Storming the Gates of Paradise (18 page)

Until recently, gold was the measure of value for all other things, perhaps because it is exceedingly stable and relatively scarce. Gold was money, and money in its material form was gold, the fulcrum between the concrete world of things and the abstraction that is the exchange value of things. Gold was an anchor for national economies, the basis for their currency. Until 1933, higher-denomination U.S. coins were still made of gold (while paper money was originally just a receipt for governmental gold and silver, a receipt that could be exchanged for the metal on demand). In the early 1970s, the United States went off the gold standard, the system that based monetary value on gold reserves, and now none of the world’s
major economies are tied to the gold still sitting in vaults. The
Economist
calls these national stockpiles the “spent fuel of an obsolete monetary system.” Older financiers still think of gold as money, but younger ones recognize that it is no longer a good investment.

The scramble by nations such as Australia and Britain to sell off much of their gold reserves has contributed to the rapid decline in gold prices in recent years. This decline has the benefit of curtailing some mining operations and the detriment of bankrupting some companies before they’ve cleaned up their mess. Unlike most other extractive-industry products such as oil, gold has little practical use: of the 4,000 tons used worldwide each year, about 85 percent goes into jewelry. About four-fifths of all the gold ever mined is still around, in bank vaults, home stashes, and jewelry stores (by volume, this is not much; all the gold ever mined, an estimated 125,000 tons, would form a sixty-foot cube; 90 percent of that gold has been mined since 1848). How do you weigh gold against a whole landscape? The quantities of gold extracted from the Sierra during the Gold Rush are diminutive compared to the splendor of a four-hundred-mile expanse of pristine mountain range containing grizzlies, elk, antelope, spring-run salmon—all gone from that part of the world now—and downslope, clear fast-flowing rivers, a big clean bay full of wetlands, aquatic life, edible fish. Even if you could put a price on this, you couldn’t put one on the dozens of small Indian nations who had woven the places and creatures into marvelous stories, names, and local knowledge, the richest legacy of people who didn’t much prize material culture, who had no use for gold, and who were devastated and sometimes annihilated by the Gold Rush. It is all this that was being traded in for gold then and, on the other side of the Sierra Nevada, is still being traded in now. There is no more classic tale of the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.

The California Gold Rush wasn’t an anomaly; it was the beginning of modern large-scale gold mining, which is still going on. In America’s new gold boom in Nevada, the dimensions are staggering. As the California Gold Rush tapered off, miners began to move across the Sierra into Nevada. Only Virginia City’s Comstock Lode is remembered now, but there were gold and silver mines across the state, with the usual effects. The indigenous inhabitants were displaced and
slaughtered, and the native food sources—fish, game, and piñon pines—were devastated. To feed the smelters of Eureka in central Nevada, all the piñon and juniper for fifty miles were cut down by 1878. Nowadays, Nevada produces nearly 10 percent of the world’s gold and three-quarters of the nation’s. This new gold rush began slowly when geologists located the Carlin Trend—a fifty-by-five-mile belt across northeastern Nevada’s Humboldt Basin bearing “invisible gold,” gold in particles too small to be seen. The first big new open-pit mines came in 1965, but it was the rise of gold prices in the 1980s (after decades of price regulation) and the invention of cyanide heap-leaching that made mining such low-grade ore profitable. Higher-grade ore is still refined in roasters and mills, but the low-grade stuff is leached outdoors. In this method, pulverized ore is heaped up in huge sloping mounds atop a plastic liner, and cyanide solution is poured through it. The solution carries much of the gold with it as it runs off, and the gold is extracted from the poisonous solution.

Gold is now mined on a scale none of those men in the sepia-tone photographs could have imagined, from ore far more low-grade than they could have considered worthwhile. The Mary Harrison mine, which opened in 1853 in Coulterville, near Yosemite, yielded about one-third to one-half an ounce of gold per ton. In 1997, the Toronto-based Barrick Corporation’s Betze/Post mine, in the center of the Carlin Trend, mined 159 million tons of rock and earth to produce 1.6 million ounces of gold—about a hundredth of an ounce per ton. Its pit is now 1,600 feet deep, a mile wide, and a mile and a half long. Nevada anti-mining activist Chris Sewell points out the irony that “invisible gold” leads to mines that can be seen from space, with 350-foot-high leach heaps covering as much as three hundred acres along with the colossal pits.

The modern history of gold mining is about these technologies that have made it profitable to go after lower and lower grades of ore. From hydraulic mining then to cyanide heap-leach mining now, more and more land and water are disrupted and polluted for every ounce of gold. Today’s mining is intensely toxic: cyanide is so deadly that a teaspoon of 2 percent solution will kill a human being, and some cyanide remains inside the mine tailings. In earlier years, the cyanide-laced water
was left to break down in open ponds, where waterfowl would sometimes land and die; nowadays, mines are obligated to net over such poison ponds. Because much of the ore contains other heavy metals, excavating it, breaking it up and watering it, or making it accessible to rain and other natural water sources make it a potent contaminant. Often ore contains sulfur, an element that forms sulfuric acid when exposed to air and water. Sulfuric acid thus formed is called acid mine drainage: it draws the heavy metals—including arsenic, antimony, lead, mercury—out with it into the environment. At the Yerington pit, for example, a toxic plume is moving toward the Yerington Paiute Reservation well field, but the corporation that created the impending catastrophe has gone bankrupt. The Paiutes are working on getting Superfund designation for the site. One way to describe modern gold mines is to say that they are displacing earth and water on a gargantuan scale and producing and dispersing toxins in smaller quantities, with gold a proportionally minute by-product of this disruption.

