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By Root 2044 0

to be discussed below. Instead, the sectors of the economy that are growing nowadays are tourism, recreation, retirement living, and health care. A symbolic landmark in the Bitterroot Valley’s recent economic transformation took place in 1996, when a 2,600-acre farm called the Bitterroot Stock Farm, formerly the estate of the Montana copper baron Marcus Daly, was acquired by the wealthy brokerage house owner Charles Schwab. He began to develop Daly’s estate for very rich out-of-staters who wanted a second (or even a third or fourth) home in the beautiful valley to visit for fishing, hunting, horseback riding, and golfing a couple of times each year. The Stock Farm includes an 18-hole championship golf course and about 125 sites for what are called either houses or cabins, “cabin” being a euphemism for a structure of up to six bedrooms and 6,000 square feet selling for $800,000 or more. Buyers of Stock Farm lots must be able to prove that they meet high standards of net worth and income, the least of which is the ability to afford a club membership initiation fee of $125,000, which is more than seven times the average annual income of Ravalli County residents. The whole Stock Farm is fenced, and the entrance gate bears a sign, MEMBERS AND GUESTS ONLY. Many of the owners arrive by private jet and rarely shop or set foot in Hamilton, but prefer to eat at the Stock Farm club or else have their groceries picked up from Hamilton by club employees. As one local Hamilton resident explained to me bitterly, “You can spot coveys of the aristocracy when they decide to go slumming downtown in tight packs like foreign tourists.”

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