Environmental design for social good, previous 'environmental sacrifice zones' require cleanup and ecological restoration for the common good, and for environmental justice. Tar Creek is a huge disaster area, addressed by EPA only as a place to vacate, particularly tragic because occupancy is primarily by native tribes.

1. Healing Whole Communities: Tar Creek beyond Superfund
through Integrative Sustainability Design
Ivan Weber, Weber Sustainability Consulting
953 1st Avenue
Salt Lake City, Utah 84103
(801)355-6863 / (801)651-8841 cellular
ivan@webersustain.com
1.
SUMMARY:
TAR CREEK REGION AS COMMUNITY INTEGRATIVE
DESIGN PROBLEM
More than 500,000 abandoned mines pockmark, stain and undermine the countenance of our
nation, thousands of them leaving a toxic, dangerous legacy upon the land, crippling the capacity of
affected communities to make a decent living in a safe, secure and non-toxic place. No miningimpacted community exceeds the devastation of the northeastern Oklahoma Tar Creek Superfund
area, known as ‘Superfund No. 1,’ the unfortunate recipient of more than a century’s lead and zinc
mining impacts funneled into a 40 square-mile zone of toxic mine wastes, acidic/metals-laden water,
and instability of the very earth above shallow, underground workings.
1.1.
Integrative, Regenerative Approach to ‘Miscalibrated Intentions’: Many, if not most,
of these mining-damaged sites may benefit from an integrative, regenerative approach to returning
landscapes and sites to sustainable productivity. As David W. Orr, Dean of Oberlin College’s
School of Environmental Studies, has observed, “Whatever their particular causes, environmental
problems all share one fundamental trait: with rare exceptions they are unintended, unforeseen, and
sometimes ironic side effects of actions arising from other intentions. We intend one thing and
sooner or later get something very different.” Orr (2002) p. 13.
Human nature conspires with human history to leave behind adverse legacies in abundance: miningcontaminated watersheds and communities nationwide; multiple clear-cuts of vast Appalachian and
Western forests; draining of nearly all wetlands in the Mississippi-Missouri River watersheds and
along both coasts; industrial emissions devastation not only over whole states, but whole regions;
apparent global climate change; and persistent toxic chemicals in tissues of all living organisms. We
echo Orr’s further assertion that, “This is a design challenge like no other. It is not about making
greener widgets but how to make decent communities that fit their places with elegant frugality.
The issue is whether the emerging field of ecological design will evolve as a set of design skills
applied as patchwork solutions on a larger pattern of disorder or whether design will eventually help
to transform the larger culture that is badly in need of a reformation.” Orr (2002, p. 12). Only
through truly “integrative” processes inclusive of all appropriate disciplines and stakeholders can
community regenerative redevelopment be stimulated.
1.2
Regenerative Design of Damaged Communities and ‘Legacy’ Places
Damaged communities and landscapes need good design, too. The regenerative design of Tar
Creek, and of all the almost countless other externalized, neglected ‘legacy’ places that are our
collective shame, is the ultimate test of our will, our compassion, our creative wits, and of our
systems of self-governance that can allocate pooled resources for the common purpose. Our
industrial systems continue to create more ‘Tar Creeks’ at astonishing rates and scales. If we cannot
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2. find ways regeneratively to redevelop neglected, victimized places, then how can we allow the
creation of more such places to continue, unsustainable in the extreme, often for the sole benefit of
foreign corporations?
2.
TRI-STATE MINING DISTRICT ENVIRONMENT AND COMMUNITY:
CHARACTERIZATION AND HISTORY
Amidst the fertile, rocky grassland at the center of our nation, a region undulates gently from the
Ozarks toward the southwest, sloping from Missouri through the meeting point with Kansas and
Oklahoma, the so-called “Tri-State” area. Averaging about 1,000 feet above sea level, this has been
the landscape claimed as home for many Indigenous peoples, historically at least ten Native Tribes
in relatively recent history: Quapaw, Peoria, Wyandotte, Miami, Ottawa, Eastern Shawnee,
Shawnee, Cherokee, Modoc and Seneca Cayuga. Lush native prairie grasses and flowering plants
covered these rolling hills, with dense oaks, nut trees and riparian forests along creeks and rivers.
The land provided an adequate livelihood, if not a rich one, for Tribes inhabiting this land before the
European arrival.
