Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape

摘要

Brad Tyer's Opportunity, Montana is an important environmental history of Clark Fork Superfund site, the largest Superfund site in the United States, and more broadly it is a reflection on the irreparable damage of industrialization. From its headwaters at Butte to its confluence with the Blackfoot River near Missoula, more than 120 miles downstream, the Clark Fork River in southwestern Montana is a watershed profoundly contaminated by a century of copper mining, milling, and smelting to feed the demand for copper by a rapidly electrifying economy. Near the beginning of the book, Tyer quotes Montana writer Rick Bass to characterize the Superfund cleanup and, more broadly, its unsatisfactory completion: "The poison hasn't gone away. It's simply redistributed. We need new stories to tell this truth, new stories built with old words."