National Park Service – Doing Its Part to Invest in Our Planet through Cleanup of Legacy Pollution

Kenilworth Municipal Dump, Washington DC - May 24, 1967

Our National Park System protects our most treasured and important places, from Caneel Bay, Virgin Island to Chandler Lake, Alaska, and from Baker Island, Maine to American Memorial, Saipan. Our mission is to preserve these places unimpaired for this and future generations. With each passing year, however, the threat of environmental harm continues to increase, and, during this National Park Week, it is important to bring attention to the legacy pollution endangering our lands and resources – and how it is being tackled in the National Park Service (NPS).

In the early 1960s, Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring raised public awareness of environmental threats. Among her observations were that “man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself” and that “the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

Her warnings have manifested dramatic, with polluting events such as the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill in California and the numerous fires decades ago on the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland, Ohio. The potential for environmental harm has not waned, as has been made clear by the recent train derailments in East Palestine, Ohio and Mojave National Preserve, California.

Ideally, the pollution from spills, fires, and other releases of contaminants to the environment are cleaned up right away. More often, however, these events lead to long-term problems, which can endanger the health and environment of a community for decades.

National Capital Parks-East (NACE) Kenilworth Park Landfill Site Cleanup Activities, Washington DC – 1998 to 2020

Within our National Park System, contamination from abandoned mines, oil and gas wells, industrial waste dumps and landfills, and emergency spills endanger natural and/or cultural resources. Pollution from these sites may reduce the viability of the ecosystem within a given park unit, endanger the health of visitors, staff, nearby communities, and wildlife, and require the closure of park areas, limiting public access and the recreational value of a park.

NPS has identified an inventory of 500+ contaminated sites, many of which are of modest size, scale, and complexity, that could be cleaned up within one to two years, given sufficient funding. NPS has also identified over twenty complex sites within our parks whose cleanup will take ten to twenty or more years and hundreds of millions of dollars. NPS is steadily cleaning up these sites, and its many successes to date are critical to the mission of the Agency.

The Agency’s work in restoring contaminated NPS lands is among the many reasons to celebrate during this National Park Week.