Building a Legacy,
One Teacher at a Time
Story and photos by Bracken Reed
Richland, Washington—One by one the teachers and scientists begin to arrive, driving in from the south on the wide, sycamore-lined streets, past the manicured lawns and industrial office buildings of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) campus. A few of the teachers miss the turn, pass by, circle back, squinting in the early morning sunlight, looking for the designated building.
PNNL is operated by the Battelle Corporation for the U.S. Department of Energy. Designed in the 1960s, the campus is all right angles and functional efficiency, with a disorienting, earth-toned sameness to its buildings. For those who don't work here every day, it's easy to get lost.
At this early hour, most Battelle employees have yet to arrive, and rush hour has yet to begin in earnest for those heading farther north, out to what the locals call "the area": the old reactors, laboratories, processing facilities, and storage tanks scattered across the 560-plus square miles of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. An eerie quiet hangs over the stark landscape, broken only by the random calls of songbirds. There is a sense of life going on in the morning shadows, of coyotes moving swiftly through the sagebrush, just out of sight.
Many have called this area a wasteland—empty, desolate, barren—and its status as one of the most toxic, radioactive spots in the country might bear them out. But those who take the time can find another reality here: a landscape teeming with wildlife and rare plant species; the last free-flowing stretch of one of the West's greatest rivers; petroglyphs and ancient village sites; and the largest remaining area of the shrub-steppe ecosystem that once flourished in the Columbia River Basin.
One of the great ironies of Hanford's nearly half-century role as part of the nation's nuclear defense program is that much of the site remained virtually untouched—used mainly as a buffer zone around the main reactor areas. As a result, while crews continue to clean up what the U.S. Department of Energy likes to call "legacy waste," others have been working hard to create another, parallel legacy: to save the untouched areas from development; to draw public awareness to their beauty and ecological importance; and to use them as a model for returning some of the disturbed areas to a semblance of their original glory.
On this summer morning the PNNL campus is the meeting ground of an unlikely group: 20 elementary and middle school teachers, a handful of Battelle scientists, and a program manager, Karen Wieda, who is already moving at full speed. Tall and thin, with the tanned, healthy look of one who spends a lot of time outdoors, Wieda is obviously in her element. She waves down those who mistakenly pass by the parking lot of the Sigma V building, greets each new arrival with an easy familiarity, and keeps things moving without once seeming to be in a hurry. "Has everybody got sunscreen?" she asks. "Hats? Water bottles? Notebooks?"
July in the semiarid country of Eastern Washington can be physically withering, with temperatures often topping 100 degrees in the afternoon. An early start to a field trip is the best antidote to fatigue, dehydration, and sunstroke, as Wieda well knows. She quickly marshals the group toward three waiting vehicles, and within minutes they are on the road, passing through the north end of the PNNL campus and on to the main road of the nuclear reservation.
Every July for nearly a decade, Wieda has directed the Partnership for Arid Lands Stewardship (or PALS)—a field-based, professional development project that matches K8 teachers with Battelle scientists. The program recruits local teachers who are already part of Battelle's larger educational project—Leadership and Assistance for Science Education Reform (LASER)—and are using one of its recommended science kits in their classrooms. For two weeks teachers are immersed in the world of science and in the ecology of the Columbia Basin.
The program is based on a set of underlying principles that some may find radical: that to learn about science, teachers need to occasionally have contact with actual scientists; that the places we live, the landscapes that surround us every day, are the most enlightening, effective, and inspiring instructional "tools" that exist; and that science, far from being a luxury or secondary subject, should be an essential, core subject at both the elementary and middle school levels.
Connecting Science to the Real World
Every year, PALS is organized around a practical, real-world scenario. This year, the scenario could hardly be more up-to-the-minute. In June 2000, then-President Bill Clinton designated significant areas of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, as well as 57,000 federally owned acres to its north, as a national monument. The Act transferred control of these areas from the U.S. Department of Energy to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and created the 195,000-acre Hanford Reach National Monument. While not popular with everyone—especially those hoping for more local control and for agricultural and industrial development—the move served as a kind of marker between the old Hanford and the new. It was the end of one era, and the beginning of another one.
Within two years, plans were underway to expand an already existing museum, called the Columbia River Exhibition of History, Science, and Technology (CREHST), and to create a Hanford Reach National Monument Interpretive Center on land just south of the city on the west bank of the Columbia River. The area, called Columbia Point, or simply "the Point" in local parlance, is at the confluence of the Columbia and Yakima Rivers, and has great cultural significance for area tribes. But while it is considered a sacred place by many, it is also a highly disturbed area, popular for many years with off-road motorists, anglers, illegal dumpers, and underage drinkers. Before the interpretive center can be built, which is slated to begin in 2005, the area requires significant study and rehabilitation.
This became the basis for the PALS scenario: the teachers are to imagine that they're a group of scientists working for a consulting group. They must study the area and make recommendations for addressing cultural concerns, restoring the natural habitat of the area, and building the center without causing further disturbance. As these would-be scientists go about their two-week study, actual scientists are at work on a real study that only differs in its breadth and depth. It's about as relevant and "close to home" as a science project could be.
