gazed at the Yangtze flotsam, I felt my own disquiet. Was I asking the wrong question by framing environmental protection as a battle between good and evil, stewardship and greed? That wasn’t the original intent. In 1970, when Republican President Richard Nixon responded to national panic over deteriorating air and water quality by creating the EPA, the goal was to make America feel safer. Feel better. Why has that sentiment so drastically changed?

My brother might have thought – and felt – that an Environmental Protection Agency was never needed. He didn’t live in Cleveland watching the Cuyahoga River catch fire, in Santa Barbara gathering dead seabirds after offshore oil spills, or in Los Angeles breathing smog that smothered the city. He wasn’t concerned about pesticides softening eggshells or contaminating drinking water supplies. He didn’t look for problems, and he didn’t see them. But public health officials and environmental engineers like me did.

Take, for example, sewage. Raw sewage, which virtually no one likes talking about, is a global health hazard because it harbors pathogens that cause diseases ranging from minor skin infections to severe gastroenteritis, cholera, typhoid, polio, and hepatitis. Sewage treatment is the bread and butter of environmental engineering. But without a coordinated governmental effort, would Americans responsibly take care of their own wastes? More telling – would they even know how? Here’s a little heralded fact. In the 1970s, a nascent EPA launched a pair of its most impactful programs: the Construction Grants Program, which funded municipalities to build sewage treatment collection and treatment facilities, and the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES), which limited the pollutants discharged from treatment facilities to ensure that water quality would not be degraded. These programs were game-changers. Fewer conventional and toxic pollutants poured into the nation’s rivers. Disinfection removed the danger of pathogens. But did people ask why they saw fewer belly-side up fish dying from low oxygen conditions, fewer floating clumps of toilet paper? When they swam in lakes and rivers, were they surprised to suffer fewer skin infections, fewer cases of dysentery?

Sewage took the world stage during the 2024 Paris Olympics. When the triathlon kept being postponed, every Parisian, and soon every Olympian, knew why. Although France had spent over a billion euros to clean up the chronically-polluted Seine, torrential rainstorms days before the Opening Ceremonies overfilled every niche of Paris’s 14th century sewer system. Huge slugs of raw sewage mixed with stormwater overflowed into the open water of the swim. Bacteria and pathogen levels spiked. Who’d want to swim in that?

***

Measurable Cost, Immeasurable Benefit

EPA’s challenge has been to quantify the benefits of its work when it’s impossible to get the public to agree on the value of preventing an adverse health or environmental effect. What’s the value of preventing a genetic disorder? The extinction of a species?

In her 1962 book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson dramatized the need for environmental protection by highlighting the crossovers between human health and ecological health. DDT, developed in the 1940s, enjoyed widespread use because it was highly effective at killing mosquitoes and tamping down malaria. Short term, fewer people got malaria. But further research showed devastating long-term human health risks. DDT had entered the food chain. Humans eating DDT-tainted meat, dairy, or fish were at higher risk for cancer, hormone disruptions, and genetic abnormalities.

On the ecological side, bald eagles were on the brink of extinction. DDT accumulation caused eggshell thinning and breakage, which led to reproductive failure. In 1972, one of EPA’s first actions was to ban the widespread use of DDT in the United States. More regulatory protection followed. In 1978, the US Fish and Wildlife Service put bald eagles on the endangered species list, making it a crime to disturb the birds, their nests, and their habitat. Bald eagle populations bounced back, from a low of 417 pairs in 1963 to 9,789 pairs in 2007. In 2007, when they inhabited every state in the continental United States, they were removed from the threatened and endangered list. Recovery had taken upwards of thirty years, but the bald eagle – our national emblem – also became the symbol of environmental protection done right.

The cleanup of Love Canal, the nation’s first Superfund site, traces the arc of my professional life. News of Love Canal broke in 1978, two months after I started my first job as an environmental engineer. Horrified at the reports that Love Canal’s 21,000 tons of toxic chemicals were leaking into a residential neighborhood, causing birth defects and chemical burns on children’s hands and faces, I was relieved that the residents were being evacuated and permanently relocated, their homes bought by the State of New York. I assumed the site would be forever barren, a permanent scar. I’ve never been so glad to be wrong.

Love Canal became the poster child for “the worst of the worst” hazardous waste sites in the nation, and public response was immediate. The Superfund Law was quickly enacted to prioritize similar hazardous waste sites for cleanup.

