The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

by Rebecca Solnit

  Overall, approximately ten times more mercury was put into the California ecosystem than gold was taken out of it. There is something fabulous about this, or at least fablelike. Gold and mercury are brothers and opposites, positioned next to each other, elements 79 and 80, in the periodic table of elements. Gold has been prized in part because it does not rust, change, or decay, while mercury is the only metal that is liquid at ordinary temperatures, and that liquid is, for those who remember breaking old thermometers to play with the globules, something strange, congealing into a trembling mass or breaking into tiny spheres that roll in all directions, ready to change, to amalgamate with other metals, to work its way into the bodies of living organisms. The miners called it quicksilver, for its color and its volatility. Half gold’s goodness is its inertness; it keeps to itself; mercury’s problem is its protean promiscuity.

  Gold was never more than a material and occasionally a curse in the old stories, but Mercury was the deity who shared with his namesake element the elusive fluctuant qualities still called mercurial, and it is as the god of commerce and thieves that he intersects with the gold that is money. Perhaps in tribute to the element’s talent for engendering fetal abnormalities, the mythological Mercury is also the father of Hermaphrodite, though mercury-generated birth defects are never so picturesque. Many other modern industrial processes, notably coal-fired power plants, disperse mercury in the biosphere, but mining did it far earlier.

  At least from Roman times onward, mercury was critical for many of the processes used to isolate both gold and silver from ore. Thus mercury was a crucial commodity, not valued in itself, but necessary for obtaining the most valued metals. Sources of mercury were far rarer than those of gold, and one of the great constraints on extracting wealth from the New World was the supply of mercury. (In forested parts of the world, heat could be used in gold refining, but in the fuel-poor deserts, mercury was the only means.) The Almaden Mine in Spain and then the Santa Barbara Mine in Hauncavelica, Peru, were the two major mercury sources in the Western world from the sixteenth century until the mid-nineteenth, and when the Spanish colonies gained their independence, they (except for Peru, of course) lost easy access to this supply of mercury.

  So dire was this lack that the Mexican government offered a reward—$100,000 by one account—to whoever could discover a copious supply. In the northwesternmost corner of old Mexico, in 1845, a staggeringly rich mercury lode was discovered by one Captain Don Andres Castillero. Located near San Jose at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, it became famous as the New Almaden Mine. By the time the mine was developed, it was well within the territory seized by the United States. Only days before the February 2, 1848, treaty giving Mexico $16 million for its northern half was signed, gold was also discovered in California. Thus began the celebrated Gold Rush, which far fewer know was also a mercury rush, or that the two were deeply intertwined.

  An anonymous 1857 visitor to the mine Castillero discovered published his (or her?) observations in Harper’s magazine a few years later. “One of the most curious circumstances connected with the New Almaden Mine is the effect produced by the mercurial vapors upon the surrounding vegetation,” said the report.

  Despite the lofty chimneys, and the close attention that has been devoted to the secret of effectually condensing the volatile matter, its escape from the chimneys withers all green things around. Every tree on the mountainside above the works is dead, and some of more sensitive natures farther removed exhibit the influence of the poison in their shrunken and blanched foliage. . . . Cattle feeding within half a mile of the hacienda sicken, and become salivated; and the use of waters of a spring rising near the works is guarded against. . . . The workmen at the furnaces are particularly subjected to the poisonous fumes. These men are only able to work one week out of four, when they are changed to some other employment, and others take their place for a week. Pale, cadaverous faces and leaden eyes are the consequences of even these short spells; and any length of time continued at this labor effectually shortens life and impregnates the system with mercury. . . . In such an atmosphere one would seem to inhale death with every respiration.

  Without the torrent of toxic mercury that poured forth from this and a few smaller mercury mines in the Coast Range, the California Gold Rush would probably been dampened by foreign monopolies on the stuff. Though the mining operation closed more than thirty years ago, the mercury is still leaching out of New Almaden into the San Francisco Bay and out of hundreds of other mercury mines in the state. A series of Gold-Rush-era mercury mines has gravely contaminated Clear Lake 120 miles or so to the north, where the local Pomo people have seven times as much mercury in their systems as the regional normal. In many places, mercury contamination of water forces Native North Americans who have traditionally relied on marine animals and fish as primary food sources to choose between tradition and health.

  Gold is the paradise of which the bankers sang; mercury is the hell hidden in the fine print. The problem is not specific to the California Gold Rush, which only realized on a particularly epic scale in a particularly lush and pristine landscape the kinds of devastation gold and mercury can trigger. The current gold rush in northeastern Nevada, which produces gold on a monstrous scale—7 million ounces in 2004 alone—is also dispersing dangerous quantities of mercury. This time it’s airborne. The forty-mile-long Carlin Trend on which the gigantic open-pit gold mines are situated is a region of “microscopic gold,” dispersed in the soil and rock far underground, imperceptible to the human eye, unaffordable to mine with yesteryear’s technology. To extract the gold, huge chunks of the landscape are excavated, pulverized, piled up, and plied with a cyanide solution that draws out the gold. The process, known as cyanide heap-leach mining and banned in Montana, also releases large amounts of mercury, which is often found along with the gold, into the biosphere. Wind and water meet the materials at each stage and create windblown dust and seepage, and thus the mercury and other heavy metals begin to travel.

