Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (11 page)

One example of such a time bomb is Tin Cup Dam, whose collapse
would inundate Darby, the largest town in the southern Bitterroot Valley. Leaks and the dam's poor condition triggered lengthy arguments and law
suits between the dam's owners, the Forest Service, and environmental groups about whether and how to repair the dam, climaxing in an emer
gency when a serious leak was noted in 1998. Unfortunately, the contractor
whom the owners hired to drain the dam's reservoir soon encountered
heavy rocks whose removal would require big excavation equipment to be
flown in by helicopter. At that point the owners declared that they had run
out of money, and both the state of Montana and Ravalli County also de
cided against spending money on the dam, but the situation remained a po
tentially life-threatening emergency for Darby. Hence the Forest Service
itself hired the helicopters and equipment to work on the dam and billed
the owners, who have not paid; the U.S. Department of Justice is now
preparing to sue them in order to collect the costs.

The Bitterroot's other water supply besides snowmelt-fed irrigation
consists of wells for domestic water use, tapping into underground aquifers.
They, too, face the problem of increasing demand for decreasing water.
While mountain snowpack and underground aquifers may seem to be separate, they are in fact coupled: some runoff of used irrigation water may per
colate down through the ground to the aquifers, and some aquifer water
may originate ultimately from snowmelt. Hence the ongoing decrease in
Montana's snowpack forebodes a decrease in the aquifers as well.

There is no doubt about increasing demand for aquifer water: the Bitter-
root's continuing population explosion means more people drinking more
water and flushing more toilets. Roxa French, coordinator for the local Bit
ter Root Water Forum, advises people building new houses to drill their
wells deep, because there are going to be "more straws in the milkshake"
—
i.e., more wells drilled into the same aquifer and lowering its level. Montana
law and county regulations about domestic water are currently weak. The
well that one new house-owner drills may lower the water level of a neigh
bor's well, but it is difficult for the latter person to collect damages. In order
to calculate how much domestic water use an aquifer could support, one
would have to map the aquifer and to measure how rapidly water is flow
ing into it, but
—astonishingly—those two elementary steps have not been accomplished for any Bitterroot Valley aquifer. The county itself lacks the
resources to monitor its aquifers and does not carry out independent as
sessments of water availability when it is considering a developer's appli
cation to build a new house. Instead, the county relies on the developer's
assurance that enough well water will be available for the house.

Everything that I have said about water so far concerns water quantity.
However, there are also issues of water quality, which rivals western Mon
tana's scenery as its most valuable natural resource because the rivers and
irrigation systems originate from relatively pure snowmelt. Despite that ad
vantage, the Bitterroot River is already on Montana's list of "impaired
streams," for several reasons. The most important of those reasons is
buildup of sediments released by erosion, road construction, forest fires,
logging, and falling water levels in ditches and streams due to use for irriga
tion. Most of the Bitterroot's watersheds are now already eroded or at risk.
A second problem is fertilizer runoff: every farmer growing hay adds at least
200 pounds of fertilizer to each acre of land, but it is unknown how much of that fertilizer ends up in the river. Waste nutrients from septic tanks are
yet another increasing hazard to water quality. Finally, as I already explained,
toxic minerals draining out of mines are the most serious water quality
problem in some other parts of Montana, though not in the Bitterroot.

Air quality also deserves brief mention. It may at first seem shameless
for me, as a resident of the American city (Los Angeles) with the worst air quality, to say anything negative about Montana in this regard. In fact, some
areas of Montana do suffer seasonally from poor air quality, worst of all in
Missoula, whose air (despite improvements since the 1980s) is sometimes as bad as in Los Angeles. Missoula's air problems, exacerbated by winter tem
perature inversions and by its location in a valley that traps air, stem from
a combination of vehicle emissions throughout the year, wood-burning
stoves in the winter, and forest fires and logging in the summer.

Montana's remaining major sets of environmental problems are the linked
ones of introductions of harmful non-native species and losses of valuable native species. These problems especially involve fish, deer and elk, and
weeds.

Montana originally supported valuable fisheries based on native Cut
throat Trout (Montana's state fish), Bull Trout, Arctic Grayling, and White-fish. All of those species except Whitefish have now declined in Montana
from a combination of causes whose relative impact varies among the
species: less water in the mountain streams where they spawn and develop,
because of water removal for irrigation; warmer temperatures and more sediment in those streams, because of logging; overfishing; competition from, and in some cases hybridization with, introduced Rainbow Trout,
Brook Trout, and Brown Trout; predation by introduced Northern Pike and
Lake Trout; and infection by an introduced parasite causing whirling dis
ease. For example, Northern Pike, which are voracious fish-eaters, have been
illegally introduced into some western Montana lakes and rivers by fisher
men fond of catching pike, and have virtually eliminated from those lakes and rivers the populations of Bull Trout and Cutthroat on which they prey.
Similarly, Flathead Lake's formerly robust fishery based on several native
fish species has been destroyed by introduced Lake Trout.

Whirling disease was accidentally introduced into the U.S from its na
tive Europe in 1958 when a Pennsylvania fish hatchery imported some Dan
ish fish that proved to be infected with the disease. It has now spread
throughout most of the western U.S., partly through transport by birds, but
especially as a result of people (including government agencies and private
fish hatcheries) stocking lakes and rivers with infected fish. Once the para
site gets into a body of water, it is impossible to eradicate. By 1994 whirling
disease had reduced the Rainbow Trout population of the Madison River, Montana's most famous trout stream, by more than 90%.