Twenty-one years later, I was working in EPA’s Superfund program when I was astonished to hear that the Love Canal cleanup was complete. Could they really render the site safe? By removing, containing, and treating the water and waste, Love Canal was deemed safe for reuse, including, in some areas, for residential housing.

EPA reviews the site every five years to ensure it remains safe. The enduring lesson of Love Canal: With conscious intent, course corrections can happen.

***

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ~ Lao Tsu, Chinese philosopher

Did We Make a Difference?

I didn’t start my career at EPA. In 1984, after years working for a private research firm and later, an engineering consulting firm, I intended to take a job at EPA to “get the big picture” before returning to consulting. But after the first year, I found EPA’s ethos compelling. Finding middle ground between economics and the environment – the never-ending debate between how much does it cost and how clean is clean enough – was difficult, but our lodestar was simple. Safety.

Despite my “big picture” aspirations, my first assignment, writing NPDES discharge permits for municipalities and industries, felt decidedly small. Each permit had an important, albeit localized impact on a specific river or embayment. I was disappointed. How much did I matter? How many people did my work protect? Only after I attended a national permit writers’ meeting did I recognize the scope of our program, and I was proud to be part of a large cadre of permit writers that kept the nation’s waterbodies clean. We ensured that our national investment in constructing sewage treatment plants was paying off. We made sure that industries didn’t discharge toxic pollutants at toxic levels. When we tallied up the megatons of waste that didn’t go into the water, we could be certain that we’d done what we’d promised – protect public health and the environment in the long run.

Shaking It Up

Eleven years and two positions later, just as I became a manager in the Superfund program, EPA experienced a full-blown identity crisis. Was a federal Environmental Protection Agency still needed? By then, states had passed their own environmental laws, invested in their own environmental agencies, developed their own technical experts. At a heated meeting, a journalist shouted, “Are you still relevant?” That shook me.

The entire EPA reorganized. Our Seattle regional office eliminated middle management, halving the number of managers and tripling the number of direct reports. Once the staff were reassured that their jobs in our basic programs remained intact – that the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and all the other underlying laws still drove our environmental work – they began to grumble, what will be different?

I landed in my ideal job. I had seventeen project managers whose duties spanned the “big picture” of the Superfund program, starting with site discovery, to site listing on the National Priorities List, to site cleanup, to site recovery, to site delisting, to the ultimate end game: site reuse. Site reuse was the bedrock principle that drove cleanup decisions, the answer to the simple question, “What’s all this for?” Like at Love Canal, a site would need to be much cleaner if it were redeveloped as a residential neighborhood instead of a parking lot.

Also, site discovery and site listing, the front end of the cleanup pipeline, felt like a huge responsibility that should meet certain criteria. Hearkening back to that journalist’s outburst, what would make us relevant? Did the federal Superfund program have a unique role? Were we listing the right sites? Posting the biggest environmental gains? Honoring our unique responsibilities to Indigenous tribes?

In the bland fluorescence of a gray-toned meeting room, I faced my five site assessment managers and drummed them with questions. How do we find sites? How many sites do we have to investigate before we hit one that’s contaminated enough to be a Superfund site? Two things stuck with me. We “found” sites when other agencies referred them to us, and out of fifty site assessments a year, only two or three were Superfund-worthy sites. I frowned. That was a terrible yield rate. Yet I had to acknowledge the upside. Less contaminated sites could get an “all clear” for redevelopment, removing the uncertainty of expensive cleanup.

But that spurred an idea. I flipped the question around. “Where are the most contaminated sites in our region that we should be cleaning up, but aren’t?”

There was a stunned pause. Finally, the most senior site assessment manager gave an exaggerated cough and said, “Well, everyone knows about the Duwamish River and Portland Harbor. But you’ll never get those listed.”

His brazen certainty annoyed me. “Why not?”

“It’s too political! Those sites are in the middle of Seattle and the middle of Portland. They’re big. There’s lots of responsible parties. Management here doesn’t have the balls to do it.”

I struggled to keep my voice neutral. “Has anyone tried?”

That last question turned out to be pivotal. A challenge. Yes, we could sit back and wait for people to identify sites and bring them to our attention. Or we could expose what “everyone” knew; that for decades prominent regional companies had, with impunity, used urban industrial waterways as dumping grounds for heavy metals, PCBs, PAHs, and other toxic chemicals. Did we dare to call them out, make them clean it up? Kick a sleeping giant? Or did we have to succumb to the tragedy of the commons?

