If you are my age, you doubtless grew up hearing about Superfund Sites, places so massively polluted with no firm left to hold accountable for cleanup. This video is about one: Picher, Oklahoma:
The narration and fact delivery is matter of fact and has no screaming "Save Mother Earth" hysteria, but then again, it does not need it. The tribe whose land was expropriated for one of the largest zinc and lead mines in America now has ownership of it again, and are in charge of cleanup. Their environmental quality director is not bitter; he puts a positive cast on how they are being paid to restore their land.
If you are familiar with the silver mining region in north Idaho, parts of this will seem familiar; lead mining poisoning and retarding children, although that was suppressed for a long time with large payments and NDAs. While the environmental movement tends towards hysteria, when not outright fraud, there are disasters like Picher we need to remember. How many of these new mines to produce electric car batteries are going to be the 21st century's Pichers? A little calmer approach to the next big technology is in order.
They just finished cleaning up a US Radium site a few years ago, I lived a few thousand yards away from it for about twenty years. Thankfully the toxic materials were all burials that had occurred decades before I lived there and I didn't have a well, but the dumps were right next to the Susquehanna River so I'm also glad our town water came from a creek that fed into the river rather than the river itself (which also avoided mine water issues not unlike those in this video.)
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