Storming the Gates of Paradise (19 page)

I went on a tour of Barrick’s Betze/Post mine—the largest gold mine in North America, third largest in the world—and was amazed how much the pit had grown since 1992, when I had seen it last. I was equally amazed that Barrick’s young tour guide told me and the leathery, upbeat Texas retirees who made up the tour group that “the first inhabitants of the Elko area were fur trappers in 1828.” Another tour guide showed us one of those steep embankments in which large-scale gold mining specializes and told us that the faint flush of green there meant that the landscape had been restored to its natural condition. Before the mine, biologists had noted an active lek, or sage grouse dancing ground, on the site. More than a hundred of the imperiled birds would gather there then; now the sage grouse are gone. One day the creek disappeared too: Maggie Creek, which runs past the mines of Barrick and Newmont corporations, vanished into a sinkhole mining had created; it had to be revived with sandbags that kept it out of the new rupture in the water table.

Back in the Mother Lode country on the other side of the Sierra Nevada, I joined activists from around the world at Project Underground’s 1999 conference on the impacts of gold mining around the world; and their reports put California and Nevada into context, with stories of both horror and hope. The conference was held near the Malakoff Diggings. The largest of California’s hydraulic mining sites, Malakoff’s hollowed-out hillside still looks like a fresh wound of bare red
earth more than a century later. It was owned by the North Bloomfield Gravel Mining Company, the defendant in the lawsuit brought by farmers that ended hydraulic mining in 1884.

At the conference, there were new stories of triumphs over gold mining’s environmental devastation. The Okanagan Highlands Alliance, based in eastern Washington, had just benefited from a decision almost as radical as the ban on hydraulic mining: for the first time, the government had reinterpreted the infamous, anachronistic 1872 Mining Act in the environment’s favor. Basically, the law provides for a five-acre mill site per mining claim. Modern mining takes up far more room—so Battle Mountain Gold Corporation’s permits for Buckhorn Mountain were denied on the grounds that the mill site exceeded the permitted size. If the decision holds up, a lot of new gold mines could be denied permits. The Okanagan Highlands Alliance started bottling Buckhorn water and labeling it with their slogan—“Pure Water Is More Precious Than Gold”—as a publicity tool, and they pointed out this was literally true: it would take Battle Mountain Gold two thousand gallons of water to produce an ounce of gold, which was then worth about $270, whereas the water itself was worth $1,500 bottled. The nearby Colville Indian Reservation, whose anti-mining activists had been involved in fighting Battle Mountain, had already banned hard rock mining on their lands. Battle Mountain Gold is itself named after the north-central Nevada town whose name commemorates a miner-Shoshone confrontation; the corporation is still at work in Nevada despite its defeat in Washington State.

Not all the stories were uplifting. The world’s first cyanide heap-leach mine, Pegasus Gold Corporation’s Zortman-Landusky mine in eastern Montana, opened in 1979, was fined $37 million for violating the Clean Water Act with acid mine drainage and cyanide contamination in 1996. The company moved to expand the mine to 1,192 acres anyway, was fined again in 1997 for stream contamination, and went bankrupt in 1998. That left the state to pick up the tab for a cleanup that will cost tens of millions and still won’t create pure water or restore Spirit Mountain, which is now just a pile of poisonous powder. Aimee Boulanger from the Mineral Policy Center told me that cyanide was coming out of the taps of the residents of the Fort Belknap Reservation, next to the mine; and Rose Main, a
White Clay Assinboine from that reservation, told me about dry wells and contaminated creeks, concluding, “Our worst nightmares have come true. And now we’re living in them.” The mined land had originally been part of the reservation, but when gold was discovered there in the 1890s, the boundaries were redrawn and the first wave of miners came in. Thanks to this disaster and many like it in Montana, Montanans recently voted to implement legislation that bans cyanide heap-leach mining.

Perhaps people in Montana value scenery and ecology more than corporate profits and temporary jobs, but Nevada is still in thrall to the mining industry (“mining works for Nevada” says the industry bumper sticker a Reno activist friend of mine rearranged to read, “Nevada works for mining”). Gold miners have almost always been mobile, rootless people; the mines punish most those who are rooted and committed, unable or unwilling to move on once the damage has been done. So from British Columbia to Venezuela, from the Philippines to Indonesia, gold is being extracted from the earth for the international market—and locals, along with the birds, the fish, and the water, are being left to deal with the consequences.