2.1
Mining’s Progress: Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma Lead-Zinc Mining 1850-1970.
Early European settlers of the area recognized the presence of lead and zinc ores, catching the
sparkle of lead ore galena crystals, zinc ore sphalerite’s iridescence, often spectacular calcite crystals,
and pyrite variants chalcopyrite and marcasite. As mining spread through the Tri-State District, lead
and zinc supplied three great wars and generations of industrial products. Deposits of lead and zinc
were mined here from the mid-19th Century onward. Beginning in the Oronogo-Duenweg mining
belt in Jasper County, Missouri, east of Joplin, lead mining was a source of bullets for Civil War
conflicts. By WWI, lead-zinc mining had been in progress in Cherokee County, Kansas, for more
than 35 years, as well. Mining began in the early 1890s in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, ending around
1970, thereby engaging counties in all three states in supplying lead for bullets and zinc for brass
shell casings, battery lead and galvanizing zinc in 19 th and 20th Century American wars up to, and
including, Viet Nam. Construction products also benefited from both zinc and lead, used for
roofing, castings, protective steel coatings, and a broad variety of consumer products. Leaded
gasoline production consumed a considerable proportion of lead for several decades until banned
and phased out by EPA in the period from 1973-1996. By the time Tri-State lead and zinc mining
ended in the 1970s, the land was honeycombed and perforated over at least 500 square miles of
intensively mined land. Unemployment ruled, as it does today in Tar Creek.
2.2
Mine Closures and Legacies: How did Tar Creek and surrounding areas become such a
catastrophic mess? The Tri-State Mining District’s ‘legacy’ consists of ground water and surface
water contamination, millions of tons of crushed rock and ore processing waste, and physical
ground instability over shallow underground mines.
2.2.1 Contaminated water: During each mine’s period of operation, mines pumped water from
the relatively shallow underground workings, generally 90 to 300 feet below surface, in order to
work underground. As mines closed, pumps were shut down, the last in the 1970s. Acid waters
form from oxidized iron pyrite, dissolving lead, zinc, cadmium and other metal. Gradually, the
mines were inundated across the region. In the 1980s, acidified water began to emerge from
countless shafts and near-surface fissures, especially in northeastern Oklahoma, the low zone in the
Tri-State Mining District. Tar Creek, itself, was stained a livid orange, while counterpart, slightly
higher areas in Missouri and Kansas were less affected due to the slope toward Oklahoma Tribal
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3. lands and Ottawa County. Contamination spread into the Neosho/Grand River and the heavily
fished, downstream reservoir, the Grand Lake of the Cherokees.
2.2.2 Mine Waste: “Chat” is the crushed ore host rock, chert, a hard, coarse, silica rock akin to
flint. Lead, zinc and cadmium are disseminated throughout most chat, which has been estimated to
have been distributed by mining and processing at an average of about one million tons per square
mile over the several hundred square miles of the Tri-State Mining District. Lead makes up as much
as 15% of chat. Because the crushed rock has been so useful as road base, concrete and asphalt
aggregate, railroad embankment aggregate, foundation drainage and base gravels, and so forth, it is
estimated that only about 1/3 of the chat remains, most of it in Ottawa County’s Tar Creek area.
People have distributed chat over literally thousands of miles of roads and railroads surrounding the
core of the Tri-State District. In the Tar Creek area, veritable mountains of chat loom above houses
and schools, tempting children to play in lead and cadmium dust, exposing them to highly elevated
metals levels.
2.2.3 Surface Instability: Aside from the area’s hundreds of abandoned mine shafts, the area is
also prone to localized collapse into near-surface mines. Parts of communities, individual structures,
parks, streets and highways rest tenuously on eggshell-thin rock crusts spanning large underground
cavities. Mines cave in, from time to time, swallowing houses, highways and other surface
improvements. EPA has warned residents of cave-in danger in and around Picher, Miami, Cardin,
Commerce and several other Oklahoma towns, extending into a zone on the Kansas side of the
border near Treece.
