Paragraphs

It is helpful to think of a paragraph like the rooms of a house. Each one is different and has a specific purpose. The kitchen is for cooking, the living room for socializing, the bathroom for bathing, etc. Each one can stand alone, but together, make the home.

Your paragraphs function in the same way. Each should have its own purpose or topic and when connected, create a cohesive paper.

This is part of an essay put together with no paragraphs—try to decide where you would split it up. There may be more than one correct way to do this exercise. Keep in mind WHY you decide to create paragraphs. Reference the directions above for assistance.

Prior to the Hanford Nuclear Site, a majority of the Columbia Basin was ceded by the Treaty of Camp Stevens in June of 1855. However, pre- and even post-treaty, the land was used by the Yakama and Nez Perce tribes for wintering during the coldest months and was permanently occupied by Wanapum. There was access, albeit far more limited than pre-treaty, to fishing, hunting, ceremonial spaces, housing, and foraging—to the River, animals, plants, and landscapes of the Columbia Basin. Full dispossession of the land did not occur until the construction of the Hanford site in 1943, at which point all access was prohibited, relationships with the land severed, and Indigenous tribes forcibly removed. Western science and technology often separates itself from political and ethical matters involving the marginalization of communities in its drive for progress and its illusory sense of its own objectivity. Yet, Western concepts of progress have traditionally resulted in the destruction or erasure of communities and knowledge systems that don’t conform to Eurocentric, rational, and scientific paradigms. Chanda Prescott Weinstein poses these questions of contemporary scientific progress; “Is a pipeline through Standing Rock progress for the people of that land? What meaning does a mission on Mars have for making Black Lives Matter? Is the fourteenth telescope on Maunakea, one that will be more permanently destructive to the mountain than any before it, progress for the people of that land? Is the global warming we have achieved through the creation of new technology ‘progress’? Is our relationship to progress catastrophic?”(249). The conception of Hanford was, and remains to be, catastrophic. When Col. Franklin Matthias and General Leslie Groves chose a location in the Pacific Northwest to construct the Hanford Nuclear Site, they understood the sort of destruction that would take place. In turn, they picked land isolated from large white cities, which had an abundant water supply, low white population, seemingly barren landscape, and hydroelectric power. Plutonium-239 is the isotope created through the absorption of neutrons fissioned off uranium-235 atoms. It is the most common isotope used in the production of nuclear weapons and was made at Hanford between 1943 and 1983. In these forty years, Hanford manufactured 74 tons of plutonium-239, some of which was used for the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WW2. The rest of the output makes up nearly two-thirds of the US’s current nuclear stockpile. As a byproduct, Hanford also produced 525 million gallons of highly radioactive tank waste, 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquid that was “dumped into the soil in ponds, trenches, ditches and sometimes injected directly into the groundwater”, and 25 million cubic feet of solid waste, most of which is buried in landfills near the site (Gephart). As the most contaminated nuclear waste site in the US, any hope for the re-occupation of Indigenous Tribes on the land are small and decreasing as the surrounding areas become both more urbanized and more intractable to clean up.