Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (7 page)

The federal government owns over one-quarter of the land in the state and
three-quarters of the land in the county, mostly under the title of national
forest. Nevertheless, the Bitterroot Valley presents a microcosm of the envi
ronmental problems plaguing the rest of the United States: increasing population, immigration, increasing scarcity and decreasing quality of water, locally and seasonally poor air quality, toxic wastes, heightened risks
from wildfires, forest deterioration, losses of soil or of its nutrients, losses of
biodiversity, damage from introduced pest species, and effects of climate
change.

Montana provides an ideal case study with which to begin this book on
past and present environmental problems. In the case of the past soci
eties that I shall discuss
—Polynesian, Anasazi, Maya, Greenland Norse, and
others—we know the eventual outcomes of their inhabitants' decisions about managing their environment, but for the most part we don't know
their names or personal stories, and we can only guess at the motives that
led them to act as they did. In contrast, in modern Montana we do know
names, life histories, and motives. Some of the people involved have been my friends for over 50 years. From understanding Montanans' motives, we
can better imagine motives operating in the past. This chapter will put a personal face on a subject that could otherwise seem abstract.

In addition, Montana provides a salutory balance to the following chapters' discussions of small, poor, peripheral, past societies in fragile environ
ments. I intentionally chose to discuss those societies because they were the
ones suffering the biggest consequences of their environmental damage,
and they thus powerfully illustrate the processes that form the subject of
this book. But they are not the only types of societies exposed to serious en
vironmental problems, as illustrated by the contrast case of Montana. It is
part of the richest country in the modern world, and it is one of the most
pristine and least populated parts of that country, seemingly with fewer
problems of environment and population than the rest of the U.S. Cer
tainly, Montana's problems are far less acute than those of crowding, traffic,
smog, water quality and quantity, and toxic wastes that beset Americans in
Los Angeles, where I live, and in the other urban areas where most Ameri
cans live. If, despite that, even Montana has environmental and population
problems, it becomes easier to understand how much more serious those
problems are elsewhere in the U.S. Montana will illustrate the five main
themes of this book: human impacts on the environment; climate change; a society's relations with neighboring friendly societies (in the case of Montana, those in other U.S. states); a society's exposure to acts of other poten-

tially hostile societies (such as overseas terrorists and oil producers today);
and the importance of a society's responses to its problems.

The same environmental disadvantages that penalize food production
throughout the whole of the American Intermontane West also limit Montana's suitability for growing crops and raising livestock. They are: Mon
tana's relatively low rainfall, resulting in low rates of plant growth; its high latitude and high altitude, both resulting in a short growing season and limiting crops to one a year rather than the two a year possible in areas with a
longer summer; and its distance from markets in the more densely popu
lated areas of the U.S. that might buy its products. What those disadvan
tages mean is that anything grown in Montana can be grown more cheaply
and with higher productivity, and transported faster and more cheaply to
population centers, elsewhere in North America. Hence Montana's history
consists of attempts to answer the fundamental question of how to make a living in this beautiful but agriculturally non-competitive land.

Human occupation of Montana falls into several economic phases. The
first phase was of Native Americans, who arrived at least 13,000 years ago.
In contrast to the agricultural societies that they developed in eastern and
southern North America, Montana's Native Americans before European ar
rival remained hunter-gatherers, even in areas where agriculture and herd
ing are practiced today. One reason is that Montana lacked native wild plant
and animal species lending themselves to domestication, so there were no
independent origins of agriculture in Montana, in contrast to the situation
in eastern North America and Mexico. Another reason is that Montana lay
far from those two Native American centers of independent agricultural
origins, so that crops originating there had not spread to Montana by the
time of European arrival. Today, about three-quarters of Montana's remaining Native Americans live on seven reservations, most of which are poor in
natural resources except for pasture.

The first recorded Europeans to visit Montana were the members of the
transcontinental Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806, which spent
more time in what was later to become Montana than in any other state.
They were followed by Montana's second economic phase involving the
mountain men," fur trappers and traders coming down from Canada and
also from the U.S. The next phase began in the 1860s and was based on
three foundations of Montana's economy that have continued (albeit with
diminishing importance) until the present: mining, especially of copper 
and gold; logging; and food production, involving raising cattle and sheep and growing grains, fruits, and vegetables. The influx of miners to Montana's big copper mine at Butte stimulated other sectors of the economy to meet the needs of that internal market within the state. In particular, much timber was taken out of the nearby Bitterroot Valley to provide power for
the mines, to construct miners' houses, and to shore up the mine shafts; and
much food for the miners was grown in the valley, whose southerly location
and mild climate (by Montana standards) give it the nickname of "Mon
tana's Banana Belt." Although the valley's rainfall is low (13 inches per year)
and the natural vegetation is sagebrush, the first European settlers in the
1860s already began overcoming that disadvantage by building small irriga
tion ditches fed by streams draining the Bitterroot Mountains on the valley's
west side; and later, by engineering two sets of large-scale and expensive irri
gation systems, one (the so-called Big Ditch) built in 1908-1910 to take wa
ter from Lake Como on the west side of the valley, and the other consisting
of several large irrigation canals drawing water from the Bitterroot River it
self. Among other things, irrigation permitted a boom in apple orchards
that began in the Bitterroot Valley in the 1880s and peaked in the early de
cades of the 20th century, but today few of those orchards remain in com
mercial operation.

