by Bill Bryson
The Berkeley Pit is not likely to evacuate Butte. But to keep it safe and contained will drain money—millions of dollars—and attention, for whichever exists longer, the pit or us. All of southwest Montana is one big environmental liability in this sense: the region is infested with abandoned mines, an estimated 20,000 of them, each coming with its own hazardous idiosyncrasies and resting above the same watershed, which rushes out to the Pacific.
“If we all intend to keep going as a civilization, as a society, we still need copper. You’re not going to stop progress. Nobody wants to give anything up, even environmentalists. It’s a dilemma, really,” Griffin mused. Even as we spoke, the Pebble Mine, in Bristol Bay, Alaska, one of the last unharmed watersheds in our country and the spawning ground of multiple endangered salmon breeds, was being proposed as a new copper venture.
“Obviously this isn’t going anywhere. I mean, even if you thought, Let’s take it somewhere, where the hell would you take it? So this will be here forever,” Griffin said. The summer heat pushed down on us as the silent pit, an accident whose full resonance is still unknown, stretched far off to the edges of Butte.
I wanted to make sure I had heard Griffin right, that he had actually used the word “forever” in our conversation, so I consulted a hydrogeologist. Nick Tucci, who worked on the Berkeley Pit for nearly a decade, clarified some details. Tucci moved to Butte in 2003 to get a master’s degree in geoscience from Montana Tech, an outpost of the University of Montana and one of the nation’s preeminent mining colleges. For Tucci, Butte, with its flooded pit mine, was the perfect place to study. Tucci is articulate and sincere, and bends your ear about complicated subjects in a way that makes you feel like you are discussing something as accessible as the weather.
“There’s no proven technology out there that we have right now to stop the water from infiltrating the pit,” he told me. “I think whatever technology you use that exists right now, you are going to be pumping and treating forever. Right now, we just don’t have the ability to clean up the Berkeley Pit.”
But that hasn’t been for lack of trying. In his time working at the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology, Tucci had given out samples of pit water to varying types of scientists (some self-declared) eager to try to solve the problem. Tucci witnessed ideas that varied from snake oil to brilliant. “There was a guy who brought in crystals and thought he could arrange them in such a way that it wouldn’t take the contaminants out of the water but would rearrange the molecules to the extent where they were no longer toxic. He was convinced it would work and he was going to show us by drinking it.”
Other ideas involved evaporating the pit water with mirrors or sprinkler heads spraying the water over fields where it would evaporate, a method that has worked with other pit lakes (though there would still be the conundrum of water quality to address). One idea that Tucci liked, but wasn’t sure was feasible because of its cost, was to fill the pit with mine tailings, a type of mine waste that’s like dirt. Groundwater would still have to be pumped in perpetuity, but at least the surface area of the pit could be used for something.
Even without the end goal of remediation, the pit has served as a laboratory for diverse experimentation. Andrea and Don Stierle, organic chemists and old friends of both Griffin’s and Tucci’s, grew interested in the pit water when they moved to Butte from San Diego. While Don taught at Montana Tech, Andrea, who had originally planned to be a marine natural products chemist, decided to explore Butte’s largest body of water, toxic or not. It’s not uncommon for scientists to pursue bacteria growth in mine waste—anything thriving in a toxic spot could hold the key to its own cleanup—but no one had really looked into acidic mine water as something that could support life. To Andrea, life in the pit didn’t seem too far-fetched. It posed a risky but thrilling challenge. She doesn’t dumb things down, so here’s how she explained it: “Nobody had looked in toxic waste for a bacterium or a fungus that could produce secondary metabolites that had biological activity that could be helpful. It seemed like a great idea!” It did.
