Sublime

Federal law requires the EPA to prove that the cost of removing a contaminant doesn’t exceed its benefits (deaths averted, that is, with a human life valued at $6.1 million).

In its lab, the DEP was testing for twenty-four different metals, yet it was reporting results for only eight. Copper, nickel, zinc, chromium, boron, titanium, cobalt, and lithium—all could be harmful and relevant to drilling contamination. However, if any of these were in someone’s water, they were missing from the test results homeowners saw. If

Seidemann told me he used to catch mainly buffalo, which are native to the Mississippi River and its tributaries. (Buffalo look a bit like carp but belong to an entirely different family.) When Asian carp arrived, buffalo populations plummeted. Now Seidemann makes most of his income from contract killing for the Illinois Department of Natural

ambient

streambait”

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone.