Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (8 page)

It is easy for us non-miners to become indignant at mining companies and to view their behavior as morally culpable. Didn't they knowingly do
things that harmed us, and aren't they now shirking their responsibility? A
sign posted over the toilet of one Montanan friend of mine reads, "Do not
flush. Be like the mining industry and let someone else clean up your waste!"

In fact, the moral issue is more complex. Here is one explanation that I
quote from a recent book: "... ASARCO [American Smelting and Refining
Company, a giant mining and smelting company] can hardly be blamed
[for not cleaning up an especially toxic mine that it owned]. American busi
nesses exist to make money for their owners; it is the modus operandi of
American capitalism. A corollary to the money-making process is not
spending it needlessly... Such a tight-fisted philosophy is not limited to the
mining industry. Successful businesses differentiate between those expenses
necessary to stay in business and those more pensively characterized as
moral obligations.' Difficulties or reluctance to understand and accept this distinction underscores much of the tension between advocates of broadly mandated environmental programs and the business community. Business
leaders are more likely to be accountants or attorneys than members of the clergy." That explanation does not come from the CEO of ASARCO, but
from environmental consultant David Stiller, who sought in his book 
Wounding the West: Montana, Mining, and the Environment
to understand how Montana's toxic mine waste problem arose, and what society really has
to do to fix it.

It's a cruel fact that no simple cheap way exists to clean up old mines.
Early miners behaved as they did because the government required almost
nothing of them, and because they were businessmen operating according
to the principles that David Stiller explained. Not until 1971 did the state of
Montana pass a law requiring mining companies to clean up their property
when their mine closed. Even rich companies (like ARCO and ASARCO)
that may be inclined to clean up become reluctant to do so when they real
ize that they may then be asked to do the impossible, or that the costs will be excessive, or that the achievable results will be less than the public expected.
When the mine owner can't or won't pay, taxpayers don't want to step in
and pay billions of dollars of cleanup costs either. Instead, taxpayers feel
that the problem has existed for a long time, out of sight and out of their
backyards, so it must be tolerable; most taxpayers balk at spending money if
there isn't an immediate crisis; and not enough taxpayers complain about
toxic wastes or support high taxes. In this sense, the American public is as
responsible for inaction as are miners and the government; we the public bear the ultimate responsibility. Only when the public pressures its politi
cians into passing laws demanding different behavior from mining compa
nies will the companies behave differently: otherwise, the companies would
be operating as charities and would be violating their responsibility to their
shareholders. Three cases will serve to illustrate some of the various outcomes of these dilemmas to date: the cases of the Clark Fork, Milltown
Dam, and Pegasus Zortman-Landusky Mine.

In 1882 the mining companies that later became the Anaconda Copper
Mining Company began operations at Butte near the headwaters of the
Clark Fork of the Columbia River. By 1900, Butte accounted for half of the
U.S.'s copper output. Until 1955 most mining at Butte involved under
ground tunnels, but in 1955 Anaconda began excavating an open-pit mine
called the Berkeley Pit, now an enormous hole over a mile in diameter and 1,800 feet deep. Huge quantities of acidic mine tailings with toxic metals
ended up in the Clark Fork River. But Anaconda's fortunes then declined
because of cheaper foreign competition, expropriation of its mines in Chile,
and growing environmental concerns in the U.S. In 1976 Anaconda was
bought by the big oil company ARCO (more recently bought in turn by the
bigger oil company BP), which closed the smelter in 1980 and the mine it
self in 1983, thereby eliminating thousands of jobs and three-quarters of the economic base for the Butte area.

The Clark Fork River, including the Berkeley Pit, is now the largest and
most expensive Superfund cleanup site in the U.S. In ARCO's view, it is un
fair to hold ARCO responsible for damage done by the mine's previous
owner, before the Superfund law even existed. In the view of the federal and
state governments, ARCO acquired Anaconda's assets, including Anaconda's liabilities. At least, ARCO and BP are not declaring bankruptcy. As one envi
ronmentalist friend told me, "They are trying to get away with paying as lit
tle as possible, but there are worse companies to deal with than ARCO." The
acidic water seeping into the Berkeley Pit will be pumped out and treated
forever. ARCO has already paid several hundred million dollars to the state
of Montana for restoration of the Clark Fork, and its total eventual liability
is estimated at one billion dollars, but that estimate is uncertain because
the cleanup treatment consumes much power: who knows what power will
cost 40 years from now?

The second case involves Milltown Dam, built in 1907 across the Clark
Fork River downstream of Butte to generate power for a nearby sawmill. Since then, 6,600,000 cubic yards of sediments contaminated with arsenic,
cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc have been washed down from Butte's
mines and accumulated in the reservoir behind the dam. A resulting "mi
nor" problem is that the dam prevents fish from migrating along the Clark
Fork and Blackfoot Rivers (the latter is the trout stream made famous by
Norman Maclean's novella and Robert Redford's film
A River Runs Through
It).
The major problem, discovered in 1981 when local people noticed a bad
taste in drinking water from their wells, is that a huge plume of ground
water with dangerous arsenic levels 42 times higher than federal water standards is spreading from the reservoir. The dam is decrepit, in need of repair,
poorly anchored, located in an earthquake zone, was nearly broken by an ice jam in 1996, and is expected to break sooner or later. No one would
think of constructing such a flimsy dam today. If the dam did break and re
lease its toxic sediments, the water supply of Missoula, southwestern Mon
tana's largest city located just seven miles downstream of the dam, would
become undrinkable, and the lower Clark Fork River would be ruined for
fishing.