The Stierles weren’t initially able to isolate any sort of living organism in the water—until a flock of snow geese spent a perilous night floating on the pit’s surface, resting their wings after flying directly into a storm. A black yeast that hadn’t been there before started to grow in the water. Andrea sent the culture to a lab for identification and learned something unexpected: the yeast was associated with goose rectums. For years, scientists had been unsuccessfully throwing organic matter, like hay or horse manure, into the pit to see if it would yield new life. The night of the storm, when the party of geese realized that what they were treading wasn’t exactly water, they fled the toxic pond. When birds take flight they evacuate their bowels to lighten their load and ease the process of takeoff. In this instance, an entire flock evacuated simultaneously and filled the pit with biological matter. Goose poop had made the pit come alive.
Prior to the discovery of the yeast, Andrea Stierle had already had many successes in her career. While in San Diego, she held a postdoctoral position at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and in the 1990s she discovered a fungus that is used to produce Taxol, a cancer-fighting drug, in the bark of the Pacific yew tree. Her focus was trained on the minuscule, and her process has always been to reduce her subjects to microscopic proportions and see what biological activity she could find.
In the pit, the Stierles had set out to find biological life with medicinal properties, similar to Taxol’s cancer-fighting capabilities. In fact, the yeast was showing promise as having an effect on two types of ovarian cancer cell lines. But the yeast had another exciting attribute: it pulled metals out of Berkeley Pit water.
Acid-generating rock in the ground beneath Butte creates metal finds—or clusters—that clog filters and amass in wells. In the case of the pit, the finds are high in iron, which is responsible for the water’s blood-red color. And as Andrea learned through her studies, the slime liked to eat, or sorb, iron. “This is one of the things this little yeast does exquisitely. It takes these finds, and if you add a drop of the yeast when we grow it in liquid solution and add it to a big flask of pit water with the finds, this yeast will take all the finds, drop them out of solution, and just form this little blob,” she explained. “It’s amazing. It quickly adsorbs up to 87 percent of a lot of the metals that are present, and that happens within five to ten seconds. It’s almost magical.”
In her lab, Andrea held a pipette with the yeast cocked over a beaker filled with Berkeley Pit water and dripped its viscous contents into the beaker. “Let’s go, baby!” she encouraged the yeast. She swirled the beaker like a lowball glass of whiskey, the yeast twining in dark, wispy tentacles. In the midst of the swishing, the water’s cloudiness diminished and a black, marble-sized ball formed in the beaker’s center. The yeast had sorbed the metals that once polluted the water, which now did look clean enough to drink. Her slime was a glimpse of refreshing innovation, a repurposing of disaster.
Since grant money for people like the Stierles is scarce and there’s a dearth of sustaining jobs in Butte, I wanted to know who was young and brave enough to commit the burgeoning parts of their career to a town that is, for all intents and purposes, extremely economically depressed. Griffin pointed me in the direction of Julia Crain, the special projects planner for the Butte–Silver Bow consolidated city-county government, and who is also involved in the Superfund program. Crain is a third-generation Butte resident—her grandfather helped build one of the town’s first railroads—and holds a graduate degree in urban and regional planning from Portland State University.
Crain is ambitious and devoted to Butte, and Griffin, Tucci, and Stierle all agree that if Butte has one good thing going for it, it’s Julia. She inexhaustibly writes grants for things that residents don’t even realize they deserve. In its risk, hard-rock mining once represented the pinnacle of manhood, with miners working hard in the wretched conditions underground and living hard in the bars and
brothels above. Butte is still a tough town, and this attitude can stand in the way of progressive change. But Crain is undeterred, and has been awarded millions of dollars to build recreational trails through Butte’s public greenspaces and plant trees along Uptown streets, amenities the town didn’t know it missed until it had them. Butte’s been “taken hostage by its perception of itself,” Crain says, in regard to its proud reputation as an overbold frontier town—which can cause her work, along with elements of the cleanup, to be met with occasional hostility.
But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. “We know that dialogue here is really healthy and that people are really engaged, because every issue has contention surrounding it, and it’s because people are holding fast to something they love. I don’t think they’re saying no to ushering in a new era; I think they want to be confident there’s someone there to really carry it forward into the forever.” Change needs gentle coaxing in Butte, but Crain knows that blooming late is better than never blooming at all. “We are playing catch-up. We had to spend thirty years cleaning up a bunch of contamination and figuring out how to protect the people that live here so they could stay. So it’s not as though we aren’t progressing; it’s just that we had to take a different approach to [progress] because of the situation we found ourselves in.”