2.4
Modern Era National Environmental Laws: Superfund and RCRA
In the period from 1963 through the 1980s, key elements of the legislative foundation for
environmental protection were enacted into law, including RCRA (Resource Conservation Recovery
Act, 1976) and CERCLA (Comprehensive Environmental Response, Claims and Liability Act,
1980). Intermittently coordinated, usually inadequately funded and variably enforced, these acts
have nonetheless formed the bases of modern environmental regulation of mining. Of these laws,
the ‘Superfund’ program under CERCLA has presented the greatest unrequited promise to Tar
Creek. A 1980 amendment to RCRA exempted mine waste left over from ore processing from
classification as hazardous waste (“Bevill waste”). On the other hand, an internal EPA “directive”
dated June 4, 2001, instructed all EPA regions to emphasize the “Superfund Redevelopment
Initiative” and the importance of post-Superfund “Reuse Assessment” tools for areas such as Tar
Creek. EPA ( 2001).
2.5
Political and Environmental Divisions of the Tri-State Mining District
Two EPA regions, three states, six counties and ten sovereign tribes make up the three designated
Superfund Sites: Tar Creek, Cherokee County and Oronogo-Duenweg. Kansas and Missouri are in
EPA Region VII, while Oklahoma falls into Region VI. For whatever reason, this has represented a
qualitative difference in programs, funding and solutions applied. A palpable difference is apparent
from north to south sides of the EPA regional line, corresponding to state lines. This is
compounded by mine water’s emergence as metals-laden acid on the Oklahoma side, where all ten
of the First Nations and a number of disadvantaged communities are located. Neglect has run
downhill with bad water.
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4. 2.5.1 The Tar Creek Superfund Site - ‘Superfund No. 1’: Among the nearly 1,300 designated
and nominated Superfund sites in the US, Tar Creek is one of a handful known for its pervasive
hopelessness. It is a risk-filled land covering approximately 40 square miles, an enduring testimony
to negligence of government and corporations, if not to ‘environmental injustice,’ a de facto
‘environmental sacrifice zone.’ Typifying externalized places, little or no effort has been made to
remedy environmental, social and economic problems. Instead, ‘response actions’ have resulted in
sporadic residential yard cleanup in Picher, OK and other heavily-affected, nearby communities.
Recent Congressional authorization of buyouts of residents who wish to leave the contaminated area
obviously protects children from further metals exposure. Family relocation and site abandonment
do not constitute an enduring, regenerative solution to the ‘perfect storm’ of Tar Creek’s
misfortunes. To add insult to injury, serious flooding occurred in the Miami area in July, 2007, and a
disastrous F4 tornado struck Picher on May 10, 2008, killing five and inflicting widespread damage.
3.
REGENERATIVE APPROACH TO HEALING WHOLE COMMUNITIES
We hold a national duty to regenerate the economies and environments of communities that have
been, in effect, victimized and damaged in order to produce commodities for the benefit of the
larger society. We hold, furthermore, a duty to restore to eventual ecological functionality and
quality the watershed and sub-watershed ecosystem elements held by indigenous peoples to be a
sacred trust. This region, and the former coal mining zone around the Kansas side, happens to be
my childhood home, the landscape that formed my earliest language and images of the earth, its
peoples and their interrelationships. Its meaning is, therefore, enduring on a personal level.
3.1
The Vocabulary of Regenerative Redevelopment
We must acquire not only a new vocabulary, but also a new toolkit in order to deal with the
complexity of damaged communities regeneration. We must extend our toolkit, moreover, to
support our talk and our vision. To be sure, ‘green design,’ ‘green architecture’ and sustainable
planning are essential to the creation of environmentally just and sustainable livelihoods for the
communities sharing attributes of Tar Creek and the surrounding region. Regenerative design of
places like this, however, demands analytical processes to which we are unaccustomed, truly
integrating environmental engineering, ecological engineering and design, economic analysis and
economic design, socio-cultural processes and mechanisms of community mobilization, and political
and fiscal resolve, as simultaneous, coordinated campaigns. Wild communities and human
communities are inseparable in this vision. Here, sustainable livelihoods depend, especially for
Indigenous peoples who hold the Land in sacred trust, on widespread ecological restoration,
returning fish to streams and lakes, birds to trees and thickets, and deer and coyote to their native
ranges among the urbanizing patterns of a sadly ravaged land.
3.1.1 Sustainability: Sustainability is design. It is important for us to note that the term
‘sustainability’ needs to be distilled to its essence, “sustain – ability”: the ability to sustain, exercised
as an ongoing, life-long process. The people who do the sustaining --- local communities --- must
acquire the capacity to do so. Sustaining is a deliberate act of individuals, communities and societies
to create an equilibrium between their own needs and the needs of the natural world. Those who do
the sustaining must envision and embrace the nature of their ecological and economic environment.
