Hanford Reflections
By Cain Allen, August 20, 1999

Sabbe sankhara anicca is an ancient Buddhist saying that means all things are subject to the irresistible force of change. It has as much relevance today as it ever has. Staring out the window of the bus as our small group from Hanford Watch entered the Hanford Nuclear Reservation for a tour of the facilities, I scanned the horizon and thought about the history of this artificially-bounded landscape, which filled me with strangely conflicting feelings of an appreciation for its great beauty on the one hand, and a sickening dread of the invisible poisons with which it is contaminated on the other.

I believe that if we take the time to open our eyes and look around we can learn much from the land, which has a much longer view of things than we who live out lives that are all too brief. Less than a dozen millenia ago, a mere blink of an eye in geologic time, much of Eastern Washington was under water, scoured clean by the great waters of the Missoula floods. The giant ripple marks that cover the land are testimony to their power.

Since the passing of those cataclysmic floods until less than two hundred years ago, the land now occupied by the nuclear reservation was the domain of the peoples who Columbus, stepping off the boat on the wrong continent, mistakenly dubbed "Indians." Several hundred years later, when the European masses began drifting, then flooding to the Northwest, the native people of the Columbia River Basin were pushed out and corralled onto reservations, freeing up land and the productive forces of nature for the new settlers.

Military takes Hanford
The lands around the Hanford Reach were settled only a bit more than one hundred years ago. Half a century passed and yet another chapter in the cycle of conquest ensued, when the military pushed the white settlers, and those few Indians who remained, off the land so that they could exploit the productive forces of nature for their own purposes.

Another half century has passed, and today that landscape is undergoing yet another change. All of these historic changes can be read on the landscape. The thing I first noticed was Rattlesnake Ridge, an ancient spirit quest site for the local Indian bands, and now a mute witness to the horrors of World War II and Cold War militarism. Ominous buildings loomed against the expansive horizon as we drove further into the site, marking the visible manifestation of these horrors. The empty hulls of the deserted town of Hanford and the blackened stumps of former orchards sat rotting in the desert sun, desolate reminders of the irresistible law of change. We joked about withdrawing money from the long abandoned bank at the old townsite, partly to cover the anxiety we felt over what the day would bring.

We moved on, driving deeper into the reservation, stopping to watch the demolition of the stacks at D Reactor. We were accompanied by a large, rather jovial crowd who had driven from the four directions to watch the spectacle, which lasted only a few seconds. The crumbling stacks and the cloud of dust they kicked up as they crashed to the earth were conspicuous, and hopeful, signs of the present changes the landscape is undergoing.

Bus breakdown
While time and space preclude me from detailing every stop we made, perhaps the small incident that occurred after the demolition of the D stacks best sums up my views of the lessons Hanford offers. As we drove away from the rapidly approaching dust cloud, our bus began to make strange noises and the driver slowed to a crawl, pulled over, and stopped by the side of the road. Automobiles break down every day, but our breakdown can be seen as a metaphor for the fundamental problem of Hanford. Our aged Ford bus, a relatively simple piece of technology compared to much of the technology at Hanford, just could not resist the forces of change any longer and our less than complete lack of control over natural processes was made more than evident when the old Ford ceased to function.

Yeats once wrote that "things fall apart," an elegantly simple way of expressing what the Buddha meant when he said sabbe sankhara anicca. Our present day society, dominated as it is by the cult of science and technology and the ever shifting whims of consumerism, should know this truth better than any other society on the planet. Yet Hanford, and an appallingly high number of other facilities like it, are evidence that most people in our society, and particularly the decision-making elite, have not let this truth sink in. The site is an terrifying example of how otherwise decent, rational people can get caught up in an indecent, irrational system.

Twelve thousand years from now, to pick a rather arbitrary date, some of the wastes that now contaminate the reservation will still be around, as dangerous as they ever were. Yet twelve thousand years ago, my ancestors, along with the vast majority of humans on earth, were hunter-gatherers, living simply on nature's surplus and blissfully ignorant of the effect of radionuclides or heavy metals on human health. Twelve thousand years ago the lands of Hanford were being scoured by the great floods.

Waste for the future
Where will we as a society be in twelve thousand years? How can we hope to manage the wastes now present at Hanford and other facilities like it for that space of time and longer, and more to the point, how can we even consider creating more? Change is an irresistible force, and our civilization, like every other before it, will fade away. Our wastes will remain though, for our children, for our grandchildren, and for those people twelve thousand years from now to deal with -- one might call this "generational injustice." Unfortunately, we do not possess a crystal ball into which we can gaze to find out if those people in that distant future will have the necessary technology and social organization to be able to deal with our toxic legacy.

We have not all learned from past mistakes. There are many who advocate the creation of more wastes at Hanford, though they of course do not frame it in these terms. But we as a society must reflect on the truth of change and the consequences of our present practices, not just five years down the road, not just fifty years, or even seven generations, but for millenia. If we open our eyes to the landscape and learn how to read it, perhaps the necessity of taking a long view will come into sharper focus, for the landscape can teach us much if we will only look.