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By Root 1898 0

a giant mining and smelting company] can hardly be blamed [for not cleaning up an especially toxic mine that it owned] . American businesses exist to make money for their owners; it is the modus operandi of American capitalism. A corollary to the money-making process is not spending it needlessly ... Such a tight-fisted philosophy is not limited to the mining industry. Successful businesses differentiate between those expenses necessary to stay in business and those more pensively characterized as ‘moral obligations.’ Difficulties or reluctance to understand and accept this distinction underscores much of the tension between advocates of broadly mandated environmental programs and the business community. Business leaders are more likely to be accountants or attorneys than members of the clergy.” That explanation does not come from the CEO of ASARCO, but from environmental consultant David Stiller, who sought in his book Wounding the West: Montana, Mining, and the Environment to understand how Montana’s toxic mine waste problem arose, and what society really has to do to fix it.

It’s a cruel fact that no simple cheap way exists to clean up old mines. Early miners behaved as they did because the government required almost nothing of them, and because they were businessmen operating according to the principles that David Stiller explained. Not until 1971 did the state of Montana pass a law requiring mining companies to clean up their property when their mine closed. Even rich companies (like ARCO and ASARCO) that may be inclined to clean up become reluctant to do so when they realize that they may then be asked to do the impossible, or that the costs will be excessive, or that the achievable results will be less than the public expected. When the mine owner can’t or won’t pay, taxpayers don’t want to step in and pay billions of dollars of cleanup costs either. Instead, taxpayers feel that the problem has existed for a long time, out of sight and out of their backyards, so it must be tolerable; most taxpayers balk at spending money if there isn’t an immediate crisis; and not enough taxpayers complain about toxic wastes or support high taxes. In this sense, the American public is as responsible for inaction as are miners and the government; we the public bear the ultimate responsibility. Only when the public pressures its politicians into passing laws demanding different behavior from mining companies will the companies behave differently: otherwise, the companies would be operating as charities and would be violating their responsibility to their shareholders. Three cases will serve to illustrate some of the various outcomes of these dilemmas to date: the cases of the Clark Fork, Milltown Dam, and Pegasus Zortman-Landusky Mine.

In 1882 the mining companies that later became the Anaconda Copper Mining Company began operations at Butte near the headwaters of the Clark Fork of the Columbia River. By 1900, Butte accounted for half of the U.S.’s copper output. Until 1955 most mining at Butte involved underground tunnels, but in 1955 Anaconda began excavating an open-pit mine called the Berkeley Pit, now an enormous hole over a mile in diameter and 1,800 feet deep. Huge quantities of acidic mine tailings with toxic metals ended up in the Clark Fork River. But Anaconda’s fortunes then declined because of cheaper foreign competition, expropriation of its mines in Chile, and growing environmental concerns in the U.S. In 1976 Anaconda was bought by the big oil company ARCO (more recently bought in turn by the bigger oil company BP), which closed the smelter in 1980 and the mine itself in 1983, thereby eliminating thousands of jobs and three-quarters of the economic base for the Butte area.

The Clark Fork River, including the Berkeley Pit, is now the largest and most expensive Superfund cleanup site in the U.S. In ARCO’s view, it is unfair to hold ARCO responsible for damage done by the mine’s previous owner, before the Superfund law even existed. In the view of the federal and state governments, ARCO acquired Anaconda’s assets, including