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 “minor” 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 groundwater 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 release its toxic sediments, the water supply of Missoula, southwestern Montana’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 created 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 removing 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, developed 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 generate the hydrogen cyanide gas used both in Nazi gas chambers and in American 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 processing 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 essential, 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 sarcastically 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 airplanes 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 snowpack gradually melting and releasing water for irrigating ranches throughout 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.
The resulting debate became known as the Clearcut Controversy. Outraged Montana ranchers, landowners, and the general public protested. U.S. Forest Service managers made the mistake of insisting that they were the professionals who knew all about logging, and that the public was ignorant and should keep quiet. The 1970 Bolle Report, prepared by forestry professionals outside the Forest Service, criticized Forest Service policies and, fanned by similar disputes over clear-cutting of West Virginia national forests, led to national changes, including restrictions on clear-cutting and a return to emphasis on managing forests for multiple purposes other than timber production (as already envisioned when the Forest Service was established in 1905).
In the decades since the Clearcut Controversy, Forest Service annual timber sales have decreased by more than 80%—in part because of environmental regulations mandated in the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, and requirements for national forests to maintain habitats for all species, and in part because of the decline in easily accessible big trees due to logging itself. When the Forest Service now proposes a timber sale, environmental organizations file protests and appeals that take up to 10 years to resolve and that make logging less economic even if the appeals are ultimately denied. Virtually all my Montana friends, even those who consider themselves dedicated environmentalists, told me that they consider the pendulum to have swung too far in the direction away from logging. They feel frustrated that logging proposals appearing well justified to them (such as for the purpose of reducing the forest fire fuel loads discussed below) encounter long delays in the co
urts. But the environmental organizations filing the protests have concluded that they should suspect the usual disguised pro-logging agenda behind any seemingly reasonable government proposal involving logging. All of the Bitterroot Valley’s former timber mills have now closed, because so little timber is available from Montana publicly owned timberland, and because the valley’s privately owned timberland has already been logged twice. The mills’ closing has meant the loss of many high-paying unionized jobs, as well as of traditional Montanan self-image.
Elsewhere in Montana, outside the Bitterroot Valley, much private timberland remains, most of it originating from government land grants made in the 1860s to the Northern Pacific Railroad as an inducement for building a transcontinental railroad. In 1989 that land was spun off from the railroads to a Seattle-based entity called Plum Creek Timber Company, organized for tax purposes as a real estate investment trust (so that its earnings will be taxed at lower rates as capital gains), and now the largest owner of private timberland in Montana and the second-largest one in the U.S. I’ve read Plum Creek’s publications and talked with their director of corporate affairs, Bob Jirsa, who defends Plum Creek’s environmental policies and sustainable forestry practices. I’ve also heard numerous Montana friends vent unfavorable opinions about Plum Creek. Typical of their complaints are the following: “Plum Creek cares only about the bottom line”; “they are not interested in sustainable forestry”; “they have a corporate culture, and their goal is ‘Get out more logs!’ ”; “Plum Creek earns money in whatever way it can from the land”; “they do weed control only if someone complains.”
Should these polarized views remind you of the views that I already quoted about mining companies, you’re right. Plum Creek is organized as a profit-making business, not as a charity. If Montana citizens want Plum Creek to do things that would diminish its profits, it’s their responsibility to get their politicians to pass and enforce laws demanding those things, or to buy out the lands and manage them differently. Looming over this dispute is a basic hard fact: Montana’s cold dry climate and high elevation place most of its land at a relative disadvantage for forestry. Trees grow several times faster in the U.S. Southeast and Northeast than in Montana. While Plum Creek’s largest land holdings are in Montana, four other states (Arkansas, Georgia, Maine, and Mississippi) each produce more timber for Plum Creek on only 60 to 64% of its Montana acreage. Plum Creek cannot get a high rate of return from its Montana logging operations: it has to pay taxes and fire protection on the land while sitting on it for 60 to 80 years before harvesting trees, whereas trees reach a harvestable size in 30 years on its southeastern U.S. lands. When Plum Creek faces economic realities and sees more value in developing its Montana lands, especially those along rivers and lakes, for real estate than for timber, that’s because prospective buyers who seek beautiful waterfront property hold the same opinion. Those buyers are often representatives of conservation interests, including the government. For all these reasons, the future of logging in Montana even more than elsewhere in the U.S. is uncertain, as is that of mining.
Related to these issues of forest logging are issues of forest fires, which have recently increased in intensity and extent in some forest types in Montana and throughout the western U.S., with the summers of 1988, 1996, 2000, 2002, and 2003 being especially severe fire years. In the summer of 2000, one-fifth of the Bitterroot Valley’s remaining area of forest burned. Whenever I fly back to the Bitterroot nowadays, my first thought on looking out my airplane’s window is to count the number of fires or to gauge the amount of smoke on this particular day. (On August 19, 2003, as I was flying to Missoula airport, I counted a dozen fires whose smoke reduced visibility to a few miles.) Each time that John Cook took my sons out fly-fishing in 2000, his choice of which stream to fish depended partly on where the fires were burning that day. Some of my friends in the Bitterroot have had to be evacuated repeatedly from their homes because of approaching fires.