In that moment I remembered the big picture of why I’d come to EPA. Those waterways belonged to all of us. Not only were they vital transportation corridors, but they also provided habitat for resident fauna, served as crucial acclimation areas for endangered salmon species, provided food for families, and for generations had been a Tribal cultural resource. We couldn’t ignore them.

***

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist

The Big Picture, part one

On December 11, 2024, eighteen years after retiring from EPA, I sit down at my kitchen table with my morning coffee and unfold The Seattle Times. I jump up and almost knock over my cup. There, above the fold, along with a full color picture of a large yellow excavator, is a headline I’ve waited thirty years to see. Hope on the horizon for a clear river. Full cleanup begins at Lower Duwamish Superfund site. I’ve been vindicated. Exposing what “everyone” knew has paid off. Our knock-down-drag-out efforts to list the Duwamish are coming to fruition.

Implementing a New Site Assessment Strategy

Once we decided to investigate the Duwamish Waterway, collecting accurate data and pinpointing bad actors had been easy. The science was clear. No one could refute that the sediments were full of toxic chemicals. No one could refute that the chemicals got there from “releases” from surrounding industries. Even Boeing admitted that a “hot spot” of PCBs located offshore from their facility came from them. We didn’t need a formal risk assessment to know that the high concentrations of PCBs – probable human carcinogens and immune system disruptors – posed an unacceptable risk to human health and the environment. But my snarky employee was right. Political opposition was strong. States, polluters, and local governments had united around a common goal: Fight like hell to avoid a Superfund cleanup. States balked at federal intervention; polluters hated bad publicity. Local governments claimed a Superfund listing would collapse real estate prices all around the site. Everyone said a Superfund cleanup would cost too much and take too long.

In January 1996, the debate took an unexpected turn. During a protracted government shutdown caused by an impasse over the national budget, some sneaky politician slipped an obscure requirement, forever known as the “governor letter,” into the must-pass budget bill. This small addendum, specific only to the Superfund site assessment program, fully politicized the Superfund listing process and shifted the power to the states. From 1996 on, for us to designate a Superfund site, the governor of that state had to agree to the listing in writing. If the intent of this ploy was to cripple the federal Superfund program, it worked. What governor wants to advertise another “worst of the worst” site in the nation? What governor wants to risk the blowback from the powerful real estate lobby? Who wants to be on record that they need help from the Feds?

But there was something foundational to the Pacific Northwest that Congress couldn’t change. Something our regional office staff breathed every day. Something my snarky employee knew how to enlist to the environment’s advantage.

The influence of Tribal governments

Out of 542 federally recognized tribes in the United States, fully half of them are within the boundaries of EPA Region 10. Because these 271 tribes are sovereign nations, they maintain government-to-government relationships with the United States, not individual state governments. Therefore, on environmental issues, many ignore the states and insist on working through the federal EPA. That’s what happened on the Duwamish. The Muckleshoot and Suquamish Tribes pressed us to respect their treaty rights, especially their right to harvest fish in their “usual and accustomed” areas. They insisted EPA list the Duwamish to guarantee that we would factor their traditionally higher fish consumption into the site’s risk assessment, and that the resultant cleanup levels would be low enough to protect them from adverse health effects. They demanded tribal consultations at crucial cleanup stages to ensure their cultural needs would be reflected in any cleanup plan.

It took five years, but under pressure from the tribes and the local Duwamish community most affected by the cleanup, EPA and the State of Washington agreed to list the site. A win for everyone, especially the environment. EPA could designate the Lower Duwamish a Superfund site, bringing federal dollars to the cleanup and the tribes to the table, and would lead the cleanup of the contaminated sediments. The State would lead the source control efforts along the waterway, identifying and controlling the ongoing discharges to the waterway. These two components of a coordinated federal-state strategy – first source control, then sediment remediation – have proven to be a successful cleanup model for our region. After listing Portland Harbor, we used it there too.

The Big Picture, part two

Today, Seattle’s gray skies can’t dampen my enthusiasm. I grab my reading glasses and spread the newspaper across the kitchen table. There’s good news. Boeing and others have already removed five “hot spots” of the most contaminated sediments, so average PCB levels are down 50 percent from when we first discovered the site. Although resident crab, clams, sole, rockfish, and perch are still too dangerous to eat – and fishers could easily ignore the Department of Health’s posted warning signs – I feel confident the environment is already recovering.

In a decade, when this cleanup is complete, PCB levels will be down by 90 percent. Dredging, capping, and natural recovery will provide a clean substrate for benthic animals. In the long run, every link of the food chain will benefit. Fish. Birds. Mammals. People. With 90 percent PCB reduction, eating seafood – for everyone – will be safer.

