Mother Nature Would Like a Word, or Two
Spokane is better known, now, for basketball than it is for hosting the 1974 World’s Fair, otherwise known as Expo ’74.
Even my mother, a former Wazzu cheerleader who passed away five years ago, was deeply into Gonzaga University basketball. It’s a great story—the rise of a consistently elite team (with a student body 1/7th that of UCLA) that has qualified for the NCAA championship tournament each of the past 26 years. We are a basketball city. Even a solitary soul like me has coached a “Hoopfest” team in the city’s annual 3-on-3 tournament, a carnival of life that occupies downtown, on both sides of the river, for a weekend in July.
A landmark in this dribbling fairy tale is Jack & Dan’s, a ninety year-old tavern in the Gonzaga district whose past owners include Jack Stockton, the late father of GU great John Stockton who became an NBA legend with the Utah Jazz before retiring in 2003. I rode my bicycle to Jack & Dan’s Wednesday night, thinking I would get there early enough to get a good seat. Wrong. The back room was packed with more than a hundred people. The booths were full, and the restaurant had used its entire stock of chairs to handle the overflow.
Street scene during Spokane’s annual Hoopfest carnival
The ebullient crowd wasn’t there for basketball though.
They were there for science—a meeting of the Society of Inland Northwest Scientists at which four young women were presenting. Their presentations would connect the deep past with a thorny problem of the present.
The problem of the present is complicated. It involves a nearly indestructible synthetic chemical that has contaminated water in western Spokane County, affecting thousands of people. I’ve written about it here.
A key figure in this saga is Eastern Washington University Geology professor Chad Pritchard who co-hosted Wednesday’s event and is a mentor to the student presenters. I met Chad a couple years ago as I was working on a deep earth story for the Pacific Northwest Inlander. He understands the complex hydrogeology of the so-called West Plains of Spokane County as well as anybody. For the past couple years, he’s been the lead researcher on a state-funded investigation to better understand the “transport and fate” of PFAS—“Perfluoroalkyl and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances” (PFAS)—the so-called “forever chemicals” that contaminate much of the groundwater on the West Plains.
The geography of the PFAS problem is not amenable to negotiation.
• The vast majority of people who live in Spokane County get their drinking water from a prolific aquifer flowing south and west from the north Idaho lake district.
•On the other hand, the West Plains is on a high, thick shelf of basalt (lava rock) that is completely cut off from the underground river that—500 feet below—is a godsend for the City of Spokane.
EWU’s Chad Pritchard giving a geology and PFAS lecture to volunteers at a community clean-up at Medical Lake last August
One of the first uses of PFAS was at the secret Hanford works in southeast Washington where it was used beginning in the 1940s (think Teflon) to protect gaskets and seals from the harsh chemicals and intense radiation involved in the extraction of weapons grade plutonium from irradiated uranium slugs. Its use on the West Plains began in the 1970s because a signature PFAS variant (abbreviated as PFHxS) was the key ingredient in a new generation of aqueous foam specifically developed to suppress fires involving jet fuel. The foam was routinely dispensed in firefighting training at both Fairchild Air Force Base and Spokane International Airport. And that’s how it got into the groundwater. It is considered a potent human health risk and now regulated at levels measured in parts per trillion. (The PFAS containing foam is no longer in use at either airport.)
Pritchard is an investigator as well as a teacher. Not long after PFAS from Fairchild Air Force Base was found to have contaminated a municipal water well serving the nearby City of Airway Heights, he signaled his concern that a much broader investigation was needed to better understand the sources and extent of the groundwater contamination. Suffice to say, not everybody welcomed his unwavering interest and, as I reported in December of 2023, it took well over a year to overcome the purposeful obstructions that delayed the field work needed to competently design a public health response to the spreading contamination.
