An Ethical Nature?

Timothy James LeCain | Professor of History, Montana State University

I thought I’d talk about Montana’s relationship to the land, to nature in particular, and how those issues have been brought up by the Superfund Sites in Montana.

I’ll begin with a story.

This story takes us back to the Deer Lodge Valley in autumn of 1902. In the 1880s there were a number of farmers and ranchers who moved into the Deer Lodge Valley. It was a high valley, a rich agricultural region, particularly well-suited for cattle, sheep, and domesticated animals. A number of ranchers, including the famous Conrad Kohrs, one of the founders of the state who eventually became a Montana legislator, moved into that area and began ranching.

In the autumn of 1902 it was unusually dry. The rain did not fall a great deal. It was sunny and cool with cloudless nights. It was a beautiful autumn like we have come to expect in Montana. But this time something was different. One of the ranchers by the name of Nick Bielenberg, who was related to Kohrs by marriage, in the course of a couple of weeks began to lose many of his animals in large numbers.

He lost somewhere around 1,000 head of cattle, perhaps 800 sheep, and several dozen horses died in just a few weeks. Of course Bielenberg in any other circumstance would probably assume there was some sort of poisonous plant within the valley, or alkali disease, which was very common in the American West, killing his animals. Yet he asked his neighbors and they were having similar deaths, although not as extensively as Bielenberg.

But frankly there was really no question what was causing the problem. All they had to do was look to the far southern end of the Deer Lodge Valley and there they could see the Washoe Smelter.

The Washoe Smelter was opened the year before by the Anaconda Company. The Washoe was a copper smelter. Copper was mined in Butte since the 1880s. The rock, mined deep underground, was transported to the surface and moved to Anaconda, approximately 20 miles away. There it was processed in the smelter. The smelter was amazing. Arguably it was one of the most high tech smelters in the world. There are those who view Montana in the early nineteenth century as a cowboy place, this frontier backwards community. But it wasn’t. It was this high tech, industrial, corporate endeavor just plopped down right in the middle of southwestern Montana.

They shipped the ore to Anaconda where it was processed. Unfortunately the ore in Butte, as with a lot of copper ores, had a lot of nasty stuff in it: arsenic, cadmium, lead, and other things that we classify as heavy metals. When it was smelted those heavy metals went up the chimney, the smelter smokestack, and they fell out of the clouds onto the farmers and ranchers’ property in the valley. Apparently as the cattle would eat the grass, which was laden with these metals, it would kill them.

If they ingested a lethal dose, they would die on the spot. Others had chronic diseases associated with this. There were pictures that were published that showed their noses where their septum’s had started to decay because the arsenic was very corrosive and would eat through their noses.

That was what was killing Bielenberg’s cattle. So what to do about it? Well the Anaconda Company, or Standard Oil Company, was one of the most powerful companies in the world. You didn’t take them on lightly. The farmers banded together to sue and this went to district court and became a very fascinating, lengthy trial that went on for almost a year. It is interesting because it is one of the first times that expert witnesses were brought in. There were a lot of technical experts on a variety of issues, used on both sides of the case. They all testified, and of course the Anaconda experts argued it wasn’t their smoke that was killing these animals and the farmers, who were shall we say less high powered, recruited experts from the Montana State College, the agricultural college, to testify that when they did their dissections they found outrageous levels of arsenic in the tissue of the bellies of these animals.

In retrospect, there is no serious question that these metals were killing these animals.

In any event, the farmers actually lost this case. The judge basically ruled that, you wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for the smelting. You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for the mining. The major markets for your meat and grain grown here was the town of Anaconda, a company town, and Butte.

The judge could have drawn on case law, which illustrated that the Anaconda Company was guilty. But they lost. At the last minute, Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States, kind of came in riding on a white horse and said with his bully pulpit, listen, Anaconda you better fix this or the Federal Government is going to sue you. Not only are you killing these cattle, you are also damaging the Deer Lodge National Forest, which is federal land.

When faced with a much more serious suit from the government, which had more resources, the Anaconda Company began to try and fix the problem. They built a 585 foot smoke stack that is still standing in Anaconda. It is a towering black smoke stack you can visit today. However the rest of the smelter is gone.

That sort of fixed the problem, but not really. There was still a lot of arsenic, sulfur dioxide, and other heavy metals in the air and in the soil that was affecting valley residents.

Another thing located in the valley were these tailings ponds, the Opportunity Tailings Ponds. Those are where, after the ore has been ground up and you have removed the two percent or three percent copper that you want, the remaining is dumped into these ponds. Yet of course these tailings contained the same arsenic, cadmium, and other heavy metals.

That is part one of the story.

Now part two happens 80 years later. In May of 1981, the Missoula City-County Health Department conducted a routine water purity inspection in Milltown. Milltown is a community just outside of Missoula along the Clark Fork and Blackfoot River area, near this dam called Milltown Dam. In this inspection they discovered to their dismay that there were very elevated levels of arsenic in the water.

Everyone was somewhat flummoxed about where this was coming from. Normally arsenic is locked into a rock matrix and is not available to water sources in most cases. Yet after some investigation it turned out that Milltown Dam had been trapping sediment that was washing down from those Opportunity Tailings Ponds over the course of almost a century. There were also tailings from Butte; however the bulk source was these tailings ponds in Opportunity.

