32: Paper Valley: The Fight For The Fox River Cleanup, The World’s Largest $1.3 Billion Environmental River Cleanup, PCB Contamination, US EPA Superfund | David Allen, Susan Campbell
Description
This episode features both authors of the new book, Paper Valley: The Fight For The Fox River Cleanup, on the $1.3 billion cleanup of the Fox River in northeast Wisconsin, the world’s largest environmental river cleanup of PCB contamination. You can visit their site here.
David Allen is an award-winning scientist and author. He directed the natural resource damage assessment of the Lower Fox River and the Bay of Green Bay from 1992 through 2001 as the assessment manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His team led the $10 million effort to collect and organize the information that was used to launch Superfund at the site, and they published one of the most comprehensive and public natural resource damage assessments in U.S. history during 1998-2000. He was the leader and public face of the assessment for federal, state, and tribal agencies. That assessment eventually led to the $1.3 billion dollar cleanup and restoration, paid by the polluters. It was among the largest Superfund efforts since the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska, and the effort led to the largest PCB cleanup in history.
Susan Campbell is an award-winning environmental journalist and author. As an environmental reporter for the Green Bay Press-Gazette from 1995-2000, she covered the scientific and political controversy leading to the landmark $1.3 billion dollar cleanup of PCBs from Wisconsin’s Fox River, and the implications for the bay of Green Bay and Great Lakes beyond. Her extensive reporting on the issue won her national and state honors, including a national “Best of Gannett” award for specialty reporting, an enterprise reporting award from the Wisconsin Newspaper Association, and a spot news award from the Milwaukee Press Club. Campbell is also co-author of “Beyond Earth Day: Fulfilling the Promise,” with the late Earth Day founder, U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson (University of Wisconsin Press, 2002)
The Person & Planet theme song is an original song by singer/songwriter Barbara Stephan. Click here to listen to “Gonna Be There.”
United States