This recent increase in fires has resulted partly from climate change (the recent trend towards hot dry summers) and partly from human activities, for complicated reasons that foresters came increasingly to understand about 30 years ago but whose relative importance is still debated. One factor is the direct effects of logging, which often turns a forest into something approximating a huge pile of kindling: the ground in a logged forest may remain covered with lopped-off branches and treetops, left behind when the valuable trunks are carted away; a dense growth of new vegetation springs up, further increasing the forest’s fuel loads; and the trees logged and removed are of course the biggest and most fire-resistant individuals, leaving behind smaller and more flammable trees. Another factor is that the U.S. Forest Service in the first decade of the 1900s adopted a policy of fire suppression (attempting to put out forest fires) for the obvious reasons that it didn’t want valuable timber to go up in smoke, nor people’s homes and lives to be threatened. The Forest Service’s announced goal became, “Put out every forest fire by 10:00 A.M. on the morning after the day when it is first reported.” Firefighters became much more successful at achieving that goal after World War II, thanks to the availability of firefighting planes, an expanded road system for sending in fire trucks, and improved firefighting technology. For a few decades after World War II, the annual acreage burnt decreased by 80%.
That happy situation began to change in the 1980s, due to the increasing frequency of large forest fires that were essentially impossible to extinguish unless rain and low winds combined to help. People began to realize that the U.S. federal government’s fire suppression policy was contributing to those big fires, and that natural fires caused by lightning had previously played an important role in maintaining forest structure. That natural role of fire varies with altitude, tree species, and forest type. To take the Bitterroot’s low-altitude Ponderosa Pine forest as an example, historical records, plus counts of annual tree rings and datable fire scars on tree stumps, demonstrated that a Ponderosa Pine forest experiences a lightning-lit fire about once a decade under natural conditions (i.e., before fire suppression began around 1910 and became effective after 1945). The mature Ponderosa trees have bark two inches thick and are relatively resistant to fire, which instead burns out the understory of fire-sensitive Douglas Fir seedlings that have grown up since the last fire. But after only a decade’s growth until the next fire, those seedlings are still too low for fire to spread from them into the crowns. Hence the fire remains confined to the ground and understory. As a result, many natural Ponderosa Pine forests have a park-like appearance, with low fuel loads, big trees well spaced apart, and a relatively clear understory.
Of course, though, loggers concentrated on removing those big, old, valuable, fire-resistant Ponderosa Pines, while fire suppression for decades let the understory fill up with Douglas Fir saplings that would in turn become valuable when full-grown. Tree densities increased from 30 to 200 trees per acre, the forest’s fuel load increased by a factor of 6, and Congress repeatedly failed to appropriate money to thin out the saplings. Another human-related factor, sheep grazing in national forests, may also have played a major role by reducing understory grasses that would otherwise have fueled frequent low-intensity fires. When a fire finally does start in a sapling-choked forest, whether due to lightning or human carelessness or (regrettably often) intentional arson, the dense tall saplings may become a ladder that allows the fire to jump into the crowns. The outcome is sometimes an unstoppable inferno in which flames shoot 400 feet into the air, leap from crown to crown across wide gaps, reach temperatures of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, kill the tree seed bank in the soil, and may be followed by mudslides and mass erosion.
Foresters now identify the biggest problem in managing western forests as what to do with those increased fuel loads that built up during the previous half-century of effective fire suppression. In the wetter eastern U.S., dead trees rot away more quickly than in the drier West, where more dead trees persist like giant matchsticks. In an ideal wo
rld, the Forest Service would manage and restore the forests, thin them out, and remove the dense understory by cutting or by controlled small fires. But that would cost over a thousand dollars per acre for the one hundred million acres of western U.S. forests, or a total of about $100 billion. No politician or voter wants to spend that kind of money. Even if the cost were lower, much of the public would be suspicious of such a proposal as just an excuse for resuming logging of their beautiful forest. Instead of a regular program of expenditures for maintaining our western forests in a less fire-susceptible condition, the federal government tolerates flammable forests and is forced to spend money unpredictably whenever a firefighting emergency arises: e.g., about $1.6 billion to fight the summer 2000 forest fires that burned 10,000 square miles.
Montanans themselves hold diverse and often self-contradictory views about forest management and forest fires. On the one hand, the public fears and instinctively dislikes the “let it burn” response that the Forest Service is forced to take towards huge fires that would be dangerous or impossible to try to extinguish. When the 1988 fires in much of Yellowstone National Park were allowed to burn, the public was especially loud in its protests, not understanding that in fact there was nothing that could be done except to pray for rain or snow. On the other hand, the public also dislikes proposals for forest thinning programs that could make the forests less flammable, because people prefer beautiful views of dense forests, they object to “unnatural” interference with nature, they want to leave the forest in a “natural” condition, and they certainly don’t want to pay for thinning by increased taxes. They (like most foresters until recently) fail to understand that western forests are already in a highly unnatural condition, as the result of a century of fire suppression, logging, and sheep grazing.
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