By Dr. Robert Thorson

Remember Sarah Palin’s comment about lipstick on a pig? To my mind, the University of Connecticut’s Hillside Environmental Education Park (HEEP for short) is carefully applied lipstick on the underground pig of its still-toxic landfill.

This hog grew between 1966 and 1993 as UConn staff members dumped trash from a generation of students into an upland wetland along with the chemical waste (synthetic chemicals, solvents, pesticides, etc.) from decades of academic research, facilities operations, experimental farm activities and landscaping. It all went into pits dug above fractured bedrock.

In 1998, after the trash had risen Babel-like to become to a colossal garbage mound polluting the wells of local residents, the state Department of Environmental Protection forced closure of the landfill, remediation of the site and a commitment to decades of monitoring.

During remediation, the mound was flattened and paved to create an artificial mesa capped not by sedimentary bedrock, but by the hard bituminous pavement of Lot C. Though UConn’s largest campus lot, it also lies farthest from the academic core and is almost always nearly empty of cars. Why? Because its primary purpose is not to hold cars or serve students, but to shunt water sideways and to prevent precipitation from infiltrating downward into the waste, where it would be stewed by the heat of busy bacteria, contaminate adjacent aquifers and leach to nearby wetlands and streams.

Though Lot C is potentially UConn’s most environmentally friendly parking spot, it wasn’t even mentioned in an article published in August by the Willimantic Chronicle, “UC Parking Lots Are Going Green.” My first thought after reading that headline was of the allegory “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the story about a boy watching a parade who points out that the emperor was, in fact, naked.

I feel like that boy when I tell my students to trust their eyes, not their instincts, for political correctness. Though the university lots do help rain and snowmelt infiltrate downward to recharge aquifers, rather than to flow sideways as pollution-tainted runoff, it doesn’t change their color from gray or black to green.

The secondary purpose of Lot C is to camouflage the past. Indeed, the park’s artificial mesa, its raison d’etre, isn’t described on the interpretive sign located on the landfill. Instead, the sign directs the viewer’s attention toward the woodlands and wetlands to the north.

Additionally, its title and text describe non-paved open space, though the phrase “landfill closure” is mentioned as part of a list in the seventh of eight paragraphs. To be fair to those who designed HEEP, there is a sign about the mesa elsewhere, tucked in the woods along one of many hiking trails. But why is the prominent sign at the landfill about open space while the obscured sign in the open space is about the landfill?

The most clever example of conceptual reframing and institutional spin is HEEP’s use of the phrase “former landfill” on its trail map. The landfill didn’t go away. It’s still there, leaking water into collection trenches and fuming methane skyward through vents made to look like lamp posts without the lamps.

UConn, the state DEP, the town of Mansfield and their engineering contractors deserve congratulations for an excellent job of diverting the waste stream, remediating the damage and converting the land to other uses. But their re-christening of the site has been less than forthcoming. I suggest they put up a sign that faces toward the parking lot rather than away from it, one that effectively says: We screwed up. We’re sorry. Below you is a hazardous waste site created by dumping trash in a wetland and pouring chemical waste into aquifers. Lot C is actually the first line of defense for isolating this permanent nastiness from the water cycle. Unfortunately, the only defense against the gas cycle is to release the fumes high enough to prevent bad smells.

Egregious euphemisms obfuscate environmental understanding. Gray things do not become green things because they are environmentally friendly. And heaps do not become HEEPs unless the transgressions of the past are clearly confessed.