WATER Center

Our field trip on Friday to the Wichita Area Treatment, Education and Remediation Center raised a plethora of issues that would make excellent topics for research essays and blogs.  Among them:

• Why should a corporation be held financially and morally responsible for cleaning up environmental damage that that same corporation caused in the distant past (when none of the current employees were alive let alone working at the company, and when environmental protection laws were very different)?  Is such a corporation responsible for paying as much as needed, even if it means bankrupting the company? How far in the past does the responsibility extend?
• What should be the role of governments in cleaning up environmental problems?
• Are there ways to do environmental cleanup that are morally unacceptable?
• Are the rules of Superfund cleanups onerous, and should local governements be allowed to sidestep those rules as Wichita has?

In comments on this post, list additional environmental, philosophical, policy and other issues the field trip raised for you.