When Companies Leave Communities for Dead

Michael Moore's "Roger and Me" is a landmark work on the economic consequences when Corporate America picks up and leaves a community for dead. But equally as devastating is the health and environmental damage that occurs. Case in point is my new home state of Montana.

The Los Angeles Times today has a fascinating piece on Butte, Montana – better-known to locals as "Butte, America." If you haven't been there, you really should go. It is a case study in contrasts. Its citizens are a tribute to the wonderful, hard-scrabble spirit of Americans. But its history is a reminder of the tragic consequences of corporate greed and negligence. As the Times details, mining companies now owned by British Petroleum have essentially left a giant hole in the earth called the Berkeley Pit, where highly-toxic water is filling up at an alarming rate. As the piece notes, "the wine-dark water is as acidic as Pepsi, filled with heavy metals." The water is so toxic that when birds migrating from Canada to California set down on the lake, they never took flight again. Autopsies "showed burns and sores in their esophaguses and stomachs from drinking and feeding in the water." And the water is rising to a level where it "could begin seeping into a nearby aquifer," contaminating the town's drinking water.

It's true, ARCO (the affiliate of British Petroleum that is responsible for this mess) has been forced to put in $1 billion or so for cleanup. But as the Times notes, that "cleanup is far from perfect and much of the pollution will be around forever," plaguing the citizens of Butte for eternity. The company surely could put in more to make the situation right - British Petroleum reported more than $5 billion in profits in the first quarter of 2005 - a 29% increase. But don't hold your breath.

This is no different than other stories around the state. In my new hometown of Helena, Montana, the local newspaper reported in 2002 that Asarco "notified the Environmental Protection Agency that the company no longer can guarantee its financial ability to pay for the continuing costs of cleaning up contamination from its lead smelter." In 2004, state officials discovered that the company was had not cleaned up potentially deadly chemical pollutants in its now-defunct plant outside of town. And Asacro has agreed to kick in only a measly $450,000 to help remove toxic lead from soil all over town, despite pumping about 1,200 pounds of lead per month into the atmosphere before it shut down. Remember – this is a company whose parent corporation, Grupo Mexico, pocketed a quarter billion dollars in profits in just the first quarter of 2005, according to the 4/22/05 edition of the Latin America News Digest.

In 2004, there was clearly a backlash to this in Montana, as voters roundly rejected a referendum that would have allowed corporate polluters to engage in even more environmentally-hazardous behavior. And this year in Colorado, some state legislators are trying for their own crackdown, pushing legislation to force more companies to pay more when they harm private property. Unfortunately, it was defeated by big corporate polluters. But these recent efforts show that even in "red" America, people are getting sick and tired of huge companies ignoring the human costs of their irresponsible behavior, and they are expressing that disgust to their legislators and at the polls.

Former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, who hails from Butte, summed up this new attitude pretty succinctly in the LA Times piece: "There's two types of environmentalists, a Walden Pond environmentalist and a Berkeley Pit environmentalist," he says. "One wants solitude, and one wants to make sure that the environmental damage that came from extraction industries never happens again." That's a new kind of populist environmentalism that is starting to boil - and politicians of both parties better take heed.