At least whirling disease is not transmissible to humans; it is merely bad
for fishing-based tourism. Another introduced disease, chronic wasting dis
ease (CWD) of deer and elk, is of more concern because it might cause an
incurably fatal human illness. CWD is the deer/elk equivalent of prion dis
eases in other animals, of which the most notorious are Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease in humans, mad cow disease or bovine spongiform encephalopathy
(BSE) of cattle (transmissible to humans), and scrapie of sheep. These in
fections cause an untreatable degeneration of the nervous system; no hu
man infected with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease has ever recovered. CWD was first detected in western North American deer and elk in the 1970s, possibly
(some people suggest) because deer housed for studies at a western univer
sity in a pen near scrapie-infected sheep were released into the wild after
completion of the studies. (Today, such a release would be considered a criminal act.) Further spread from state to state was accelerated by transfers 
of exposed deer and elk from one commercial game farm to another. We do
not know yet whether CWD can be transmitted from deer or elk to people, as can mad cow disease, but the recent deaths of some elk hunters from
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease have raised alarms in some quarters. The state of
Wisconsin, concerned that fear of transmission could cripple the state's
one-billion-dollar-per-year deer hunting industry, is in the process of killing 25,000 deer (a desperate solution that sickens everybody involved) in an in
fected area in hopes of controlling the CWD epidemic there.

While CWD is potentially Montana's most frightening problem caused
by an introduced pest, introduced weeds are already Montana's most expensive such problem. About 30 noxious weed species, mostly of Eurasian ori
gin, have become established in Montana after arriving accidentally in hay or as wind-blown seeds, or in one case being introduced intentionally as an attractive ornamental plant whose dangers weren't anticipated. They cause
damage in several ways: they are inedible or poorly edible to livestock and
wild animals, but they crowd out edible plant species, so they reduce the amount of livestock fodder by up to 90%; some of them are toxic to animals; and they may triple rates of erosion because their roots hold the soil
less well than do roots of native grasses.

Economically, the two most important of these weeds are Spotted Knap
weed and Leafy Spurge, both now widespread throughout Montana. Spot
ted Knapweed takes over from native grasses by secreting chemicals that
quickly kill them, and by producing vast numbers of seeds. While it can be pulled out by hand from selected small fields, it has now infested 566,000
acres in the Bitterroot Valley alone and 5,000,000 acres in all of Montana, an
area far too large for hand-pulling to be feasible. Spotted Knapweed can
also be controlled by herbicides, but the cheaper herbicides that kill it also kill many other plant species, and the herbicide specific for Spotted Knap
weed is very expensive ($800 per gallon). In addition, it is uncertain whether
the breakdown products of those herbicides end up in the Bitterroot River or in the aquifers used for human drinking water, and whether those prod
ucts themselves have harmful effects. Because Spotted Knapweed has be
come established on large areas of national forest as well as of pastureland,
it reduces the fodder production not only for domestic animals but also for
wild herbivores in the forest, so that it may have the effect of driving deer
and elk from forest down into pastures by reducing the amount of food
available in the forest. Leafy Spurge is at present less widespread than knap
weed but much harder to control and impossible to pull out by hand, be
cause it establishes underground roots 20 feet long.

Estimates of the direct economic damage that these and other weeds
cause in Montana are over $100,000,000 per year. Their presence also re
duces real estate values and farm productivity. Above all, they are a huge pain in the neck for farmers, because they cannot be controlled by any sin
gle measure alone but require complex integrated management systems.
They force farmers to change many practices simultaneously: pulling out
weeds, applying herbicides, changing fertilizer use, releasing insect and fungus enemies of weeds, lighting controlled fires, changing mowing schedules,
and altering crop rotations and annual grazing practices. All that because of
a few small plants whose dangers were mostly unappreciated at the time,
and some of whose seeds arrived unnoticed!

Thus, seemingly pristine Montana actually suffers from serious environ
mental problems involving toxic wastes, forests, soils, water, climate change,
biodiversity losses, and introduced pests. All of these problems translate
into economic problems. They provide much of the explanation for why
Montana's economy has been declining in recent decades to the point where
what was formerly one of our richest states is now one of the poorest.

Whether or how these problems become resolved will depend on the at
titudes and values that Montanans hold. But Montana's population is be
coming increasingly heterogeneous and cannot agree on a vision for their
state's environment and future. Many of my friends commented on the growing polarization of opinion. For instance, banker Emil Erhardt explained to me, "There is too much raucous debate here. The prosperity of
the 1950s meant that all of us were poor then, or we felt poor. There were no
extremes of wealth; at least, wealth wasn't visible. Now, we have a two-tiered
society with lower-income families struggling to survive at the bottom, and
the wealthier newcomers at the top able to acquire enough property that
they can isolate themselves. In essence, we are zoning by money, not by land
use!

The polarization that my friends mention is along many axes: rich
versus poor, old-timers versus newcomers, those clinging to a traditional lifestyle versus others welcoming change, pro-growth versus anti-growth
voices, those for and against governmental planning, and those with and
without school-age children. Fueling these disagreements are Montana's paradoxes that I mentioned near the beginning of this chapter: a state with
poor residents but attracting rich newcomers, even while the state's own
children are deserting Montana upon graduating high school.