And if we’d done nothing?

Today, there are about 1340 active Superfund sites.

No, we didn’t cure cancer. But by preventing people’s exposure to hazardous substances – chemicals like arsenic, lead, cadmium, trichloroethylene, dioxin, PCBs, plus hundreds more – we surely must have prevented some.

***

“I don’t believe in magic. I believe in the sun and the stars, the water, the tides, the floods, the owls, the hawks flying, the river running, the wind talking. They’re measurements. They tell us how healthy things are. How healthy we are. Because we and they are the same.” ~ Billy Frank Jr., Native American environmental activist (Nisqually tribe)

When I moved to Seattle in 1980, the rumor of a bald eagle sighting sent my friends and me into a frenzy. We couldn’t even wait for the weekend. We called in sick, lashed our sea kayaks onto makeshift roof racks, and by dawn we were speeding ninety miles north on I-5 to the Skagit River. The Skagit was a birder’s delight. As we paddled, binoculars slung around necks, my birder friends excitedly pointed out every bird they saw. I pretended to listen, but I was greedy only for eagles. I’d never seen a bald eagle before! With the immediacy of youth, I felt that all horrors then plastering the news were teetering at one minute to midnight. Nuclear arms race. Energy crisis. Species extinction. Time plunged ahead, never looking back, never reflecting, never correcting.

Ahead of me I heard a low chuckle, then a reverent whisper, “There they are!” Gripping my paddle tight, I floated around the river bend. Perched on a graying tree crag overlooking the water, their unmistakable white heads and tail feathers clearly visible against the blue sky, a nesting pair warily regarded me. I shrank back, heart pounding. They were so much bigger than I imagined! From only twenty feet away, their piercing eyes and flesh-tearing talons felt menacing. I knew not to stop or invade their space. As I floated away, I felt a frisson of glee. I thought, if they go extinct and I never see another, at least I can say I saw two bald eagles today.

This spring, forty-five years after my first sighting, eaglets will emerge from a rugged twig-and-branch nest high in a cottonwood tree above Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood. In the chill of my early morning row across Union Bay, I will spy two little heads silhouetted above the rim, hungry hatchlings awaiting their parents’ return. I’ll feel a rush as I witness this miracle, measure the time between. Banning DDT made a visible difference. Our nesting eagles, and their eggs, will continue to thrive.

Days will lengthen, and the fledglings will dive off to test their wings. By summer, the mottled juveniles will join the offspring of the other two resident bald eagle pairs, swooping and soaring over my single scull, wingtips flared like fingers, before plunging toward the water as they learn to fish for themselves. By fall they will be gone.

And next spring, new eaglets will emerge.

References for The Long Run

Isabella Breda. December 11, 2024. “Hope on the Horizon for a clear river: Full cleanup begins at Lower Duwamish Superfund site.” The Seattle Times.
Rachel Carson. 1962. Silent Spring, Houghton Mifflin Company, New York
US EPA Construction Grants Overview https://www.epa.gov/enviro/igms-construction-grants-overview
US EPA National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System overview https://www.epa.gov/npdes/npdes-permit-basics
Paris Triathlon postponement https://www.nbcolympics.com/news/mens-triathlon-race-postponed-wednesday-due-river-seine-water-quality
Newsweek, July 30, 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/paris-olympics-seine-river-pollution-dirty-sewers-1932233
Washington State Department of Health fact sheet: Lower Duwamish Waterway 2008 https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/Documents/Pubs/334-139.pdf
Washington State Department of Ecology fact sheet: Lower Duwamish Waterway 2024 https://apps.ecology.wa.gov/cleanupsearch/site/1643
United States Environmental Protection Agency Region 10. November 2014. Record of Decision: Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Site. https://semspub.epa.gov/work/10/715975.pdf
Conservationcatalyst.org. January 5, 2017. “Saving America’s Icon”
Unionbaywatch.blogspot.com
EPA Superfund Site: Love Canal, Niagara Falls, NY Cleanup Activities https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/SiteProfiles/index.cfm?fuseaction=second.cleanup&id=0201290
Fifth Five-Year Review Report for Love Canal Superfund Site: City of Niagara Falls, Niagara County, New York. February 29, 2024. Prepared by U.S Environmental Protection Agency Region 2, New York, New York, signed by Pat Evangelista, Director, Superfund and Emergency Management Division. https://semspub.epa.gov/work/02/704674.pdf

Image by Annie Spratt on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

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