Collapse

As a teen Diamond visited Montana with his family. The peaceful grandeur of the Bitterroot Valley—with its surrounding mountains and “big sky”—so enchanted him that he returned during a college summer break to work at Hirschy Ranch. Decades later, haunted by the memory of Montana’s beauty, Diamond finally returned with his young sons, teaching them fly fishing and revisiting the ranch. His wife and sons now go to Montana every year.

The area’s natural beauty draws tourists and residents. Though much less fraught environmentally than most other American regions, Montana still suffers from all 12 classic environmental problems. It is becoming a microcosm of issues confronting the United States: growing population, a stressed environment, and climate change. A study of local Montanans’ motivations and thinking can help explain what happened among ancient peoples before their societies collapsed; it also can disclose the major issues and conflicts that must be resolved before environmental problems can properly be remedied.

Montana agriculture suffers from low rainfall, a short growing season, and long distances to market. Gold and copper mines, along with logging, helped build up the region, but today “the sectors of the economy that are growing nowadays are tourism, recreation, retirement living, and health care” (34).

Montana’s mines unearth copper and “lead, molybdenum, palladium, platinum, zinc, gold, and silver” (35). The waste rock, or tailings, from these operations—including from some 20,000 abandoned mines—contain arsenic, zinc, copper, cadmium, and sulfuric acid, which leach into water and soil and are poisonous to people and animals. Cleanup costs often exceed the mine owners’ ability to pay. Some companies build settling ponds to recondition the tailings; others avoid responsibility. Many sites are repaired with Superfund and state monies. Montanans, lately realizing it would have been cheaper simply to buy ores from Chile and elsewhere, have voted to restrict mining practices.

Anaconda’s open-pit mine at Butte, which spilled toxic metals into the Clark Fork of the Columbia River, was closed in 1983, costing Butte three-fourths of its economic base. Nearby, 6.6 million cubic yards of poisonous sediments collected at the bottom of dangerously decrepit Milltown Dam, and in 1981 high levels of arsenic were found there, putting Missoula’s water supply at risk. The plan is to remove the dam at a cost of $100 million. The Zortman-Landusky Mine, which used cyanide to leach gold from tons of rock, leaked dangerous amounts of the poison; cleanup costs bankrupted the mine.

Logging in Montana often involved clearcutting entire mountains, which caused snows to melt too quickly, reducing water availability; it also damaged local ecosystems and fish populations, and it was ugly. The Clearcut Controversy erupted, and new federal laws restricted the practice; the resultant court cases caused years-long delays, greatly reduced logging, caused massive layoffs, and left deadwood on the hills to feed forest fires. Even dedicated environmentalists now believe the new rules have caused too many problems.

The largest private owner of forests, Plum Creek Timber Company, is caught in the same kind of political and economic crossfire as that experienced by mining operations. In both cases, only new laws governing corporate responsibility will clarify the issues. The high-and-dry Montana environment makes for slow tree growth; they take twice as many decades to reach maturity there as do trees in Southeastern forests. Plum Creek now focuses on developing its lands as real estate.

Logging practices and federal fire-suppression rules tend to leave hillsides more liable to fire; climate change adds hotter, drier summers to the mix. Lightning strikes once cleaned out the understory tinder, leaving large trees to thrive; in today’s overgrown forests, fires are now bigger and more often out-of-control. Removing the undergrowth in Western forests would cost $100 billion. People like dense forests, yet residents expect the government to save their homes from the resulting fires. Unfortunately, fighting huge conflagrations can cost more than a billion dollars a year.

Montana soils suffer erosion from overgrazing, overlogging, overplanting, devastating fires, and noxious weed infestations. Clearing of native vegetation, leaving agricultural land fallow, can cause saline creep, the leaching of salts from bedrock by rainwater that then flows downhill onto nearby farmland. Salinization also has led to the decline of major agricultural areas in Turkey, India, Australia, and the Fertile Crescent regions of Iraq and Syria.

New practices can help, like using shorter fallow periods, sowing salt-tolerant crops, and raising alfalfa and other thirsty plants that suck up bedrock water. Pumping water from coal beds causes methane to leak out for capture and use, but the water contains salts that can damage soil downstream.

Drought from climate change has caused loss of farmland in Eastern Montana and nearby in Canada. Snow runoff has slackened—Glacier National Park will have lost all 150 of its glaciers by 2030—and the Bitterroot aquifer has diminished, reducing available well water. Many dams are no longer properly maintained in districts converted to housing; court disputes over water rights and maintenance costs have ballooned.

Fish populations lately suffer from less stream water, more sediment, voracious non-native fish, and parasites. Chronic wasting disease, the “mad cow disease” of deer and elk, has devastated those herds. Introduced plants and weeds, especially Leafy Spurge and Spotted Knapweed, are inedible to livestock, deer, and elk, and crowd out natural fodder.

Partly for these reasons, Montana has declined from one of the wealthiest states to one of the poorest. Newcomers with money buy up property and isolate themselves, while old-timers argue with each other about how to fix the problems. It’s not that some Montanans are selfishly despoiling the land, but that residents hold clashing views on how to resolve the issues.

As Montana agriculture becomes too expensive, farmland converts to subdivisions for those who move to the state for its natural beauty and recreation. Many longtime residents can no longer afford to live where they work. Traditionally conservative, Montanans now want government intervention to protect their farms from conversion to housing.

Farmers are modernizing with new technology to stay in business, but new residents often resent the sounds, smells, and noises of farming and campaign for restrictions. Montana’s children tend to leave for other states. Without out-of-state income streams and federal transfer payments, Montana’s economy would already have collapsed.