Toxic Frontiers

I have a piece up at Dissent on the Animas River mine pollution in Colorado, the toxic history of mining in the U.S. West, and how mining companies have created new toxic frontiers in poor nations around the world. An excerpt:

The boom-and-bust mining economy has also left much of the region without access to stable jobs. When the mines close, where can their workers turn? Where can the people who built the United States through mining and farming and lumbering the West’s rich natural resources go? Throughout the region, two disparate economies have developed, with the rise of tourism and wealthy “amenity migrants” revitalizing particularly beautiful or desirable areas on one hand and towns where the mining landscape tore down mountains or left giant open pits, such as Leadville and Butte, on the other. In the second, residents suffer from poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. They cling to the mining or logging culture, hoping it comes back, because they have no other options. Tourist towns like Silverton and Durango have little space for working-class culture and few well-paying jobs like mining. With complex international economic conditions often dictating the success of these mines, it is easier for workers to blame environmentalists for the loss of their jobs.

And when the EPA comes in to clean up these towns, workers often resist. After changing hands several times, and undergoing an initial cleanup effort after the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, the mining complex that included the remnants of the Gold King finally closed in 1991 and, after negotiations with the government, its Canadian owner capped it with concrete and agreed to do water remediation downstream from the mine. What the mine’s owner did not agree to was to have the mine listed as a Superfund site, which would have mandated a more comprehensive cleanup effort. It’s hardly surprising that mining companies aren’t prepared to pay up. But residents are often opposed to the Superfund mandate, too. They don’t want what is now the tourist town of Silverton tainted with that label. So the EPA agreed not to list it so long as it could implement water quality improvement projects, which are underway.

It’s hard to blame the residents. Throughout the West, tourism has replaced natural resources as the major economic engine of many former mining communities in the region. And, leaving economic concerns aside, many residents simply find the Superfund label insulting. This became clear when the EPA declared Leadville a Superfund site in 1983, after over a century of mining, and began cleaning up the toxic tailings piles that littered the city where many locals played as children and where their children still played. Locals resisted the EPA for a decade, feeling offended by the rejection of their heritage. If the lead in the tailings hurt the children’s cognitive development, as the EPA claimed, did that imply that Leadville miners were stupid, since they played there too? Many former miners, at any rate, took it that way.

Resistance from mining communities is only one of the many obstacles the EPA, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other government agencies face in maintaining these abandoned mines and preventing water contamination. Underfunded and under attack from conservatives, the EPA has to deal with extremely technical situations in which a minor error can cause severe pollution. When they, or their contractors, make a mistake—as they did last month—conservatives seize on the opportunity to blame the EPA and tell us government doesn’t work. Their opportunism is astounding. The contractors may have messed up, but the EPA is hardly responsible for polluted rivers. Rather, corporations, along with their right-wing backers, are whom we should hold responsible. When President Carter signed the original Superfund bill in 1980, it forced polluters to pay for the cleanup of two centuries of toxicity, creating a fund of $3.8 billion by 1996. This bill did a tremendous amount to protect Americans from pollution. It also angered conservatives who considered it anti-business. In 1995, the newly powerful Republicans in Congress refused to renew the polluter tax after it expired, leading to the depletion of the program’s surplus and hamstringing its ability to remain effective.