Given that ‘sustainability’ is a condition that we can only recognize after having reached it, then
strategies for approaching that condition are matters of design.
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5. 3.1.2 Restoration is usefully defined to convey a compound intent in the field of ‘ecological
engineering,’ as presented by William Mitch, a pioneer of this recent discipline:
“…the act of restoring to a former state or position or to an unimpaired or perfect condition… and
reinstating the original functions of the soil (or aquatic system) in full measure.” Mitsch and
Jorgensen (2004), p. 288. Restoration often seeks not to recreate literally a specific habitat or
ecosystem, but rather to reset processes of ecological succession, with the objective of facilitating
nature’s own adjustments toward a stable floral and faunal community. We “construct” wetlands by
creating the conditions within which wetlands create themselves. So it is for regenerative economic
redevelopment:
3.1.3 Regeneration and Regenerative Redevelopment seek to return places and communities
to productivity, but not necessarily to a literally ‘restored,’ former state. Understanding of ‘place’ is
the critical basis of regeneration. Design is the necessary process of making applied choices for
regeneration, accepting full responsibility for choices that depart from restoration, based on careful
consideration of options and their consequences. “Redevelopment” implies that a former condtition
was “developed” in the minds of residents; this may or may not have been the case, but we wish to
avoid implication that a place lacked a sustainable balance in its past, relative to values and ecologies
of those times. Now, in Professor Orr’s parlance, we must ‘calibrate intentions,’ leading to design
solutions.
3.2
Sustainable Jobs for Productive Regeneration
Sustainable employment --- ecologically responsible jobs --- is the essence of regenerative
redevelopment. Bearing in mind the urgency of adequately helping damaged, externalized
communities like the Tar Creek Superfund Site, and the many individuals within, we assert that
sustainable employment conveys the full measure of obligation to environment, ecosystems,
community patterns and individuals at all scales, as well as our necessity to understand and develop
creatively an assemblage of opportunities that respond to place and community preferences: to
design a lasting solution. Indeed, individuals and communities deprived of basic needs will not
sustain their environment. Sustainable jobs, then, are adequately rewarding forms of employment or
of business enterprises that are clean, safe and in harmony with their environment. Worker health,
energy efficiency, resource efficiency, pollution prevention, emissions restraint are attributes we
should expect of sustainable jobs in ‘closed-loop’ enterprises. Sustainable jobs engender
stewardship.
3.3
Community-Focused Interdisciplinary-Integrative Approach
An intensive methodology for ‘whole community’ regeneration is an extension of more familiar
‘integrative design’ practices, but unlike ‘integrative architecture,’ we draw on every applicable
practice of sustainable planning and design: Environmental engineering, ecological engineering,
geochemical and biogeochemical sciences, agricultural engineering and agribusiness, sustainable
forestry and wood sciences, materials sciences, energy sciences and engineering, landscape planning
and design, land development and finance, economic design and geographic analysis, industrial
planning and design, industrial finance, sustainable architectural planning and design, and so forth,
as may assist understanding of and envisioning opportunities. Community and its ‘place’ in regional
context --- historical dynamics, seen from a vision of alternative futures --- must be at the center of
this integrative, interdisciplinary effort. We must find ways to design an economy appropriate for
each community in need of regenerative redevelopment.
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6. 3.4
Industrial Ecology and Eco-Industrial Parks.
Industrial Ecology is a useful analytical methodology, as is the corollary proposition of the ‘EcoIndustrial Park’ (EIP), the primary tool of the industrial ecologist. Loosely analogous to ecological
systems, industrial ecology sees economic systems in terms of energy and material flows through
economic ‘trophic’ systems, from ‘primary producers’ at the bottom of a ‘production web,’ to higher
consumers, through economic niches and still higher consumers and ‘top predators’. Through all
systems, the sun is the source of all energy. Little if any waste occurs, since niche organisms seize
the opportunities to utilize byproduct materials and energy, and the overall community is
cooperative for the good of the whole. This symbiosis is familiar in nature, relatively common in
traditional societies and in modern Europe, but rare in the US.
3.4.1 ‘Eco-Industrial Park’ (EIP): Industries, businesses and business development institutions
form an economic community, clustered or co-located for optimal energy, material and financial
efficiency, exercising collaborative intelligence to plan, recruit, and complement each other for the
enduring benefit not only of the individual ‘organism,’ but also of the community as a whole.
