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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