Poisonville, USA

"When Sherry Skipper first arrived at the [Rocky Mountain Arsenal] as a young biologist in the early 1990s, she would often don booties, respirators, and goggles to check on starlings she was using, like canaries in a coal mine, to monitor pollution. The birds fed on worms and burrowing insects that accumulated dieldrin. Skipper remembers one damp spring in particular when the earthworms emerged—and birds that ate them fell out of trees, convulsing. 'That’s never going to happen again,' she said one day last winter. The place is now a wildlife refuge." —From “Wasteland,” Paul Voosen’s National Geographic story on Superfunds, those toxic sites we don’t talk about all that much anymore (even though 49 million Americans live near one)