Although some object to its citation as a true EIP, the famous Kalundborg, Denmark, ‘ecoindustrial symbiosis’ was possibly the earliest-recognized example of cooperative business clustering
for the sake of resource efficiencies. This is a very recent realization and discipline, all coming about
since the early 1980s. Other such projects are only now under development in several countries.
3.4.2 EIP ‘Primary Producers’: In each EIP case, one or more ‘primary producers’ is/are
engaged in the cooperative business community. Complementary or niche businesses are recruited
or attracted to utilize major energy or material byproducts. The primary ‘tenants’ of an ecoindustrial park can be any of a range of possible activities, as long as they have the capacity to
produce with little adverse environmental consequence.
3.4.3 Integrated Biorefinery: The ‘integrated biorefinery’ is an EIP-like complex of industries
and research-development activities centered on a full range of uses of woody and organic
byproducts, energy and value-added products. This cluster may include, for example, rapid-growth
cellulosic crops (e.g., willow, poplar, or perhaps switchgrass or fibrous stalks of food crops), which
may be separated into constituent hemicelluloses and cellulose compounds and lignin, possibly
yielding value-added chemicals, cellulosic ethanol through fermentation or high-temperature
processes, lignin for energy production, and fiber for various products. A biorefinery may also
process agricultural wastes and fiber crops, such as wheat straw and corn stover, into agrifiber/agriboard products, and multiple biomass energy forms and fuels. Municipal waste, given
directed R&D, may be separable in such a way that some constituents contribute to the cellulose
processing stream, while other constituents are digested anaerobically to produce methane and
composted nutrients for soil amendments. Dairies, cattle feed lots and ‘CAFOs’ (concentrated
animal feeding operations, such as swine and poultry farms) are significant manure and litter
producers, which can create energy productivity opportunities and large compost output, necessary
for soil restoration. This opportunity to recover otherwise lost nutrients is one of the most
significant of our times. Gardner (1997).
3.4.4 High-Performance Facilities and Communities: High-performance planning, design,
construction, commissioning, operation and maintenance is axiomatic for all sustainable facilities in
the EIP and surrounding communities. ‘LEED-Platinum’ or better should be targeted, exercising
the ‘Greensburg Principle’ of striving for the best possible performance in restoring distressed,
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7. damaged communities. Housing development and architectural restoration, moreover, can become
basic industries of a sustainable economy.
3.4.5 Energy to Finance Regeneration: Net energy productivity can provide an ongoing
financial resource for the restoration and regenerative redevelopment of a well-situated, welldesigned EIP and surrounding community. By assuring that energy efficiency improvements and
technology assistance are incorporated into the EIP’s organizational purposes, and by establishing
community-wide financial assistance mechanisms (e.g., ESCO model) for efficiency upgrades and
renewable energy, the energy security and affordability for residents and businesses can be
dramatically improved.
4.
TAR CREEK REGENERATIVE STRATEGIES: A VISION FOR HEALING
WHOLE COMMUNITIES
Bullets and brass drove the degeneration of Tar Creek and the Tri-State District. What economic
drivers can be assembled to drive regeneration? Cultural diversity and biological productivity
provide a broad basis for regenerative redevelopment of the Tar Creek Superfund Site and
neighboring communities in Kansas and Missouri.
4.1
Process to Arrive at Regenerative Strategies
Intensive, ‘front-loaded’ processes akin to the ‘eco-charrette’ hold promise for early shaping of
process pathways and key events, leading in turn to subsequent processes and events. Because the
residents of a place ultimately must sustain it, the people of Tar Creek communities must envision
and assert their own preferences and desires. They may need help getting started. ‘Process’ must be
designed and executed to support this realization. It will be up to governments, supporting
organizations and businesses to complement and actualize the local vision, lending strength, value,
quality and momentum. For all stakeholders, patience with process will be essential --- determined
patience, however, rather than the resigned patience of past decades. Through an intensive research
and interview process, with public discussions at critical junctures, devoting as much attention and
time as is required to understand and catalyze the visions of residents and Indigenous peoples, the
following steps should occur:
4.1.1 Discover the primary existing economic activities in the region, which may provide impetus
to economically regenerative redevelopment and the EIP as ‘primary producers’ or basic industries;
4.1.2
Identify other candidate primary activities that ‘match’ likely regenerative resources;
4.1.3 Identify possible ‘niche’ and supporting enterprises, to create acceptable, alternative
pathways to appropriate outcomes, and commence strategic recruitment; and
4.1.4 Mobilize existing financial and funding mechanisms, and create new ones, in order to put the
community’s design into action.