Despite opportunity existing all around in subtle forms, no one was moving to Butte or staying in Butte for it. Instead, one might stay for the town’s sense of everlasting potential and the belief systems built around it—just like in the days when Montana was still a frontier. “I think everybody here has their own romances, and maybe some people don’t have the words to express it, but I know that Andrea Stierle was completely enraptured by the Berkeley Pit, and her research is the result of that,” Crain explained. “You have to be capable of seeing something more, and that’s how people can get through here. I’m not saying it’s that hard; I’m just saying it’s a diamond in the rough.”
Thirty-five hundred feet above Butte, along one of the Continental Divide’s arched ridges, stands a surprising, 90-foot statue called Our Lady of the Rockies. Our Lady took six years to construct, from the initial plans in 1979 to the final portion, her head, which was airlifted by helicopter to the top of the mountain in the winter of 1985. She looms protectively over Butte, arms outstretched in a come-gimme-a-hug pose. She is impossible to miss from the streets of Butte. During one of the city’s economic downturns, miners designed and welded her out of donated steel to serve as a symbol of workers everywhere. She is as strange and Herculean as everything else in Butte: the patron saint of toughness. As the third-tallest statue in the United States, and painted a scorching white, Our Lady is Butte’s very own Christ the Redeemer. And you can visit her, twice a day, by way of a shuttle bus departing from the Butte Plaza Mall.
I took the morning tour to Our Lady to avoid the hot July sun. The narrow, unpaved road, the retiree bus driver, and the bus that should’ve been retired were a nerve-wracking combination during the 45 minutes we spent laboring up the mountain. At the top, I scurried around the base of Our Lady, taking pictures that never managed to get her full figure in the frame. Around me, kids kicked at bushes and people put quarters into mounted binoculars, but the majority of the tourists kneeled and touched Our Lady, seemingly in prayer. The few people I spoke to on the bus weren’t from Butte, or even from Montana, but were on vacation, and, as people who were either still working or had worked blue-collar jobs, had a reason to be on that bus: they were paying homage to a town whose culture revolved around self-reliance and whose entire workforce had operated around hard, hazardous, thankless work for generations.
Without realizing it, I had begun to fancy myself a pilgrim, too. Being engulfed in the wilds of national parks still fills me with the awe I first experienced out on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, where I spent summers growing up. There, the land is safe, and nature has the right of way. And it was in a national park, in my late 20s, that I realized that some of my favorite sensory perceptions, like the bitter smell of ferns after rain and the sounds of creatures scurrying through dried leaves, exist largely in places that are now protected by the government.
The lines between what is nature and what is natural have become blurred in my lifetime. Other mammals also consume the land: in Butte, enterprising beavers have depleted floodplains all around the valley with their dams. In getting what you want as a species, it sometimes seems impossible not to leave some sort of mark, but it is the remnants that have become my main concern. Since the damage has already been done, I want to know what we are doing with the damage—how we are transforming our destruction into creation.
During one of our conversations, Tucci, the hydrogeologist, said something to me that I had been thinking all along but had been afraid to say out loud, which was that the pit was beautiful. At first I had wanted to say that it was hideous, sinister even, but the pit’s engineered tiers, industrialized terra-cotta complexion, and crimson water have a hard-won refinement, like western art scenes of dusty cavalcades and buffalo runs. “I think the research value of the Berkeley Pit is not quantifiable and the lessons that can be learned from the Berkeley Pit are not quantifiable,” Tucci said. “People are going to come here, look at the Berkeley Pit, and know what we are capable of, and people will be cautious, hopefully.”