The announcement of the Stock Farm's development plan came as a shock to some Bitterroot Valley long-timers, who predicted that no one would pay so much money for valley land, and that the lots would never sell. As it turned out, the long-timers were wrong. While rich out-of-staters had already been visiting and buying in the valley as individuals, the Stock Farm's opening was a symbolic milestone because it involved so many very rich people buying Bitterroot land at once. Above all, the Stock Farm drove home how much more valuable the valley's land had become for recreation than for its traditional uses of growing cows and apples.

Montana's environmental problems today include almost all of the dozen types of problems that have undermined pre-industrial societies in the past, or that now threaten societies elsewhere in the world as well. Particularly conspicuous in Montana are problems of toxic wastes, forests, soils, water (and sometimes air), climate change, biodiversity losses, and introduced pests. Let's begin with seemingly the most transparent problem, that of toxic wastes.

While concern is mounting in Montana about runoff of fertilizer, manure, septic tank contents, and herbicides, by far the biggest toxic waste issue is posed by residues from metal mining, some of it from the last century and some of it recent or ongoing. Metal mining
—especially of copper, but also of lead, molybdenum, palladium, platinum, zinc, gold, and silver— stood as one of the traditional pillars of Montana's economy. No one disagrees that mining is essential, somewhere and somehow: modern civilization and its chemical, construction, electric, and electronic industries run on metals. Instead, the question is where and how best to mine metal-bearing ores.

Unfortunately, the ore concentrate that is eventually carried away from a Montana mine in order to extract the metals represents only a fraction of the earth that must first be dug up. The remainder is waste rock and tailings still containing copper, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc, which are toxic to people

(as well as to fish, wildlife, and our livestock) and hence are bad news when
they get into groundwater, rivers, and soil. In addition, Montana ores are
rich in iron sulfide, which yields sulfuric acid. In Montana there are about 20,000 abandoned mines, some of them recent but many of them a century
or more old, that will be leaking acid and those toxic metals essentially forever. The vast majority of those mines have no surviving owners to bear fi
nancial responsibility, or else the known owners aren't rich enough to
reclaim the mine and treat its acid drainage in perpetuity.

Toxicity problems associated with mining were already recognized at
Butte's giant copper mine and nearby smelter a century ago, when neigh
boring ranchers saw their cows dying and sued the mine's owner, Anaconda
Copper Mining Company. Anaconda denied responsibility and won the re
sulting lawsuit, but in 1907 it nevertheless built the first of several settling
ponds to contain the toxic wastes. Thus, we have known for a long time that
mine wastes can be sequestered so as to minimize problems; some new
mines around the world now do so with state-of-the-art technology, while others continue to ignore the problem. In the U.S. today, a company open
ing a new mine is required by law to buy a bond by which a separate bond-
holding company pledges to pay for the mine's cleanup costs in case the mining company itself goes bankrupt. But many mines have been "under-
bonded" (i.e., the eventual cleanup costs have proved to exceed the value of
the bond), and older mines were not required to buy such bonds at all.

In Montana as elsewhere, companies that have acquired older mines re
spond to demands to pay for cleanup in either of two ways. Especially if the
company is small, its owners may declare the company bankrupt, in some cases conceal its assets, and transfer their business efforts to other companies or to new companies that do not bear responsibility for cleanup at the
old mine. If the company is so large that it cannot claim that it would be
bankrupted by cleanup costs (as in the case of ARCO that I shall discuss below), the company instead denies its responsibility or else seeks to minimize
the costs. In either case, either the mine site and areas downstream of it re
main toxic, thereby endangering people, or else the U.S. federal government
and the Montana state government (hence ultimately all taxpayers) pay for
the cleanup through the federal Superfund and a corresponding Montana
state fund.

These two alternative responses by mining companies pose a question that will recur throughout this book, as we try to understand why any person or group in any society would knowingly do something harmful to the 
society as a whole. While denial or minimization of responsibility may be in
the short-term financial interests of the mining company, it is bad for soci
ety as a whole, and it may also be bad for the long-term interests of the company itself, or of the entire mining industry. Despite Montanans' long
standing embrace of mining as a traditional value defining their state's
identity, they have recently become increasingly disillusioned with mining
and have contributed to the industry's near-demise within Montana. For
instance, in 1998, to the shock of the industry, and to politicians supporting
and supported by the industry, Montana voters passed a ballot initiative
banning a problem-plagued method of gold mining termed cyanide heap-
leach mining and discussed further below. Some of my Montana friends now say: in retrospect, when we compare the multi-billion-dollar mine
cleanup costs borne by us taxpayers with Montana's own meager past earn
ings from its mines, most of whose profits went to shareholders in the east
ern U.S. or in Europe, we realize that Montana would have been better off in
the long run if it had never mined copper at all but had just imported it
from Chile, leaving the resulting problems to the Chileans!