4.2
Eco-Industrial Park and Regenerative Redevelopment Strategies
Due to the necessity for an extensive, community-centered, placed-based, strategies-forming
process, we can only explore here a hypothetical catalog of possibilities, based on knowledge of
bioregional resources and environmental imperatives.
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8. 4.2.1 Environmental Remediation Strategies to Reduce Risk and Restore Ecological and
Biological Productivity:
• Containment, sequestration and repository construction, where necessary permanently to
isolate toxicologically significant mining wastes; reducing contaminated materials footprints to
the least, most stable area possible, sustainably capped and “closed” in perpetuity, regardless
how long it takes. This may require: sequestering toxics-bearing ‘chat’ underground, structural
strengthening of near-surface underground workings to prevent cave-ins, and filling of shafts
and abandoned openings. Utilize chat as aggregate for concrete where feasible for underground
application, and for building where leachability testing shows it’s safe to do so. Above all, get
toxics-bearing chat off the surface.
• Survey and Rank Subsidence/Ground Collapse Risk and address aggressively by whatever
means necessary, including (for example) explosively induced collapse and filling, filling of voids
with chat, creation of column structures with reinforced chat/concrete, or other structural
measures.
• Ground water remediation by regional-scale intervention and local treatment: upgradient
withdrawals of clean water before mine exposures can cause acidification, interception and
treatment at points of emergence, strategic alteration of subsurface flow, and in-aquifer/in-situ
treatment. Treatment menu should include passive and intensive technologies, avoiding
exposure of eco-toxic compounds to wildlife; biosulfide reactors are likely to be effective, using
sulfate-reducing bacterial processes for metals reduction. “Active” treatment may need to
include multiple filtration technologies ‘in train’ with biological pre-treatment. Inorganic iron
reduction may also help. Restore every local surface water body and the entire watershed.
• Shallow Ground Water Remediation with Hybrid Poplars and other ‘Phreatophytes’ to
uptake metals-bearing waters; and other phytoremediation strategies for soils remediation.
Hybrid poplars may be conducive to plantation forestry for value-added wood and fuels.
4.2.2 “Biorefinery” Eco-Industrial Park for Integrative Creation of Value-Added Organic
Products, Services and Energy; and Integrative Resource-Recovery Center:
• Large-scale production of soil amendments for restoration: Compost wastes from poultry,
CAFOs, dairies, food processing, and agricultural byproducts and products; urban
organic/municipal waste, converted to soil restoration nutrients, compost and amendments.
• Short-rotation woody crops for cellulosic ethanol, cellulose separation for value-added
hemicelluloses chemicals, and for lignin for energy.
• Agricultural fiber byproducts for agriboard, other architectural agrifiber products,
energy, cellulosic separation; regional manufacturing and supply center for LEED-compliant,
rapidly-renewable, sustainable and healthful products from agriculture and wood, serving major
population centers within 500 miles.
• Sustainable agriculture; no-till native prairie productivity and restoration; Permaculture
applications; crops to complement and support biorefinery development.
• Plantation forestry w/poplars, walnut, oak, etc.; value-added wood products manufacturing,
signature-style crafts from Tribes and communities.
4.2.3 Sustainable Land Development, town-restoration, industrial facilities creation and
housing stock improvement as financial drivers: Replacement and new development at strategic
locations, guiding and encouraging quality growth and employment into planned developments,
such as near Joplin housing markets, and other growth areas.
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9. •
•
•
•
Housing development and town-center commercial development to provide funding for
community regenerative development generally. All structures, infrastructure and public
places must be made safe from hazards, secure, energy efficient and affordable, and
reflective of community cultural preferences. ‘Process’ must be conducive to culturally
appropriate choices, while encouraging maintenance of strong sense of place and community
that characterizes most towns in the area.
LEED-Neighborhood Development at town-center locations, planning enhanced community
center experience.
LEED-NC and EB for all possible design and building projects, especially schools, public
buildings and low-income/affordable housing, emphasizing energy efficiency for environmental
and affordability benefits. If Greensburg can declare rebuilding to be LEED Platinum, why
can’t Tar Creek?