  As the Ban Mercury Working Group reports, “Though cumulatively coal fired power plants are the predominant source of atmospheric mercury emissions, the three largest point sources for mercury emissions in the United States are the three largest gold mines there.” The Great Salt Lake, when tested in 2004, turned out to have astonishingly high mercury levels, as did wild waterways in Idaho, and Nevada’s gold mines seem to be the culprit. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported that year:

  The scope of mercury pollution associated with Nevada’s gold mining industry wasn’t discovered until the EPA changed rules in 1998 to add mercury to the list of toxic discharges required to be reported. When the first numbers were released in 2000, Nevada mines reported the release of 13,576 pounds in 1998. Those numbers have since been revised upward to an estimated 21,098 pounds, or more than 10 tons, to make Nevada the nation’s No. 1 source of mercury emissions at the time.

  Glen Miller, a longtime Nevada environmentalist and professor of natural resources and environmental science at the University of Nevada, Reno, estimates that since 1985, the eighteen major gold mines in the state have released between 70 and 200 tons of mercury into the environment.

  Maybe some of this is already evident in the Greek myth of King Midas. Bacchus, the god of wine and revelry, gave Midas a single wish and regretted the mortal’s foolish choice: the ability to turn anything he touched into gold. The rest is familiar. The king transformed all he touched so that what he tried to drink became gold when it touched his lips, and his thirst grew intolerable. Worse yet, he touched his daughter and his greed turned her to inanimate metal, and it was with this that he begged the god to take back his gift, resigned his crown and power, and became a rural devotee of the god Pan. In this ancient tale, gold is already associated with contaminated water and damaged children. Gold is a curse in Exodus too, when the Israelites, having lost faith during their forty years in the desert, come to worship the Golden Calf made out of melted-down jewelry. Moses comes down from the moun
taintop, grinds the golden idol into powder, throws it into a stream, and forces them to drink it. For us, perhaps the Golden Calf is the belief that the current economic system produces wealth rather than poverty. It’s the focus on the gold to the exclusion of the mercury.

  Midas and the Golden Calf are myth, but true tales of gold as a horror checker the history of the Americas. There is an extraordinary print from Girolamo Benzoni’s 1565 La historia del Mondo Nuovo, a report by an embittered witness to fifteen years of Spanish colonization. In the image, unclothed Native men, tired of being savagely forced to produce gold, pour the molten metal down the throat of a captive Spaniard in pantaloons. Thus literal fulfillment of a hunger for wealth leads to death, and thus revenge for the brutality of the gold economy begins in the Americas. Another tale comes from the Death Valley Forty-Niners, seeking an easy route but finding a hard one to the California gold fields. On their parched sojourn across the desert, one goldseeker abandoned $2,500 in gold coins to lighten his load in the hopes that thus unburdened he might make it to water and life. Another of these desperadoes snapped at his companion that he had no interest in what looked like gold-bearing ore on the route through the dry lands: “I want water; gold will do me no good.” Something similar became the slogan of an anti-gold-mining struggle in Washington State in the 1990s. Pointing out that the water the mine was contaminating had value and, if bottled and sold, more short-term monetary value than the gold, they proclaimed, “Pure water is more precious than gold.”

  2006

  OIL AND WATER

  The BP Spill in the Gulf

  New Orleans’s Saint Charles Avenue is lined with oak trees whose broad branches drip Spanish moss and Mardi Gras beads from the pre-Lenten parades, and behind the oaks are beautiful old houses with turrets, porches, balconies, bay windows, gables, dormers, and lush gardens. There are no refineries for miles, hardly even gas stations on the stretch I was on in mid-June, and the Deepwater Horizon rig that exploded on April 20, 2010, and the oil welling up a mile below it were dozens of miles away as the bird flies. So there was no explanation for the sudden powerful smell of gasoline that filled my car for several blocks or for the strange metallic taste in my mouth when I parked at the Sierra Club offices uptown, except that since the BP spill, such incidents have been common. By mid-July, the spill was supposed to be plugged at last, except that the plug is temporary at best, and the millions of gallons of oil are out there in the ocean, on the coast—and in the air.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency have an unhelpful handout for the BP era that says that the effects of such toxic taste

  should go away when levels go down or when a person leaves the area. The low levels that have been found are not expected to cause long-term harm. . . . If you smell a “gas station” like odor . . . it may be volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. The key toxic VOCs in most oils are benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylene.