The reporting from the field work is now close to being complete. On Wednesday night, at Jack & Dan’s, the first presenter was Jerusha Hampson who—as part of Pritchard’s research team—has focused on how the PFAS groundwater contamination has made its way into West Plains surface waters. Suffice to say the findings she shared Wednesday corroborate smatterings of data that private well owners and investigators from state and federal environmental agencies have gathered—primarily in the past year—indicating that waters contaminated with PFAS (above federal and state safe drinking water levels) have migrated well beyond the airport’s boundaries. The results Hampson presented show the track of the PFHxS variant for at least four miles from SIA. The contaminated groundwater outcrops in springs that feed streams flowing north and east, toward and eventually into Latah Creek and the Spokane River.
“Spokane International Airport is very likely the source of this contamination,” she told the audience at Jack & Dan’s.
Left to right in foreground, Spokane Waterkeeper Jule Schultz, Chad Pritchard and Jerusha Hampson sampling a creek in the Spokane Arboretum—downgradient from the Spokane International Airport,—for PFAS last fall.
Hampson was followed by Cadence Meier-Grolman and Emerson Slanga who, in order, gave presentations on the age of West Plains groundwater, and an initial projection of the “geospatial distribution” of PFAS in the complicated West Plains groundwater regime. The audience listened quietly and then, as though they’d just watched the Zags take down UCLA with a last-second dunk, erupted with applause and “whoops” of support for the presenters.
It was impossible to overlook the context. Just a few hours before the crowd gathered at Jack & Dan’s, the man Donald Trump has installed as the new head of EPA delivered what he described as “largest de-regulatory announcement in U.S. history.” His name is Lee Zeldin, a former Republican Congressman from New York and long-time Trump supporter. Before running for office, Zeldin was a lawyer with a bachelor’s degree in political science.
In a two-minute video Zeldin posted to Elon Musk’s “X” social media platform Wednesday, the new EPA leader was blunt: “From the campaign trail to Day 1 and beyond, President Trump has delivered on his promise to unleash energy dominance and lower the cost of living.” “We at E.P.A. will do our part to power the great American comeback.”
To which the New York Times added: “Nowhere in the video did he refer to protecting the environment or public health, twin tenets that have guided the agency since its founding in 1970.”
That strikes close to home in several ways.
The theme of Expo ’74—Spokane’s World’s Fair—was “Celebrating Tomorrow’s Fresh New Environment.” Practically, that meant a famous head-long rush to clean up the badly polluted Spokane River, to bring it into compliance with the federal Clear Water Act in time for the big event. A half century later, Spokane now has a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant. As someone who spends more than a hundred hours a year swimming in the river, I reap the benefit of that. But so does the larger community, as the resurrection of the river was also the centerpiece of the economic renaissance of a downtown that—pre-Expo—was in dire straits.
The Mother Earth memo
The sub-text of Trumpism is that “Make America Great Again” includes gutting environmental and public health protections, presumably because the science and scientists behind them are too “woke.” A better explanation is that Trump and his enablers are purchasable for those who view scientists and science-based regulation as a threat to their profitability. The oil & gas industries contributed nearly a half billion dollars to Republican candidates for federal offices in 2024, about a fifth of which went to the Trump campaign.
That seems to have worked rather well. In short order, the president who has often dismissed human-induced climate change as “a hoax” once again pulled the plug on U.S. participation in the international Paris climate accords. Before taking office, he explicitly told his choice to be the new Secretary of Health & Human Services—Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,—“you can’t touch our liquid gold” by which he meant any health hazards associated with oil and gas extraction.
The snide allegations that scientists can’t be trusted connects to Trump’s rebuke to education in general—something he gave away in celebrating a primary election victory in 2016 when he said “We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.” No surprise, then, that last week the new Secretary of Education—the former entertainment-wrestling executive Linda McMahon—announced layoffs that will cut the size of her department in half, on the way to Trump’s planned elimination of the agency altogether.