These heavy metals had washed 120 miles downriver. No one thought this could happen. They had misjudged the complexity of the ecological system. And now it had built up. There were tens of thousands of tons of this toxic sediment sitting behind the dam in a layer of soil. The question became: What do we do with this? The problem was that it wasn’t just getting into the Milltown water supply, the problem was also that if the dam should break all of that toxic sediment would wash down into the Clark Fork and wipe out that riverine system. It would also get into the water supply of Missoula which is heavily dependent upon ground water.

Eventually Milltown, Anaconda, the Opportunity Tailings Ponds, and Butte all became part of the Superfund Site designated by the Federal Government under the Superfund Legislation. They began clean up. But the question remained, what do we do about these tailings in the Milltown Reservoir? There was a great deal of debate about what to do. One option was to cap this layer and leave it there. Another was to excavate it and store it on site, or someplace nearby.

Eventually the Environmental Protection Agency, a number of environmental groups in Missoula, the Missoula government, and others came to a different decision. They decided to excavate it and cart it all the way, 120 miles upstream, to the town of Opportunity and give it back to the people of Opportunity. Not surprisingly the residents of Opportunity objected. They argued they had already paid enough of the price from Montana’s copper mining heritage, and perhaps Missoulians should pay some of that price now.

That argument did not win out.

Every day, this long blue line of railroad cars from Denny Washington’s Montana Rail Link Corporation would back up to the site and fill up with this black, heavy sludge comprised of soil, metals, and random sediments. It would then travel back up to the Deer Lodge Valley, get dumped and then spread out. The idea is that these tailings will eventually grow vegetation and develop a sort of cap.

There was a great celebration at Milltown after deconstruction was complete. But here is where we get to the ethical issues, if we haven’t already. I was troubled by all of this unalloyed sense of accomplishment about destroying this dam. I think it really pointed toward the strange relationship that Montanans and Americans more broadly have with nature, what they think of as nature. This goes back a long way in the American psyche and American culture. For a variety of different reasons we can’t go into now, Americans have come to see the natural world as a place that is separated from humans. Humans are not part of nature. Their technology is definitely not part of nature within this view.

One of the purest expressions of this is the 1964 Wilderness Act, which specifically said that humans may come to visit these areas, but they cannot stay. Interestingly it also prohibited only certain machines, motors in particular, while others were allowed. But they made a clear line, both in the federal national policy and in Montana, that humans are separate from the natural world.

I came to an interest in this project and topic from that very same position. When I was about eight years old living in Missoula, my family decided they were going to go on a trip to Yellowstone, like many others. I’m not sure if it was the interstate yet, most likely just a two lane road at that point, and on the way we stopped in Butte. At that time Butte had the Berkeley Pit in operation, this big open-pit copper mine. I was very impressed by it, but also shocked by the industrial devastation of the landscape which was truly, for an eight-year-old, breathtaking. I thought, oh, what a different place than Missoula. Missoula is a different place that has nothing to do with Butte.

Forty years later I’ve realized that is the wrong way to think about it. Missoula did have a great deal to do with Butte in all sorts of ways. Ecologically it clearly did. Those pollutants made their way down that river—120 miles. You can’t think about a community in isolation. You can’t think about a state in isolation anymore, or even a nation. Things are so globally interconnected in the way that modern technologies function that it doesn’t make sense to think of separate regions like that.

On another level, more interesting to me, is this idea that somehow Missoula was green and prosperous all on its own. Well there was a part of the story that I didn’t tell you. Why did they build that Milltown Dam in the first place? It generated electricity. Some of it was used by the Bonner Mill, owned by the Anaconda Company. But a great deal also went to Missoula to electrify Missoula. Missoulians in the early twentieth century enjoyed the pleasures of walking down clean, brightly lit streets, with lights in the buildings, and all of those means of modernity. They enjoyed that because of the dam, the electricity from which was carried on copper wires. Some of that copper inevitably came from the mines in Butte.

Missoula was what it was and is still today in large part because of places like Butte.

What I began to realize was that we needed to get away from these ideas that we can have these pristine reserves that are cut off from the rest of the industrial technological world. Instead we need to begin to embrace an idea of seeing technology as part of nature, seeing humans as part of nature, and not trying to have preserves, where it is nice and green, separate from places where it is just an industrial park and it is just too bad for the people who are harmed by those areas..

There is an ethical need for all of us to share in the damages that are done.

Now of course we want to avoid the damages in the first place. But if people can really see what is being done to give them the lives which they live, the lives we lead today, that will help all of us to make more ethical decisions. It is that distancing that is so troubling.

So don’t just say, Opportunity, you take this back. You’re the ones who have to suffer for this while Missoula continues to be clean and pristine and healthful. We all have to begin to embrace these facts. And that model is actually indicative of a much broader, global pattern. Today the United States imports most of its copper from overseas. We don’t even experience the damage anymore. The environmental catastrophes are still happening because companies are using very destructive types of technologies all around the world.

Today it is people in Indonesia, in Africa, in Chuquicamata, Chile, who are the new Opportunity, Montana. They are the ones that pay the price for our copper consumption, for our electricity. I would end with is this sort of ethical idea, that what we need to do is be as local and think as locally as we try to do with our food and think about where it comes from with all sorts of things—our minerals, our metals, and all sorts of things we depend on—and take responsibility for this consumption.

We need to take responsibility for this damage done to other places. We need to realize that these damages allow us to have nice places, like Missoula, like Bozeman.