Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape
Montana is a beautiful state, full of soaring peaks, deep valleys, and scenic rivers. But beneath that beauty lies environmental damage largely invisible to the visitors who, drawn from other states by stunning advertising campaigns, float and fish its rivers. Copper mining in Butte, once home to the “richest hill on earth,” left a legacy of poisoned aquifers and waterways running a hundred miles downstream. Environmental activists in Missoula scored a major coup in forcing ARCO to remove a dam and restore the river, but toxic sediment dredged from behind the dam still had to go somewhere—the dinky, already dumped-on community of Opportunity. Tyer mixes exposé with memoir, asking big questions with no easy answers: who should pay the price of history? What does it even mean to restore a river? After paying homage to a place often omitted from the discussion, and even from maps, he concludes that the least we can do is to acknowledge what we’ve done. An intelligent, insightful, and finely crafted book that channels outrage into clear thinking. --Keir Graff