A Glimmer of Hope for the Future--in the Berkeley Pit?

[alfreda89]

I have been busy beating out brush fires, and so have not figured out how I want to write about this podcast.  I started listening to it because I was in the car driving a lot, and I'm a magpie for information.  I never grow tired of learning.  This report was stringing together a lot of interesting things, starting with an open pit copper mine that became the Berkeley Pit, one of the worst of the Superfund sites.  This is not a new report--but I think it is worth your while.

At the end, I was moved to tears, because for the first time in a long while, I thought there was a chance that maybe, just maybe, we will figure things out before we destroy ourselves.

So I offer to you "Even the Worst Laid Plans" from Radiolab.  Their blurb is as follows:

Soren Wheeler takes us to Butte Montana--where an open pit copper mine’s demise leads to a toxic lake filled with corrosive runoff. Reporter Barret Golding goes to visit the pit lake, and writer Edwin Dobb tells Soren the story of a pile of dead snow geese who made an ill-fated landing on the water. Soren also talks to husband-and-wife chemists Andrea Stierle and Don Stierle, whose startling discovery reveals the secret life inside a death trap.

The discovery the Stierles made may be the seed of a way to clean huge areas of the world, of a new business, of a new way to think about biochemistry.  It's a reminder that there may, indeed, be a medical solution to every condition lurking somewhere on the planet.

If we can only find and recognize it before we burn it down.