Excerpt from Neil Patterson Interview (2)

Neil Patterson is the Assistant Director in the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. In this video segment, he talks about Honeywell's dredging project. An interesting metaphor for the amount of work it takes to clean an entire lake is discussed.

Transcript:

Kelly: Do you have an opinion on Honeywell's dredging project, now that it is done?

Neil Patterson: My opinion is larger biased toward what the Onondagas think and how they're reacting to it, because I haven't read through and don't understand enough of the chemistry and the limnology involved, but what I do understand is that any time you pollute someplace--and this is like a general thing--is that I think it takes 10% of your effort to clean up 90% of the contamination, but it's gonna take the other 90% of your effort to clean up that last 10% because it's so difficult once it happens. Once you spill something, it's like a stain; the stain goes deep and it takes so much work to... I guess now that I think about it, it's like when you're eating and you slop something on your shirt and it's so easy to get most of it off, but the stain that's left...you'll maybe never get it out.
 So I realize the constraints that they [Honeywell] are under, and the near impossibility to clean up the lake 100%. That doesn't make them any less responsible, though, because they should be doing more than the minimum. But, as a for-profit company, their interest is in doing the minimum to reduce cost and to protect the bottom line of their shareholders. And that's a huge company--a massive worldwide, international company. And whether they have the resources to get at that last 10%., they're gonna tell you, "No, we don't. We can't afford, for the next 50 years, to continue dredging and monitoring." So you don't actually know. You just know that they probably do the minimum. We are a people of maximum.
And there's responsibility! If you do it part way, it's really not done if you just clean up something a little bit, right? In the same way with our responsibility, if you just go out and shoot something, and you don't really use it, that's not really fulfilling your responsibility. So, whether Honeywell has a vested interest a hundred years in the Lake... Hmm, no one really knows that. They probably don't, is my guess. That's a very philosophical answer to dredging! I mean, I just know, you can dredge all you want, but you're not gonna get everything, hence the problem. And there are going to be constraints put on you to say leave it in place, don't bother. And there's science behind that, too! Whether you're disrupting contaminants and re-entering them into the food chain, or maybe they'd be completely immobile.