St. Louis, MO, November 2000- At a meeting attended by some of the top ranking administrators from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD), tribal representatives and state regulators gave the agency mixed reviews on its efforts to clean up pollution on military bases.
The forum was called to discuss all the DOD clean up sites in the U.S. and local officials, who live near those facilities, told DOD administrators that while some of their projects were working well, their efforts at range clean up, risk management, regulatory partnering and communication left a lot of room for improvement.
The tribal officials from Alaska, Idaho, South Dakota, Montana, Nevada and other states were in attendance to take advantage of the rare opportunity to participate in a dialog with DOD officials and members of other tribes with environmental problems.
Mervyn Tano, president of the Institute for Indigenous Resource Management, was one of the main presenters for the risk management and communication sessions of the forum.
Tano talked specifically about the Risk Assessment Tool Project the Institute is conducting with the Department of Energy's Center for Risk Excellence and the American Society for Testing and Materials. He told the group that once a cultural assessment tool is developed, it will greatly enhance the ability of tribal and federal officials to deal with some of the cultural issues associated with pollution clean up on Indian lands.
As an example, Tano described how salmon lost because of water pollution cannot be compensated for just in terms of it's value as a food source or lost revenue. "You can't measure the value of a salmon simply by its caloric or dollar value. It has symbolic, totemic and spiritual values that have to be considered." An effective cultural assessment tool would help put a value on the cultural components that currently are overlooked or difficult to quantify Tano said.
The two day meeting was attended by the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security, Sherry Goodman, as well as assistant secretaries of all branches of the military.