Into the Field
The convoy of Battelle vehicles turns right onto a dirt road and heads toward the river. Since leaving the Sigma V parking lot, Wieda and one of the participating scientists, a retired biologist named Bill Rickard, have been keeping up a constant, informative patter. Rickard first joined Battelle in 1965 and his knowledge of Hanford and the entire Columbia Basin is encyclopedic. With his white hair, baseball cap, blue jeans, and casual demeanor he gives an impression that is both grandfatherly and eternally youthful. He wears his knowledge lightly, never becoming the boring "dad" who lectures about local history, while the "kids" in the back of the car roll their eyes and wonder how much longer the trip will take. His comments are seemingly offhand, spoken in a quiet drawl, almost as if to himself. "Mulberry trees," he says, looking out the window, but not pointing. Beside him, Wieda serves as a kind of foil, peppering him with questions, coaxing him to expand on his sometimes droll comments. There is a remarkable timing between the two of them, a kind of seamless back and forth interplay that is obviously based on mutual respect, a shared love for the environment, and contrasting but compatible temperaments.
"Those mulberry trees aren't native," Wieda says in a half-statement, half-question, leaving the door open on a subject she knows inside and out.
"No," replies Rickard, still looking dreamily out the window, his hands folded in his lap. "They escaped. They were brought in by farmers and they self-established."
As the car bumps down the dirt road, the conversation spools out in this casual way. Before they realize it, the teachers have probably learned that farming first began in the area around 1903; that the farmers were displaced during World War II, when the government turned the area into the Hanford Nuclear Site; that many of their orchards and windbreak trees still dot the area; that black cottonwoods are the only native trees along this stretch of the Columbia; and that Lewis and Clark camped downriver from here and wrote in their journals about the lack of trees—perhaps a subtle suggestion that the teachers should be writing some of this seemingly idle conversation down in their journals.
"Silkworms eat mulberries," Rickard says to no one in particular, wrapping up this line of conversation.
The convoy pulls up beside the river—the drivers taking care that the hot undersides of the vehicles aren't parked directly over potentially fire-starting underbrush—and the scientists and teachers pile out. Wieda gives the teachers a preview of the day's activities and their purpose within the overall project. After a typically informal lecture by Rickard about the specific area in which they are standing—and a reminder to watch out for snakes, scorpions, and black widows—the teachers break into teams.
This is another consistent strategy of the PALS project. Each year the teachers are divided into three groups that broadly represent the work of actual scientists. Each team—the terrestrial, the geologic, and the aquatic—is led by a Battelle scientist who is a specialist in that field. Rickard and Janelle Downs take the terrestrial team, Duane Horton, the geologic team, and Ted Poston and Sue Sargeant, the aquatic team. Wieda jumps from group to group, keeping things on schedule and providing support. All the scientists, along with Shannon Goodwin who didn't make today's trip, have been involved with PALS for several years.
The teachers have already visited the Columbia Point site, where they took soil and water samples and looked closely at the features of a disturbed habitat. Today's goal is to study a habitat that, in contrast, is about as close to pristine as can be found. To facilitate this, each team heads for a different part of the designated area and begins to build transects. Using a measuring tape, string, stakes, a hula hoop, and other tools, each group creates a 100-square-meter plot. After setting certain parameters, such as the minimum height of plants to be counted, they begin to note each plant within the transect. It's here that the real fun begins.
The names of the plants flow like music from the mouths of teachers and scientists alike: stork's bill, burr sage, bitterbrush, and fiddleneck tarweed. Bunchgrass, sagebrush, prickly pear, and turpentine parsley. Purple aster, needle and thread grass, and snow buckwheat. It's a sacred choir.
Meanwhile, geologic team members are sifting the soil within their transect. Medium sand, coarse sand, silt, sandy clay loam, and animal scat, goes the song here. "How much of that is there?" asks Horton. "Is it a trace?" The teachers are on their hands and knees, sifting and grading the soil with the fervor of lifelong specialists. "Let's just say trace," Horton directs. "We're overgrading again."
As the day progresses, the teachers will visit several other sites. They'll eat lunch beside the old Hanford townsite while grasshoppers chirp wildly in the brush. They'll see the stumps of an old apricot orchard still standing in neat rows. They'll look out across the river at the chalky White Bluffs that loom over this free-flowing stretch of the Columbia. They'll see pelicans, kestrels, and greater egrets. They'll hear the distinctive songs of meadowlarks, horned larks, and lark sparrows.
They'll watch a bright green praying mantis cling to a slender plant. They'll learn about soil types, plant species, and the meaning of words like "eolian" and "fluvial." And this is only the third day.
By the end of the two weeks, the teachers will give presentations on their mock-proposals for the restoration of Columbia Point and the building of the interpretive center. They'll develop strategies to integrate this kind of ecological study into their instruction, how to access resources that can support such activities, and how to share what they've learned with their fellow teachers. But most important, they'll learn something about the power that comes with fully investing yourself in the place where you live. It's this kind of knowledge that can lead us away from a legacy of waste, toward one of stewardship. 
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