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The Price of Gold
by Savanna Ferguson
I almost bought a ring in August. The narrow gold band set with a turquoise stone was in the jewelry case at the gift shop of the exquisite Desert Museum outside of Tucson, Arizona. The turquoise was a deeper shade of green than I had ever seen, set off by jagged lines of black and flecks of gold. I asked the lady behind the counter to pull it out for me, and as I slipped it on to my left hand she said, "Yes, isn't that lovely? It came from a small mine in Nevada." In my admiration for the strange color of the stone and the rarity of turquoise with gold I had forgotten, or willfully dismissed, that in fact it must have come from a mine somewhere. It wasn't just a mine anywhere either, a location lost to the abstract world of resource extraction; I had a state, albeit a state I'd never seen. There was a place in Nevada with a hole in the ground for the sake of tiny, shiny, pretty thing - I wasn't allowed to forget it. I looked at the ring for a few minutes longer, admiring the teal mixed with gold, and I put it back. I have a complicated relationship with mining.
I grew up exploring the humbled mountains of West Virginia, driving on winding highways past abandoned coalmines. Mining in those hills is not as simple as a conflict between the health of the environment and the health of the economy. Coalmining is the root of Appalachia's culture; it is the subject of her songs and the foundation of her folklore. The hillbillies have watched the value of their mountains disappear by train car and truckload for almost two hundred years. I can't take the mines away from the people, because they have made them their own. Because they have been told they are all they have. In the greasy spoons of the backhills are mounted photos of stripmines, draglines, four hundred ton trucks, and gravel deserts where forests used to be. These photographs are displayed alongside those of untamed rivers, wooded mountainsides, and rustic farmsteads. Looking at those pictures I ask myself, Does the culture depend on this oppression? If it does, I would let the patient die to kill the cancer. I am broken watching those mountains die.
But why go off on a tangent about Appalachia? We're in the West after all, I haven't forgotten.
In September, at the head of the Clark Fork River in Butte, Montana I felt that same wave of depression, of anger sweep through my stomach and gather in knots between my ribs. In the 1880s the Butte mine had the richest copper deposits in the world, but by the middle of the twentieth century the Anaconda Mining Company had to move to an open pit operation to make the extraction economically efficient. The cheerful voice of the informational audio recording on the mine's viewing deck reports that many residents (probably those who were forced out of their houses) were displeased with the decision to open the Berkeley Pit, but they eventually realized (and thank God!) that continued mining was essential for Butte's economy. It was their pride and their only hope.
The copper from the Butte mine fueled the Industrial Revolution and the weapons of both World Wars, but Butte isn't a glamorous destination. It's a Superfund site. The Berkeley Pit is 1800 feet deep, just under the height of my favorite ridge in West Virginia. In that sunken, lifeless rock is the myth of prosperity through destruction. In the pit are the ghosts of three neighborhoods worth of homes. It is a hole where someone's mountain used to be.
It is almost two months since I put back the ring, and I have come to Nevada. The landscape is as arid as Tucson, but it is no Sonoran Desert - it's just desolate. I see only unimpressive mountains and big flat expanses with nothing but sagebrush. I don't much care for Nevada. Despite this apathy when I pulled to the edge of the Cortez Gold Mine in Lander County I expected my disgust of mining to override my feelings towards the state of Nevada. Instead, looking down on the nine hundred feet of carefully carved red rock benches in the Cortez pit I could understand what mine employee and our tour guide Jim Collard saw when he called it a "work of art." I was ashamed.
My problem was quite simple: I need to hate the mines. This is the war that gives me meaning. I must resent them fundamentally, on principle. But I didn't mind the pit in the middle of the wasteland that is Nevada. It didn't bother me, but it should. If I am capable of not caring about Nevada what kind of an environmentalist does that make me? Nevada has the Dann sisters, Chris Sewell, and Jon Marvel to counteract its Grant Gerbers, its Jims, Georges, and Stephanies, but doesn't it deserve me, too?
I got lucky this time, because I found a way out, a way to reject the culture that supports this mine, and thereby love the Nevadan landscape, if only secondhand. I asked the miners about their power needs and got the answer I had to hear: each one of their trucks grinds through forty to seventy gallons of diesel an hour. The operations of the mills use twenty-two megawatts of electricity twenty-four hours a day. That electricity is supplied by a coal-powered plant. So, I find myself safely back in a war I care about, a fight that gives me purpose. That is the horribly wonderful trick of the environmental movement I've discovered: everything's connected. The destruction of one uninspiring landscape can mean the death of a distant place which I value without reason. On principle, I can hate a hole in Nevada for the sake of a hole in West Virginia. And I refuse to forget it.