THE VAST BROWN FIELDS OF HOME

The Dallas NAS is called, by some city planners/architects, a "drosscape" (term created by Alan Berger) - urban contaminated land which must be renewed over time by known scientific methods and decades or centuries of natural restoration.
Already I'm wondering if such a positive outcome can happen, but..
Drosscapes have few stakeholders and spokespersons and may have low population density. Whether on the edge of huge city or downtown, these scarred sites are what's left of past industrial or military enterprises. City leaders-planners are concerned with their appearance, public perception, and eventual reuse.
At the Dallas naval facilities, completed remediation tasks do improve appearance and the perception of improvement. The problem is the true contamination underground and in Mountain Creek Lake/Cottonwood Bay, in aquifers and underground plumes. These are constants that a remediation crew can't run over and fix in a hurry-or ever. Invisible, but nevertheless present and potentially threatening.
Yes, our former military base is being reused to some degree, but far below its capacity for usefulness based on its size and proximity to downtown. This land, while on the edge of Oak Cliff, appears on a map in the heart of the city.
A drosscape in the heart of Dallas? Sad but true, thanks to the military, which protected us for the past seventy years. Little did we know that its activities would yield the dead fields and abandoned cement slabs of West Dallas.
A drosscape can be a "brownfield" - that is, part of a govt program focusing on productivity of land during the period nature is supposedly healing it. In fact, I just read that surprisingly Dallas NAS is a Brownfield "success story"! No offense to the govt, but what are the failures like? You could read about Dallas NAS as a Brownfield online except that the file is damaged and cannot be replaced-just like the land! As my husband who has a doctorate would jokingly say, "This is ironical."
Nevertheless, I keep can't get past the question: What about the contamination that remains in the ground and water? Do these new labels minimize risk?
Citizens have to understand the level of danger that really exists, and we have to know that the polluter has not ceased responsiblity for long-term clean up. AND...we have to know that all that really could be done was; and what will be possible in the future, will be done. (*Note the repeated use of the word really. No smoke and mirrors, which I fear these designations might be.)
Most of us have no way of evaluating risk with certainty. So whom do we trust to tell us the truth? The Navy and its boss the federal government?
The people have to demand answers from scientists, pay them, and trust them to give us the truest truth they can produce, which we should be able to understand.
Gosh, I am sounding like a stakeholder or, God forbid, a spokesperson. Maybe that's why no one from EPA answers my e-mails any more.
Would you like to work every day at a drosscape or brownfield?
Wearing a mask with a case of bottled water in your car-like an ultra modern urban pioneer? ...Reminiscent of weird movies about the "future" - like "2010" viewed back in 1969 when the military was going strong here.
Working in an office atop a "DROSS-scape" is not my thing, but reality forces us to at least acknowledge and try to understand this aspect of life in a not-so-gracefully-aging city that the military forgot.