Carrie Dann once said that everyone who buys gold jewelry should get to deal with the consequences, too—such as the tailings it took to produce that much gold. Ever since, I’ve pictured a truck driver ringing the doorbell of a home to say something like, “Ma’am, about that new wristwatch: would you like your seventy-nine tons on the front lawn or the back? You’ll want to keep the kids and the dog off them ’cause of the acid and arsenic.” Gold mining is like all the other environmental dilemmas, distilled into an essence. It’s about prizing what can be pocketed and possessed versus cherishing those phenomena whose value is inseparable from their location and their role in larger systems. It’s about systems that measure and exalt immediate profit for the few versus those that benefit the many over the millennia. It’s about two kinds of tangibility: the figures in a stock report or a dividend versus the water that seeps up from springs, flows over rocks and down slopes to nourish—everything. Gold used to be the more tangible of the two goods, but gold going out of the country or being locked up in vaults now seems less tangible than even the remotest stream in which trout swim, sage grouse splash, pronghorn drink.

In July 2004, the Feds handed down to Nevada the state’s bitterest defeat and sweetest victory in ages: the former, a termination of thousands of years of Western Shoshone history; the latter, a reprieve from an apocalyptic future as the world’s biggest—and maybe dumbest—nuclear waste dump. In one three-day period, Nevada’s past was canceled while its future was salvaged. But this Indian war and these nuclear politics are just part of a panoply of glaringly weird things going on in the state; there’s a gold rush, a water war, and vast military operations, just for starters, and all of them are ecological bad news.

Nevada’s invisibility may be as alarming as the apocalyptic dimensions of its plight. The state is a truly peculiar place, a hole in public consciousness. Where else could you set off a thousand nuclear bombs unhindered—from 1951 to 1991, at the Nevada Test Site—while even most antinuclear activists were arguing about nuclear war as a terrible possibility rather than as an ongoing regional catastrophe? Once nuclear testing went underground in 1963, and American babies stopped having fallout-induced radioactive milk teeth, Nevada fell off the map, even as the nuke-a-month program continued unimpeded for almost three more decades.

Across the United States, the contemporary Indian wars are invisible in part because most non–Native Americans believe that all such wars happened in the picturesque
past, in part because they’re fought by other means, in part because the mainstream media don’t give a damn. One of the most egregious wars has been the ongoing battle between the Western Shoshone and the federal government for title to most of Nevada. It began in 1848, when the U.S. government claimed the Southwest from Mexico; heated up in the post–World War II era, when the Shoshone went to court to protect their rights; and may have ended July 7, 2004, when President George W. Bush signed into law the Western Shoshone Distribution Bill.

That bill dishes out money the government set aside a few decades ago as payment for much of eastern and southern Nevada. The area had looked so worthless to the bureaucrats of the nineteenth century that they drew up a treaty letting the Western Shoshone, unlike most indigenous nations, retain title to their lands. The bureaucrats of the twentieth century, desperate to reverse this misstep, realized that the best way to seize title to Nevada was to pretend that the government had already taken the land at some point in the past—back when it was more affordable. Of course, you have to overlook the fact that, as Western Shoshone bumper stickers say of their homeland, “Newe Sogobia is not for sale.” The price set was $26 million, or 15 cents an acre, a discount price even for the 1870s. (With interest, the sum to be disbursed is now $145 million.)

Reasonably enough, the Western Shoshone point out that they never offered their land for sale, and many of them refuse to take the money. The disbursement was made against their strenuous opposition. (Others believe that $30,000 per person is the best they’ll ever get and are willing to settle up.) The case matters in part because Western Shoshone “traditionalists” have strenuously opposed mining, military operations—20 percent of all military-controlled land in the United States is in Nevada—and nuclear activities on their land. Though environmentalists sometimes decry their cattle-grazing as destructive to the desert, the Shoshone look like far better stewards of Nevada’s arid lands than the federal government ever has been. They have deep roots in the past and are interested in the long-term future of the place. Then there’s the simple matter of justice: the Western Shoshone are being stripped of their birthright and their rights just as surely as any Palestinian on the wrong side of Israel’s Great Wall of Intolerance or the Iraqis whose resources have been redistributed to various American corporations.