Though on the morning of my visit to Our Lady I felt as though I didn’t deserve a seat on the bus, by midafternoon I had decided the miners who built her would want me to believe she belonged to me, too, and that I was welcome to join my fellow tourists in praying at the folds of her steel robes if I liked. Even when it doesn’t seem like it, there is a lot of connectivity in towns like Butte that masquerade as the edge of the universe but are really its center. Had I known at the time that we were all there because embracing our scars as they amass is difficult, and loving hard-to-love things is alienating, maybe I would’ve rested my forehead against her cool steel siding, too.
HELEN MACDONALD
Hiding from Animals
FROM The New York Times Magazine
I’m walking beside a hedge of tangled dog roses in a nature preserve in eastern England, toward a hide, a building whose purpose is to make me disappear. This one is a rustic box with bench seats and narrow slits in the wall. Half-hidden by branches, it looks like a small, weather-beaten wooden shed. I’ve made myself disappear in hides for as long as I can remember; structures like this are found in nature preserves all over the world, and they seem as natural here as trees and open water. Even so, a familiar, nervous apprehension flares up as I reach for the door, so I pause for a few seconds before opening it and walk inside, where the air is hot and dark and smells of dust and wood preservative.
Alone, I sit on a bench and lower a wooden window blind to make a bright rectangle in the darkness; as my eyes adjust, I can see through it to a shallow lagoon under cumulus clouds. I scan the scene with binoculars, ticking off species—three shoveler ducks, two little egrets, a common tern—but my mind is elsewhere, puzzling over that odd sense of apprehension, trying to work out what causes it.
Perhaps it is partly the knowledge that wildlife hides are not innocent of history. They evolved from photographic blinds, which in turn were based on structures designed to put people closer to animals in order to kill them: duck blinds, deer stands, tree platforms for shooting big cats. Hunters have shaped modern nature appreciation in myriad unacknowledged ways, even down to the tactics used to bring animals into view. As hunters bait deer and decoy ducks, so preserve managers create shallow feeding pools that concentrate wading birds near hides, or set up feeding stations for wary nocturnal mammals. In the Highlands of Scotland, one celebrated hide gives visitors a 95 percent chance of seeing rare pine martens—lithe, tree-climbing predators—munching on piles of peanuts.
What you see from hides is supposed to be true reality: animals behaving perfectly naturally because they do not know they are being observed. But turning yourself into a pair of eyes in a dar
kened box distances you from the all-encompassing landscape around the hide, reinforcing a divide between human and natural worlds, encouraging us to think that animals and plants should be looked at, not interacted with. Sometimes the window in front of me resembles nothing so much as a television screen.
To witness wild animals behaving naturally, you don’t need to be invisible. As scientists studying meerkats and chimps have shown, with time you can habituate them to your presence. But hiding is a habit that is hard to break. There is a dubious satisfaction in the subterfuge of watching things that cannot see you, and it’s deeply embedded in our culture. When wild animals unexpectedly appear close by and seem unbothered by our presence, we can feel as flustered and unsure about how to behave as teenagers at a dance.
Two years ago, I was walking with my friend Christina through a park in a small English town when characters I’ve only ever seen in bird hides began to appear: camouflage-clad photographers with 300-millimeter lenses and expressions of urgent concentration. We looked to where the cameras were pointed, and were astonished. Three meters away, two of Britain’s most elusive mammals were swimming in the shallow river running through the park. Otters! They didn’t seem to see us; they certainly didn’t care.
Their wet flanks gleamed like tar as they rolled in the water. They broke the surface to crunch fish in their sharp white teeth, showering droplets from their stiff whiskers, then slipped back beneath the surface to swim down the river, the photographers chasing them like paparazzi and intermittently running backward because the lenses they’d brought were the wrong ones for such close views. It was thrilling. We followed the otters downstream and stopped by a woman with a toddler and a baby in a stroller, who were watching them, too. She told me she loved these otters. They were part of her town. Part of her local community. They’d eaten all the expensive carp from the fishpond in the big house, she said, amused. Then she tilted her head at the photographers. “Aren’t they weird?” she asked. Outside the hide, they looked faintly ridiculous, so accustomed to their binoculars, camouflage, and high-zoom lenses that they felt compelled to use them even when they were unnecessary.