I won’t be the first to suggest there is a resonance to this, that slashing federal funding for science and education can only empower the political punch of ignorance. Last week Reuters and other news services reported on how the cuts threaten work at a federally-funded observatory in Hawaii that measures atmospheric carbon dioxide, the key ingredient in the dramatic escalations in global temperatures, especially over the past decade. In short, the Mauna Loa observatory provides regular updates on the soaring CO2 levels responsible for the ominous fever in the planet’s biosphere. In short, when paired with the increase in powerful hurricanes, droughts, and sea level rise, it’s a reliable bad news story. But if there’s no data, then there’s no news story. It brings to mind the dark satire of the 2021 film Don’t Look Up.
The final speaker at Jack & Dan’s Wednesday night was Natalie Porter. It was her task to tell the deep Earth story of the West Plains and how it connects to the present. She included a briefing on what scientists call “detrital zircon chronology.”
Zircons are tiny mineral grains that form when igneous rocks (e.g. granite) crystalize from molten magma. They’re incredibly resilient. It just happens that as they form, zircons harvest uranium, but expel lead. But what’s even more interesting (and beneficent for Earth scientists) is that lead is a decay product of the radioactive uranium. What this means is that lead found in a zircon comes from the decay of uranium after the zircon has cooled and solidified. This allows a clear calculation—the ratio of uranium to lead will give you a precise age of the zircon. Ratios of other isotopes trapped in a zircon grain also shed light on whether it was born in oceanic or continental rock. It allows for tedious but fascinating detective work.
It happens that the West Plains is the westernmost tableau—so to speak—of a dramatic deep Earth story. Buttes that rise above the otherwise flat terrain are formed from some of the oldest rock in Washington state, well over a thousand times as old as the volcanoes in the state’s Cascade range. In addition to being fantastic clocks, the zircons offer valuable information about their host rock, such as the deeply ancient sedimentary rocks that are on the surface in the Four Lakes area, literally a stone’s through from Interstate-90.
I can’t do Natalie’s presentation justice in this space. But her work picks up on earlier investigations by other geologists—including Spokane’s Steve Box, recently retired from the U.S. Geological Survey. The science tells a remarkable story, about how the Spokane-area was once the coast-line on a primeval ocean, about how fragments of ancient rocks born in the inland Northwest wound up in Australia and Antartica, and vice-versa.
1.4 billion year old lobe of ancient Belt Basin rock ensconsed in a blanket of younger granite on the West Plains near Four Lakes, WA.
Back to the present, the Holocene, or what some geologists now refer to as the Anthropocene, given the clear and unwelcome effects the exhaust from fossil fuels is now inflicting on the biosphere. It’s been hard to find anything in the course of the past week that’s encouraging. Lee Zeldin’s statement about “unleashing energy dominance” is clearly code for de-regulating fossil fuel production and emissions—with a predictable escalation of atmospheric CO2 emissions.
Zeldin’s brash announcement reminded me of the warnings Andrew Knoll shared with Elizabeth Kolbert as she wrote her Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction a decade ago.
Knoll is a Harvard paleontologist and a gifted writer in whose own right. His subjects include the Permian extinction that wiped out 90 percent of the world’s ocean creatures and wreaked havoc on the continents as well. As devastating as the asteroid impact that decimated the dinosaurs 66 million years ago was, the Permian extinction 250 million years ago was much worse. It was caused by runaway atmospheric CO2 emissions from massive lava eruptions in Siberia.
Knoll has focused on this because the rate at which CO2 is being added to the atmosphere today, by humans, rivals the rate at which the Siberian eruptions pumped CO2 into the biosphere at the end of the Permian period. He does not speak or write in rants, but his message is clear nonetheless. When Kolbert interviewed him a decade ago he cautioned he didn’t want to suggest that a Permian extinction event was imminent. But, he added,“it’s not like you have a stress and the stress is relieved and recovery starts. It gets bad and then it keeps being bad, because the stress doesn’t go away. Because the stress is us.”
Conversely, this means the answer is also—us.
The wave that Trump and Zeldin are surfing comes largely from the dark energy of those who care more about their wallets and stock price than the fate of civilization. But the energy in Jack & Dan’s Wednesday night gave me hope. It’s the energy of truth, and how we can work for truth and support others who do so. And truth is powerful; even more contagious than basketball.
—tjc
