APCC Publications: About Face

About Face

Introduction

Writing history about the present is a scary kind of acrobatics, a trapeze swing launched without the reassuring safety net of hindsight. This book is trying to make such a leap. If all goes well, the hands that will catch and hold it belong both to contemporary readers, and readers of the future.

As we go to press, there is still plenty of tension in what we call the present tense: Will the high-tech, expensive treatment schemes designed to stop underground pollution at the base really work? Will they be fully funded? Will there be yet more contamination discovered? Will an "envirotech center" mature into something vital? Will the northern part of the base prove to harbor a clean underground water supply, or will yet more test wells and investigation reveal that years of military activity contaminated much of the groundwater there as well? Will we see renewed military training in that area? Will a new prison, originally proposed for the northern part of the base, wind up someplace else?

These are just some of the questions that cannot be answered yet. But there is a lot we can say, even as we tumble through the air.

First, from the ashes of a flawed process and a failed plan, we now have a new way of deciding what to do about these underground catastrophes called plumes. Community involvement and public pressure were and are the key elements in creating a political environment in which to fight the threat to the natural environment.

Second, a military training ground and artillery range has been silenced, shut down because of concerns about what that activity might do to the groundwater below. This has never happened before in United States history. That silence may prove temporary. But there is a growing sense that it is permanent.

Third, the Massachusetts Military Reservation, as Cape Cod's military base is formally called, continues to serve as a near-perfect case study for exploring some of our nation's weightiest issues. A close look at this one base is like staring at a tiny bonsai that slowly reveals all the complexities of a giant redwood. Cutting edge questions about the "solutions" technology supposedly offers, fundamental conflict over what national security really means (and who should define it), deep concern about how insidious chemicals can harm people's health, debate about how civilians can exert control over a military bureaucracy, evidence of how some of the billions of dollars sent to the Pentagon each year can be squandered--every one of these issues manages to cram its way onto this "reservation" located in a corner of a little peninsula, at the fringe of a huge country.

There is one more uncanny quality about the base: It continues to act as a catalyst, a tool people use to move their thinking. As we will see, that transformation begins many ways and takes many forms. For people in Hatchville, it began with an anonymous knock on the door one night and led toward a surprising kind of radicalism. For people in the Environmental Protection Agency, it began with a thick document on the table and evolved into a confrontation with the Pentagon. For journalists at the Cape Cod Times, it began with an editor's judgement and worked into a dramatic way of telling the news to the public and advocating for change. Realtors and cranberry growers, MIT graduate students and colonels in the Air Force, engineers and activists, politicians and schoolteachers--all of them have used this place to pry open new ideas.

Perhaps this shouldn't be too surprising. From Pilgrim times forward, Cape Cod has occupied a larger space in our national psyche than you would expect from its sandspit geography. It is only fitting that Cape Cod's military base would carry on with that tradition.

I'm not immune to the catalytic quality of Cape Cod, or its base. In many ways, the Cape has been a teacher to me, helping me find the better parts of myself. And the base has transformed my thinking: I now believe that pollution created by the United States military is the most important environmental issue facing the nation. I believe problems similar to those at Cape Cod's base can or will be found in every state in the Union, as well as many foreign countries. I believe this affects people of every race, class, and political persuasion, and could be the common ground and raw material used to build a national environmental movement.

This book is a sequel and continuation of The Enemy Within; The Struggle to Clean Up Cape Cod's Military Superfund Site, published in 1995. Yet my hope is that this volume is sturdy enough to stand alone as well. The first book covered almost a century's worth of ground to try to bring context to a contemporary struggle. This time around, the near past is as far back as we go. While many characters and issues flow from one book to the next, the attempt here is to break new ground, and broaden the understanding.

Another hope is that readers will not feel too burdened by the technical language and detail that sometimes presses down on this tale. That's where the devil is, as the old saying goes, but that's not where the greater truth lies. This is a story about insight, change, and control, about defining community and creating environmental activism, about people of very different perspectives brought to common tables by a crisis. Even in the short hiatus between my writing these words and their publication, details will change, new revelations will emerge, more pieces of the puzzle will fall in and out of place. That is the nature of contemporary history. Fortunately, that truth does not make the greater truth less profound.

Every writer thinks about his audience, those who will read and, he hopes, enjoy his work. Certainly, I hope the participants in this drama will recognize themselves, and feel fairly treated. I hope that people who care about Cape Cod will find more reason to care, as well as insight into how that care can change public policy. I hope officials in the military will apply the lessons learned on Cape Cod to other sites around the country, and keep their doors open to community involvement and control.

I hope this work can become a kind of primer for activists grappling with similar problems elsewhere. And I hope that a generation from now, people will read these words and find them fascinating but maybe a little quaint, because by then the dilemmas that seem so ugly and difficult for us will have been solved.

Finally, my deepest thanks to everyone who has contributed to this book. Each is an acrobat in his and her own way, tumbling through the air, grabbing hold of me and hopefully grabbing hold of each other.

Seth Rolbein, 1998