‘Energy Star’ ratings for all buildings and appliances. Aim high and achieve it.
4.2.4
•
•
•
•
Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy: EE & RE programs must pervade all
regenerative activities. While wind generation, high-temp geothermal and certain other
forms of renewables may not be likely here, others will be feasible at varying scales:
Solar energy development --- solar-thermal and PV, especially at schools and public
buildings, as well as low-income family homes
District energy for clusters of businesses and residences
Energy efficiency retrofit and new construction can provide significant employment
opportunities in many trades, as well as sales of goods and services; ESCO model may be
extended to provide low-cost energy efficiency services to those who cannot afford them, but
who need them most in the dawning age of fuel price instability.
Biomass energy, coordinated with Biorefinery: Wood pellets and chips for efficient boilers
at many scales, for businesses, schools, government buildings, residences; short-rotation woody
crops and residues from crops for energy and byproduct materials.
4.2.5 Financing Regeneration: An optimal combination of strategies among these and other
place-specific and regional opportunities must be selected and reinforced with financial mechanisms
for short, medium and long-term stimuli.
• Regional redevelopment funds
• Regeneration-directed Congressional funding
• Business development assistance programs and incubator at EIP core
• Regenerative investment funds and networks
• Cleaned and restored-site verification for lender liability relief
• Business recruitment and marketing center
• Research and development (R&D) management center
• By-products exchange and infrastructure management for EIP optimization
4.3
Appropriate and Appropriate-scale Technologies in an Integrative Regional EcoIndustrial Center
An institution that embodies the community-centered intentions of the EIP can create sustainable
jobs, investment and entrepreneurial opportunities. A ‘Sustainable Biorefinery and Integrative
Resource Recovery Center’ can provide further economic benefits to surrounding communities by
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10. returning nutrients, energy, technical assistance and reinvestment to the community environment. It
can also support and guide sustainable agriculture, forestry and resource utilization for a broad area
around it. Anticipating that fossil fuel prices may never return to former levels, participating
communities may convert past misfortunes into opportunities to re-envision and rebuild their
existences in harmony with a future model of environmental efficiency and stewardship, as well as
community celebration.
5.
CONCLUSIONS:
We must extend our understandings of ‘sustainable design,’ our collective and individual
capacities to manage the many disciplines of design that are needed by Tar Creek and places like it,
and our sensibilities toward assisting damaged, perennially disadvantaged communities and
landscapes. This kind of design may not be glamorous or the fodder for luminous journal
illustrations. In fact, this is not about us, except in the sense that our collective, continued complicity
and negligence of such communities is ours as surely as it has been that of our governments.
Rather, our attention, concern and compassion --- and our investment, especially our investment --must be directed toward Picher, Miami, Quapaw, Commerce, Joplin, Galena, Baxter Springs, Treece,
Cherokee, Columbus, Weir, and all the other communities --- Libby, Anaconda, Leadville, Marsh
Fork, and so forth --- that suffer from the unintended consequences of extracted national and
regional benefit. These towns and First Nations, their rivers, their prairies and their forests have
every right to be returned to productivity, and to a reasonable semblance of their former natural
integrity. Self-respect and stewardship depend on hope and a reasonable degree of prosperity. For
these to return, divisions and borders must fall away, allowing agencies, governments, NGOs and
those with humble expertise and motivation to join with these astonishingly resilient people, to help
them to help themselves through community regenerative design.
REFERENCES:
Beesley, B., J. Payne and J. Brannum, 2007. The Creek Runs Red – A Documentary Film. KERA
and ITVS.
Berger, A., 2002. Reclaiming the American West. Princeton.
Dixon, T., M. Raco, P. Catney & D.N. Lerner, 2007. Sustainable Brownfield Regeneration: Livable
Places from Problem Spaces. Blackwell.
Gardner, G., 1997. Recycling Organic Waste: From Urban Pollutant to Farm Resource,
Worldwatch Institute, Worldwatch Paper No. 135.
Mitsch, W. J. and Jorgensen, S.E., 2004. Ecological Engineering and Ecosystem Restoration. Wiley.
Orr, D.W., 2002. The Nature of Design: Ecology, Culture and Human Intervention. Oxford Press.
USEPA, 2001. OSWER Memorandum (Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response) 9355.706P, “Reuse Assessments: A Tool to Implement the Superfund Land Use Directive.”
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