  When I went out on the sea from Grand Isle, which is hardly more than a great sandbar at the end of the watery land south of the city, 109 miles from it by car, the taste was much stronger, and one of my companions on the boat had run into far worse. Drew Wheelan, a birdwatcher from the American Birding Association, told us that he had walked into a patch of fumes so intense his body seemed to react automatically and fling him away. “I hit a cloud so concentrated,” he wrote on his blog, “that 20 hours later my mouth and tongue still feel as though they’ve been burned by a hot liquid.”

  A pregnant friend wondered if she should have left New Orleans altogether, and another friend warned his pregnant girlfriend to stay indoors on the more pungent days. The smells were just part of the ominous, uncertain atmosphere of the Gulf in the wake of the BP spill. The whole region had become something like the Western Front, a place where you might run into pockets of poison gas, except that this wasn’t a battlefront: it’s home, for pregnant women, for children, for old people who’ve spent their entire lives here, for people who love the place passionately, for people who don’t know anyplace else on earth and don’t want to go anywhere, and for people who can’t, at least economically. And for countless birds, fish, crustaceans, cetaceans, and other ocean life. The spill has hit them all hard.

  If spill is the right word for this oil that didn’t pour down but welled up like magma from the bowels of the earth. It’s also called the Macondo blowout, and maybe blowout is a better word. The blowout is about global capital, and about policy, and about the Bush-era corruption that turned the Minerals Management Service into a crony-ridden camp that didn’t do its job, and about Big Oil, and about a host of other things. But it is also about the destruction we’ve all seen in the images, which are horrible in a deep and primordial way. I went out on boats twice and saw an oiled pelican through binoculars and some faint oily traces on wetlands grass and couldn’t quite make out the oiled terns in the distance. And I saw what everyone else could see too, the photographs and footage from those who went to ground zero of this catastrophe.

  Mary Douglas said that dirt is matter out of place, and petroleum is out of place everywhere above ground. We design our lives around not seeing it even when we pump it into our cars and burn it; and when we do encounter it, it’s repulsive stuff with a noxious smell, a capacity to cause conflagrations, and a deadly impact. Nature kindly put a huge amount of the earth’s carbon underground, and we have for the past two hundred years been putting it back into the atmosphere faster and faster, even though we now know that this is a project for which words like “destructive” are utterly inadequate.

  There’s a YouTube video shot by an oil-rig diver in which huge brown globs of oil float underwater like colossal clots of phlegm. From the surface, the chunky brown stuff looks like vomit. “Just globs of death out there,” one diver, Al Walker, says in a southern accent. “Oil so thick it blocks out almost all the light below,” says another diver. An AP photograph by Dave Martin shows one of the gentle little waves of the Gulf Coast in close-up, a wave on Orange Beach that’s brownish gold with spots of orange and black oil on it, water acting just like water and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.

  And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the Internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible, but the columns of smoke rise up and float away: burning water, like the famous incident in 1969 when the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire from having so much industrial contaminant. That was one river in an industrial region; the flat calm blue ocean burning is apocalyptic, a world turned upside-down, rules broken, taboos violated, something as unnatural as nuclear fission and fallout, something nightmarishly wrong, and it extends for hundreds of miles, on water and under it, on shore and in the air.

  In the Sierra Club offices, Darryl Malek-Wiley, the club’s local environmental justice organizer, showed us a map of the Gulf, checkerboarded with gas leases, and peppered, as though the map had been hit with buckshot, with oil platforms, 4,000 of them. A news story a week later mentioned the 27,000 old oil wells also out there in the territory the maps show, some probably leaking, but no one is monitoring them. Darryl, a big white-haired guy with a southern accent and a slight Santa affect, showed me another map—an aerial photograph of a portion of the Louisiana coast—on which you could see all the channels the oil and gas industry has cut through the wetlands, creating straight routes through which water can move fast and hard, cutting the channels wider and eroding this coast still further. “Nature meanders but time is money,” a bayou-dweller told me. About a football field of coastline erodes away every forty-five minutes, and a third map of Darryl’s showed how much land has been lost in the past several decades, since the petroleum industry came to the Gulf, an area about the size of Delaware, or 2,500 square miles.

  Oil and gas channels are responsible fo
r nearly half of this erosion of land that is for the most part sediment laid down by the Mississippi over the eons before it was tamed. When you look at the remnant land on a map, it looks like tattered lace, a frail smear of soil pitted and pocketed and veined by fresh and salt water, if the map is up to date. (Mostly we see out-of-date maps that make the coast look more solid and extensive than it is.) From the flat ground you can’t see much of this texture, but water is everywhere, and anything can flood. Most structures rebuilt since 2005 are on stilts a dozen feet or more high, ready for the next surge, flood, or sea-level rise, if not for the continuing erosion that will leave a lot of these structures literally out at sea. Sometimes traveling through this country you see drowned old structures whose underpinnings the sea has already reclaimed.