Ernie Maurer was 20 in the summer of 1942 when the US Army took his family's farm, along with dozens of others, to create the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a 69.9km2 chemical weapons complex that became notorious for the deep scars of pollution that were left on the land.
Last Saturday Maurer was back, watching as an Army official signed over title on nearly 2,023 hectares of arsenal land to the federal Fish and Wildlife Service to create America's newest national wildlife refuge. Maurer, now 82, pointed to where he picnicked as a child, and where the bomb factories once stood.
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"It's quite amazing the way things developed," he said.
Environmentalists like to say that nature bats last. But the continuing story of the arsenal suggests another way. Here the realms of human and wild appear to have fought to a draw, or at least a kind of uneasy detente. Each side has carved out a deep imprint in what the arsenal became, and what it will be going forward as the suburban sprawl north of Denver encroaches ever tighter.
The arsenal is still a major environmental cleanup project and will be for years to come. The US$2.2 billion restoration will not be finished until perhaps 2011, when 4,047 hectares are to be added to the refuge. Small bomblets containing liquid Sarin, a deadly nerve agent, were uncovered as recently as 2000.
But wildlife experts also say that somewhat paradoxically, the bounty of nature that came to exist -- owls and egrets, coyotes and deer, prairie dogs and salamanders -- is also a direct product of those dark years. The arsenal became an island of nature in a way that it never was or could be when farmers like the Maurers lived here, they say, because for four decades through the hot and cold wars of the 20th century, military security kept the arsenal isolated. Nature crawled, slunk and flew into the dark, secluded places where people were barred from entering or dared not tread.
The first section of refuge, on the arsenal's perimeter, is in what the Army called its buffer zone, where no chemical production ever took place. Fish and Wildlife Service researchers think deer and other animals that Maurer said he never saw as a farm boy began colonizing the buffer zone as early as the late 1940s.
Dean Rundle, a career employee of the Fish and Wildlife Service who manages the refuge, said, "Because of the security that was required by defense and energy around these weapons sites, they kept people out, they kept out artificial lights, there was no noise at night, and so wildlife was undisturbed."
Most land animals have been locked in since the early 1990s, when a tall chain-link fence was installed, and Rundle said that having a permanent animal group in the arsenal also creates a sentinel population that scientists can use to monitor the cleanup's progress. Birds' eggs are regularly checked for chemical residue.
"Wildlife are an excellent indicator of the health of the environment," he said. "The animals live here their entire lives; these deer, coyotes, prairie dogs get all of their food, all of their water and all of their air in their entire life from this site."
Rocky Mountain Arsenal is certainly not the first military facility to become a place of nature. That tradition began nearly 100 years ago when some derelict forts of the Indian wars were turned over to bison, Fish and Wildlife officials said. In more recent years, part of the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington, where nuclear bomb components were made, has been proposed as a wildlife refuge. The Rocky Flats nuclear facility in Colorado, which is also being cleaned up, is supposed to become a nature preserve.
But the arsenal's history made the ceremony last Saturday particularly poignant for many of the participants.
Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, a Colorado native who grew up not far from the arsenal, referred to the often repeated adage that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Standing in a white tent on land where a Swiss immigrant family named Eglis once raised corn, she said that military defense and peace were both bound up in what the arsenal represents.
"Rocky Mountain Arsenal was the price of eternal vigilance," Norton said. "Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge is the blessing that vigilance has produced."
Many environmentalists say that continued vigilance at the arsenal is also essential as the cleanup continues, and some worry that all the attention paid to nature's recovery, like school tours and bird-watching expeditions, could make that task harder.
"What are we telling children?" said Sandra Horrocks, who has followed the arsenal's trajectory for more than a decade for the Sierra Club.
"What will they think when they're older, that a Superfund site is not that dangerous? The way it's been marketed, a lot of parents think it's all a wildlife refuge," she said.
Horrocks said that focusing only on the nature and not on the still-dangerous chemicals that are being cleaned up elsewhere on the property, and that are perhaps still in the soil, reminds her of something her mother said.
"Storing your dirty underwear under your bed is not cleaning your bedroom," Horrocks said.
Rundle said he believes that, on the contrary, the human story will never be forgotten, because history is so bound up in how the arsenal came to be. He plans a big exhibit that talks about the history of the land, from the homesteading days in the 1880s through the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s and then World War II and everything after.
"Even when it's all done and the landfills are just rolling hills of grass out here," Rundle said, "we think it's going to be important to continue to talk, especially to kids, about the history and what man's hand does to the landscape, both what's detrimental and then what's beneficial."
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