The corporations reaping twenty-first-century profits from the great Shoshone land grab, and already engaged in a gold rush in the heartland of Shoshone territory, aren’t even American in most cases. The 1872 Mining Act allows virtually anyone to acquire public land for pennies in order to mine it; the Toronto-based Barrick Corporation, for instance, paid less than $10,000 for land containing an estimated $8 billion in gold. Unfortunately, we’re not talking about the gold nuggets often seen in pretty engravings of the Forty-Niners. Barrick and the other megacorporations are mining microscopic gold, dispersed throughout the subterranean rock along the Carlin Trend in northeastern Nevada, enough gold to make the state the world’s third most productive gold mining region.

To get microscopic gold, you dig up huge hunks of the landscape, pulverize them, and then run a cyanide solution through the resultant heaps, which pulls the gold out. It takes about a hundred tons of ore to produce an ounce of gold. Grinding up the bedrock releases other heavy metals in the ground, which is why Nevada—with less than 1 percent of the nation’s population—was, until a court changed the measurement standards in 2001, tops in the release of toxic substances. Its annual half billion tons of toxics amount to 10 percent of the nation’s total, and a soaring 88.7 percent of U.S. mercury releases, to say nothing of the cyanide, which at least is an organic compound that breaks down under the right circumstances. Mercury is forever.

The environmental price of gold is pretty high, and that’s not even counting groundwater. But groundwater counts too. Much of the Carlin Trend gold is underneath the water table, so the mines, here in this arid state, pump out vast quantities of groundwater and discard it. They are, in other words, mining water as well as gold; and as demonstrated by recent attempts around the world to privatize water—by Bechtel in Bolivia, for example—pure water is getting more and more valuable. The elderly Western Shoshone activist and mystic Corbin Harney had a vision about water scarcity long ago and has made it a focus of his
work ever since. In Nevada’s gold rush districts, water is being contaminated or dispersed into nearby waterways, where it will run away, never to return. According to Great Basin Mine Watch, Nevada mines wasted enough water in 2001 to serve a city of half a million people.

It takes thousands of years to recharge an aquifer. To drain one, or even drop the water table, creates “drawdown,” the drying up of surface waters that would otherwise feed agriculture, rural communities, and wildlife. That’s one of the reasons why environmentalists and rural citizens are up in arms about the latest plans to suck out the water under White Pine, Lincoln, and Nye counties, as well as that under rural Clark County for the benefit of urban Clark County (aka Las Vegas). This conflict is already being compared to the water war between Los Angeles and the Owens Valley, immortalized in Roman Polanski’s movie
Chinatown
. What Polanski’s movie didn’t show was the dry lake bed breeding dust storms and the habitat drying up, as part of the ecological disaster that Los Angeles lawns and car washes demanded (and which Mono Lake activists have partially reversed in recent years).

Currently, Las Vegas gets most of its water from the Colorado River. In 1900, the city’s population was in the single digits; it had made it only to about half a million when I started swinging through in the 1980s to protest the nuclear testing taking place sixty miles to the north. The city now has 1.4 million people, almost two-thirds of the state’s population, and five thousand new Vegans arrive every month—which is why the entire Nevada congressional delegation is behind the water grab. That’s where the votes are.

Even the usually environmentally respectable Senator Harry Reid so strongly supports a bill to start building the two-hundred-mile Lincoln-to-Vegas pipeline that he’s threatening to attach it to some larger piece of legislation that is bound to pass. “They have enough water for the existing population,” says Jan Gilbert, a longtime state activist. “They don’t for this explosive growth.”

Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, struck a different note when she said, “The notion that we have a finite supply of water, and when that finite supply is gone you stop growing, is in the past.” Welcome to Nevada, driest state in the union, where water is infinite; where you
can wait until the late twentieth century to make things happen in the nineteenth century; where gold is cheap; and where the future is radioactively bright. Or was. Not all the news is bad.