Pollution and the Slippery Meaning of 'Clean'.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, has deleted 278 sites from the 1,200 on the Superfund Manual national priorities list. Each has been defined as clean in a different way, and with few exceptions, the offending pollutants were never removed. What makes the notion of clean so slippery is the relative newness of the idea of decontaminating industrial sites and the unpalatable truth that treating pollution, even rendering it harmless, almost never means getting rid of it. The sin, once committed, cannot, be entirely undone, and this is something no one really wants to hear.