Just Go Dump Your Mining Wastes on the Native Americans: A Recycling Story

 

The Quapaw Native American town of Picher, Oklahoma once had the biggest lead mine in the world. Half of all the zinc and lead used by the United States in World War I came from this mine. For a while the mine was extremely profitable. Part of the reason is that the external costs (externalities) were simply ignored: the corporation just dumped their mine tailings in big mounds which leaked contaminants into the water in Picher. The corporation closed the mine and moved out, leaving the local Native Americans to deal with the ensuing health crisis. Many of the children had dangerous levels of lead in their blood. In 2009, the school closed and the town shut down except for a few defiant Quapaws who stay (presumably with clean water trucked in?) and fly the tribal flag.

Our economy needs rare earth and other toxic metals. The computer on which I am writing, and on which you are reading this essay, require them. But currently forty percent of rare earth elements come from China. Just a week ago China announced restrictions on the export of francium and germanium. Now what do we do? Fortunately, Sweden (new NATO member!) found a big deposit of rare elements. (Because of their similar chemical properties, they are often found together in ores.) But it will take at least a decade for this deposit to supply our industrial chain, since unlike China Sweden has careful environmental guidelines.

An alternative is recycling. Already, electronic recycling is big business. If we can get new germanium and yttrium and ytterbium for our new electronics from our old electronics, there is no need for mining. Recycling makes more economic sense in some situations (such as aluminum) than in others (such as plastic). But if the alternative to recycling is to dump toxins on our fellow humans, recycling is always worth the cost. Do we all want to become a toxic ghost town like Picher, Oklahoma?

Even a gorilla can understand this. In a video, I explain this to a gorilla, which was the mascot of the Picher schools before they closed.

To those in France: happy Bastille Day, I guess. Your history is as bloody as ours, but we work with what we have.

Our Shared Environment

I am sure I have written about this idea previously: What we do to the environment of the Earth, locally or globally, is directly involved with how we relate to other people. How can we say we love our human brothers and sisters if we pollute the environment we share with them? Love your neighbor—and it is your neighbor’s Earth.

A particularly amazing example of the disregard that some people have for their neighbors, and their neighbors’ environment, has come to my attention in rural Oklahoma, where I live. When I first heard about it, I could hardly believe it, until it was corroborated by a second person. Both of these people, who do not know one another, grew up in and still live in rural Oklahoma. I still find it hard to believe, but I will pass the story on to you.

One way that some rural residents of Oklahoma have of getting rid of their garbage is to put it in the flatbed of a pickup truck and drive around until the wind blows it away. This does not work for heavy objects like beer bottles—those are more efficiently disposed of by throwing them out the window—but it works very well for paper and plastic. There are two reasons for this. First, Oklahoma has a lot of wind. Second, the air pressure is greater down in the pickup bed than in the moving air (moving, that is, relative to the pickup bed) above the pickup bed, virtually guaranteeing that the light garbage will be lifted out and blown away.

People who do this sort of thing might as well have a bumper sticker on the truck proclaiming, “This is what I think of you, you worthless miserable fellow Americans—I will dump my garbage on you.” Of course, they do not want to actually say this, so they pretend that, oh-oh, the wind just happened to lift the garbage out of my truck, oh well. Maybe they are even salving their own consciences by pretending that they are not really dumping their garbage when they do this.

As I said, I would not have believed this story had it not been told to me by two people who do not know one another or live in the same town.

A Landscape Thick with Stories

Every landscape is a palimpsest thick with stories. Where I live in Oklahoma is an example.

First, there is the story of its evolutionary past, for example when the part of Oklahoma in which I live was the bottom of a shallow sea, creating limestone filled with seashells, or when the Ice Ages caused Oklahoma to be cold and dry, a place where spruce trees and mastodons lived.

Second, there are the primordial human effects just after the most recent Ice Age. The native peoples who originally lived here were hunters and gatherers, but they deliberately manipulated the environment. They often set fires, which cleared away some of the forests and created grasslands on which game animals could graze and browse. The post oak forests were open and light because the fires did not often kill the large trees, and the oak seedlings could resprout.

Third, there are the secondary human effects caused by later immigrants, not only whites but the Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Muskogees, and Seminoles, and later by dozens of other tribes. Not only the whites but the “Five Nations” of natives displaced from the east brought agriculture and ranching.

Finally, there are the modern effects caused by the exploitative human economy: urbanization, pollution (especially from oil extraction), and global warming.

When I walk or drive through Oklahoma, I think about all of these layers of natural and human effects on the landscape. I see myself as part of that last layer (I hope a less destructive member of that layer than are many other people), and therefore as part of a complex set of stories.

In contrast, when someone drives a big truck as fast as possible, spewing black smoke from the tailpipes, they are experiencing only one story: “me, me, me, me.”

Another place that is a palimpsest of stories is central California, where I will be going to my fortieth high school class reunion tomorrow. The San Joaquin Valley was once a vast marsh teeming with wildlife, with water coming into it from snowmelt through the Kings, Kaweah, and Tule Rivers. Today nearly all of this water has been diverted into agricultural irrigation and (to a lesser extent) domestic use.

The landscape has been totally altered into agricultural fields and weed patches, with just a few exceptions. When I grew up there, I thought I was lucky to live out in the countryside, away from the air pollution of Los Angeles. But today, and even back then, the air quality of the Visalia-Tulare-Porterville area is one of the worst in the nation, and the environment was (is?) permeated by pesticides. The story of human alteration and pollution of the land overlies the natural environment. And part of the human story includes economic injustice: migrant farm workers barely make a living, in that pesticide-drenched land, on vast farms owned by rich corporations.

We need to be able to read the palimpsest of stories on the landscape in order to understand the Earth on which we live and which is endangered by our activities.