RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
When you think about wilderness conservation, your mind probably conjures images of pristine forests and rolling green fields. Not toxic waste dumps, but a dump that's exactly what a private land conservancy in Southern Indiana has inherited, putting it in an unusual situation.
From member station WFIU in Bloomington, Indiana, Adam Ragusea reports.
ADAM RAGUSEA: For eight years starting in 1962, an 18-acre site west of Bloomington called Neal's Landfill accepted industrial waste from what was been the Westinghouse Electric Corporation. That waste included polychlorinated biphenyls or PCBs, a class of compounds used by Westinghouse to insulate capacitors produced at a nearby plant.
PCBs were banned in the '70s after they were linked to multiple health problems and the landfill was designated a Superfund Site by the EPA in 1983. Today, the landfill is capped with clay and is overgrown with grass except for the EPA's testing wells that looks like any other meadow on a hilltop.
In 2003, this land was purchased by an unlikely buyer, a nearby compost farmer named David Porter.
Ms. DAWN HEWITT(ph) (David Porter's Girlfriend): You know, a lot of people say not in my backyard. David wanted that backyard because he had more control of the situation if he was an owner.
RAGUSEA: That's Dawn Hewitt, Porter's longtime girlfriend. Looking out over his land, she says Porter was dissatisfied with the environmental remedies being negotiated here. By owning the land, he would have standing to sue. Porter had dreams of opening a kite park on this land once the cleanup was completed.
But in 2006, and as he was dying of colon cancer, Porter bequeathed the old landfill to the Sycamore Land Trust, a local non-profit that stewards about 4,000 acres in south central Indiana. Land Trust Executive Director Christian Freitag says at first, his organization wasn't quite sure what to make of the gift.
Mr. CHRISTIAN FREITAG (Executive Director, Sycamore Land Trust, Bloomington): There's probably a thousand land trust in the country who would never touch it with 10 foot pole because the first nature of reaction that everybody has is, oh, my gosh, what about the liability?
RAGUSEA: Land trust like Freitag's usually deal with cornfields or old logging areas not toxic waste dumps. But EPA Project Manager Tom Alcamo told Freitag that if Sycamore Land Trust were to take possession of the property, it would be considered an innocent purchaser under the Superfund law.
Mr. TOM ALCAMO (Project Manager, EPA Region 5): They're completely protected under Superfund unless they did something that would damage the landfill cap or damage the site remedy, there's no liability associated with that.
RAGUSEA: Legal concerns aside, Freitag says his board members had to reconsider the very active conservation and as they thought long and hard about whether to accept this Superfund site.
Mr. FREITAG: Not every piece of land that we have is going to be wilderness quality land. What does it mean to be a conservationist? Does it mean only focusing the best of the best or does it mean looking at pieces of ground like this and saying what role can we apply to bring that back into the positive realm?
RAGUSEA: After a nearly two years of grappling with those questions, Sycamore Land Trust is now finally taking possession of Neal's Landfill. While it's unlikely that Porter's dream of a kite park on this bald hill will come through anytime soon, Freitag is hoping that the treeless site could harness the wind for something else, turbines.
For NPR News, I'm Adam Ragusea in Bloomington.