Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [21]
Toxicity problems associated with mining were already recognized at Butte’s giant copper mine and nearby smelter a century ago, when neighboring ranchers saw their cows dying and sued the mine’s owner, Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Anaconda denied responsibility and won the resulting 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 opening 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 respond 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 remain 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 society 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 earnings from its mines, most of whose profits went to shareholders in the eastern 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!
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,