Author Greg Neuschafer published The Lower Fox River Clean Up: An Electronic Resource Library with The Teaching Press in October 2023. Email the Teaching Press to buy your copies! 

Interviewers’ notes: This interview was conducted via e-mail by Abby Jurk and Autumn Johnson, in stages, from 2022-2023. 

Why embark on this project?

Let me begin with some converging parameters.

In “The Tempest” William Shakespeare wrote “what is past is prologue”. In geology, my chosen field of university study, a basic tenant is, the Uniformitarian Principle which describes that the same natural processes that operate today in our environment have operated in the past.

Winston Churchill in a 1948 speech to the House of Commons paraphrased American philosopher George Santayana, who said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. During four decades of oceanography research for the US Navy I learned the need to chronicle scientific processes and progress in order for new discoveries to stand future scrutiny.

For a number of years, I have supported UWGB’s Professor Kevin Fermanich’s Lower Fox River Watershed Water Monitoring Program. In a meeting with him after his annual student conference in 2018, he showed me a video clip of the operation of the high-tech filter-cake PCB cleanup process. We discussed the enormity of the Fox River Restoration in terms of scale, funding resources and time. I rhetorically asked if someone was summarizing all the effort going into this project? Dr Fermanich said he believed UWGB’s Professor Emeritus Bud Harris who had been a personal consultant to the technical cleanup operations was assembling a memoir. Continue reading