ARCO acquired the liability for the toxic sediments behind the dam
when it bought Anaconda Copper Mining Company, whose activities cre
ated the sediments. The near-disaster in the ice jam of 1996, and fish deaths 
downstream resulting from releases of water with toxic copper levels from
the dam then and again in 1998, triggered recognition that something had to be done about the dam. Federal and state scientists recommended re
moving it and its accumulated toxic sediments, at a cost to ARCO of about
$100,000,000. For a long time, ARCO denied that the toxic sediments caused
the fish deaths, denied its liability for the arsenic in Milltown groundwater or for cancer in the Milltown area, funded a "grass-roots" movement in the nearby town of Bonner to oppose removing the dam, and proposed instead just strengthening it, at the much lower cost of $20,000,000. But Missoula politicians, businesspeople, and the public, who initially considered the
proposal to remove the dam crazy, switched to being strongly in favor of it.
In 2003 the federal Environmental Protection Agency adopted the proposal,
making it almost certain that the dam will be removed.

The remaining case is that of the Zortman-Landusky Mine owned by
Pegasus Gold, a small company founded by people from other mining companies. That mine employed a method known as cyanide heap-leaching, de
veloped for extracting very low-grade gold ores requiring 50 tons of ores to
yield one ounce of gold. The ore is excavated from an open pit, piled in a big heap (approximating a small mountain) inside a lined leach pad, and
sprayed with a solution of cyanide, best known as the poison used to gener
ate the hydrogen cyanide gas used both in Nazi gas chambers and in Ameri
can prison gas chambers, but with the virtue of binding to gold. Hence as
the cyanide-containing solution seeps through the ore heap, it picks up the
gold and is drained off to a nearby pond, whence it is pumped to a process
ing plant for extracting the gold. The leftover cyanide solution containing
toxic metals is disposed of by spraying it on nearby forests or rangeland, or else is enriched with more cyanide and sprayed back on the heap.

Obviously, in this heap-leach process several things can go wrong, all of
which did go wrong at the Zortman-Landusky Mine (Plate 4). The leach pad's
liner is as thin as a nickel and inevitably develops leaks under the weight of millions of tons of ore being pushed around by heavy machinery. The
pond with its noxious brew may overflow; that happened at the Zortman-
Landusky Mine during a rainstorm. Finally, the cyanide itself is dangerous: in a flooding emergency at the mine, when the owners received permission to dispose of excess solution by spraying it nearby to prevent the pads from
bursting, mishandling of the spraying operation led to the formation of
cyanide gas that nearly killed some of the workers. Pegasus Gold eventually
declared bankruptcy, abandoning its huge open pits, heaps, and ponds from 
which acid and cyanide will leak out forever. Pegasus' bond proved insufficient to cover the cleanup cost, leaving taxpayers to pay the remaining bills,
estimated at $40,000,000 or more. These three case studies of toxic mine
waste problems that I have described, and thousands of others, illustrate
why visitors from Germany, South Africa, Mongolia, and other countries contemplating mining investments have recently been coming to Montana
to inform themselves at first hand about bad mining practices and their
consequences.

A second set of environmental problems in Montana involves the logging
and burning of its forests. Just as no one denies that metal mining is essen
tial, somewhere and somehow, no one would dispute that logging is also
necessary to obtain wood for timber and for making paper. The question
that my Montana friends sympathetic to logging raise is: if you object to
logging in Montana, where do you propose to get wood instead? Rick Laible
defended to me a controversial recent Montana logging proposal by noting,
"It beats cutting down the rainforest!" Jack Ward Thomas's defense was
similar: "By refusing to harvest our own dead trees and instead importing
live trees from Canada, we have exported both the environmental effects of logging, and the economic benefits of it, to Canada." Dick Hirschy sarcasti
cally commented, "There's a saying, 'Don't rape the land by logging'
—so we
are raping Canada instead."

Commercial logging began in the Bitterroot Valley in 1886, to provide
Ponderosa Pine logs for the mining community at Butte. The post-World War II housing boom in the U.S., and the resulting surge in demand for
wood, caused timber sales on U.S. National Forest land to peak around 1972
at over six times their 1945 levels. DDT was released over forests from air
planes to control insect tree pests. In order to be able to reestablish uniform
even-aged trees of chosen tree species, and thereby to maximize timber
yields and increase logging efficiency, logging was carried out by clear-cutting all trees rather than by selective logging of marked individual trees.
Set against those big advantages of clear-cutting were some disadvantages:
water temperatures in streams no longer shaded by trees rose above values
optimal for fish spawning and survival; snow on unshaded bare ground
melted in a quick pulse in the spring, instead of the shaded forest's snow-
pack gradually melting and releasing water for irrigating ranches through
out the summer; and, in some cases, sediment runoff increased, and water 
quality decreased. But the most visible evil of clear-cutting, for citizens of a
state who considered their land's most valuable resource to be its beauty,
was that clear-cut hillsides looked ugly, really ugly.