Examining Waterbody Impairment of Arbor Lake in Poweshiek County

Please read ALL THE WAY TO THE BOTTOM, do not skim! There are both hints and requirements throughout, and most points that are lost in this class are simply due to not following the prompt.
The purpose of this paper assignment (~3 pages, double-spaced, 12pt font) is to examine the balance between science and policy on EITHER a particular surface water quality issue OR a Superfund site.  Under the Clean Water Act, each state is required to generate a 303(d) list of impaired water bodies.  As of 2016, the total number of impaired water bodies in the U.S. was ~75,000, with many of those impaired by more than one pollutant.  “Water body” is a legal term in this context, and can be one segment of what we might consider to be a true water body.  In other words, the Sacramento River can be split up into numerous stretches, some of which are impaired, some of which are not.  Each of the impaired stretches would show up on the 303(d) list separately.  Choose an impaired water body from a 303(d) list OR  choose a Superfund site (http://www(dot)epa(dot)gov/superfund/ (Links to an external site.)).  Here is one place to start your search for 303(d) water bodies:  https://www(dot)epa(dot)gov/tmdl/impaired-waters-and-tmdls-program-your-epa-region-state-or-tribal-land (Links to an external site.)
 (Links to an external site.) Your job will be much easier if you pick a waterbody+impairment with an established TMDL, as there will be much more information available to you.
In your paper, you will want to give a brief history of the site and how it came to be impaired (~0.75 pages), then please discuss how science and policy mesh together to a) identify the impairment and b) remediate it.  Questions to consider:
1) Was this site identified through routine monitoring (a policy decision) or through obvious detrimental effects (science-driven to understand why)?
2) Are remediation targets set by clearcut scientific understanding, or through policy decisions because of uncertainty in the science?  How clean is clean enough?
3) Is remediation a technical fix (just clean up the water/site) or a policy fix (implementing best management practices and discharge restrictions to reduce sources in the case of surface water impairments)?
4) For surface water bodies, is the impairment science-based (e.g. an identifiable contaminant) or culturally/policy based (e.g. aesthetics as in our national parks or Lake Tahoe and its clarity)?  For superfund sites, how does policy use science to identify superfund sites, and how does your chosen one qualify?  What is the longterm plan and prognosis?
5) What is the local reaction to the superfund site or water body impairment?  (this could be personal stories from a newspaper article, or it could be grass roots organizations that sprung up in reaction to it).
AND FINALLY,
6) What is the overall hypothesis/thesis/knowledge gap upon which you will frame your paper? We will talk about this in greater detail in class as it relates to effective writing.
I would like at least one source to be a newspaper (See “Electronic_Databases” posted on Canvas in the Writing Assignments folder under Files on how to get to the newspaper database), and the federal/state EPA or Superfund websites are sure to be beneficial.  List all your sources (note that Wikipedia is NOT an acceptable source), consult the style sheet on the course website, and please feel free to state opinions (backed up by supporting argument) about whether you think the right balance is being achieved or if there are ways that you think it could be improved!  Please indicate a topic sentence in each paragraph by underlining, italicizing, or making it bold! Also please make each topic sentence a 2-3-1 sentence, as covered in class.
For this paper assignment, it may be helpful to envision writing this as a newspaper article for a general audience.
Digital drop off on the course website required under “Assignments”.
2-3-1 sentence: the second important sentence in the beginning, the least important sentences in the middle, and the most important sentence in the end of the paragraph.
Additional feedback from the teacher
The biggest issue every year with papers is how well students follow and respond to the prompt. Your papers fall right in line with past years -- 1) insufficient numbers/data to define the nature of your water quality problem, 2) too much micro-attention on the specific six questions and not enough on the macro-concept that those six questions are trying to "seed," which is the interaction between science and policy (We got a very concrete example of that once again on Tuesday where Policy was set to ignore all new chemicals until Science proves that they are dangerous--without any resources to do so)--when Policy could have taken the opposite approach), and 3) not working on your 2-3-1 topic sentences.