Last week I attended the ‘Brownfields and Land Revitalization’ 2011 conference here in Spokane, WA. A ‘Brownfeild’ is piece of land which has been polluted or contaminated, making further development ‘complicated.’ Historical land-uses are the primary culprit of why sites become brown. Mining practices in Idaho’s ‘Silver Valley’ have contaminated large tracts of land. Abandoned vehicle service stations are the blight of many small towns. In coastal areas of Washington, a Brownfield can also be located along the shoreline where tar creosote was applied pier posts and other shoreline developments.
Cleaning up contaminated sites can be difficult and often requires an enormous amount of resources. Specialized site analysis, soil sampling, water quality and seepage analysis, and numerous testing and studies are all involved; and this is only phase one. Appropriate clean up may require tons of material and debris to be removed using specific equipment and techniques to not expose further hazards to human and environmental health. However, the rewards for remediating (cleaning) a site may be exponential. Brownfields are often located in areas of high traffic and prime real estate. Unless the market has deemed these areas profitable after clean-up (and redevelopment) costs have been spent, they are left to further decay. 
One example of this is in the heartland town of Palouse, Washington; an agricultural depot and bedroom community to two nearby universities. Within Palouse’s historical downtown, a former service station is a blighted sore spot along Main Street. The owners of the property went bankrupt long ago leaving a contaminated parcel of prime real estate. The City has the option of buying the property, but the clean-up costs are insurmountable. With the help of the Washington Department of Ecology, a new vision for the site may soon come to fruition. The EPA reports that “community members were interviewed about their vision for the site and how that vision might fit into long-term plans for downtown Palouse.”
Brownfield remediation and reuse is beneficial to the social, economic, and environmental ecology of the community. When a contaminated site is made usable for 21st century uses, the holistic benefits to people and the environment can be exponential. The ignorance and decisions of the past will certainly need to be dealt with in this generation if we are to continue to have healthy places to live, work and play.