Water is being sacrificed for gold in Nevada’s gold rush, as it was in California’s—but in Nevada water is being both contaminated and used up. Though Nevada is the driest state in the union, the slender Humboldt River meanders nearly four hundred miles west from its beginnings in the northeast corner of the state. Springs and mountain streams feed the river, and the region is blessed with huge aquifers not far below the surface of the earth—but eighteen of the large mines in the Humboldt region are working below this water table. To do so, they “dewater” the mine site, by pumping out the underground water at stunning rates—the Betze/Post mine alone has pumped more than half a million acre-feet, and the Lone Tree mine northeast of Winnemucca pumps an amount equal to about 14 percent of the Humboldt’s annual flow. Groundwater, remarks water historian Mark Reisner, “is as nonrenewable as oil.” A deficit of 5 million acre-feet is being created in the Humboldt Basin, 1.6 trillion gallons, the equivalent of twenty-five years of the river’s annual flow. Some of this water is pumped into the Humboldt River, where it’s generating higher streamflow and wetter wetlands before it leaves the region for good. Some of it is being used to irrigate alfalfa fields. Some is used to process the ore, which contaminates it with cyanide, acids, and
heavy metals. Some of it is “recharged”—put back into the ground—but it will not necessarily be the same pure water that was pumped out, nor will it necessarily go back where it came from.

Nevada hydrologist and Great Basin Mine Watch director Tom Myers estimates that the water table around each mine is being drawn down more than a thousand feet, with localized “cones of depression”—deep subterranean dry areas. When the mines stop pumping out the water, some water will be drawn back to these dry areas to fill up the mine pits to the water table, creating a whole string of deep dead lakes, including the two largest artificial lakes wholly in Nevada. Local springs, streams, and parts of the Humboldt River may dry up. The water table will be radically rearranged. Nobody knows exactly what will happen: Myers’s models allow for various scenarios, none of them pretty. I asked Myers why most of the anti-mining activists are working in places like Washington and Montana, when most of the gold mining is in Nevada. “Nobody moves to northern Nevada for the scenery,” he said. “You and I know how beautiful it is, but the public doesn’t.”

Few writers and artists have celebrated the Great Basin the way they have extolled sandstone canyons and mesas, and maybe that’s why so much of it is still unpopulated and unprotected. It is a gorgeous, austere stretch of country, with great seas of fragrant sagebrush and grass sweeping up to juniper and piñon at higher elevations. The mountains in this basin-and-range country conceal marvelous clefts and canyons where streams make small oases of wild rose, cottonwood, aspen, and willow; where butterflies, songbirds, and the endangered—but unlisted—sage grouse can be found. Another endangered subspecies, the Lahontan cutthroat trout, lives in the Humboldt River (and in two other rivers, though in the Carson and Truckee rivers it has interbred with introduced trout species). Pronghorn still range in the more remote places—but mining is doing in those more remote places, too.

More than 350,000 acres of roadless Forest Service land vanished in Nevada between 1985 and 1997, largely because of mining and prospecting roads; and the figures for vanishing land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management are probably greater, but no one has calculated them. Mining is devouring Nevada, and
the state is getting very little in return: twelve thousand jobs and a 1 percent tax on the gross (about 25 percent of the gross is profit). Most of the profits go out of state, or out of the country. Of course, the question of whose land it really is has yet to be settled.

One oft-neglected fact about the California Gold Rush is that it took place on land that still legally belonged to its resident tribes. One of the issues in Nevada’s gold rush region is that the Western Shoshone, whose homeland it is, have never ceded their land to the U.S. government or accepted the payment for it that the United States tried to force on them anyway (and the payment of $40 or so million is pure peanuts compared to the quantities of gold being taken from the region every year, as were the diminutive payments California Indians received for their land long after the Gold Rush). In southern Crescent Valley, Nevada, a huge new mine has opened up, Cortez Gold’s Pipeline Deposit mine. For thousands of years in this area, there had been nothing but sagebrush grassland and open space, through which any creature might move freely; and even a few years back, when I worked as a land rights activist with the Western Shoshone, it was open space threatened by nothing worse than a few cows. Now its expanse is dominated by steep slopes of waste rock piles and fenced-off cyanide leach heaps, thousands of feet long and hundreds high, mounds that mean an equally large hole exists nearby. Black pipes lead into the distance, where a grid of rectangular recharge ponds gleams—the mine pumps about 13,000 gallons per minute to get under the water table.

The recharge isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. The water that does sink back into the ground will have changed in quality as it filters through soil on its way, and much of it is spreading into the valley instead, making it unnaturally green—and turning the family cemetery of the Danns, an extended family of Western Shoshones who have been living in the valley for generations, into spongy marsh. Traditional Western Shoshones have been fighting to get their land back throughout most of the twentieth century. But mining means that not merely the ownership but the very survival of the land is now at stake. In earlier
times, whatever the land’s legal status, it was still there, full of life; but it is now being bled dry, dug up, and depleted of its wildlife.

I asked Carrie Dann, a traditional Shoshone elder, about the mining in Crescent Valley, and she said, with an outrage unblunted by five years of living with the Pipeline mine and thirty years of living with the smaller Cortez mine nearer her home:

Mining is against our culture, is against our spiritual ways. They’re pumping all the life out of the earth. It’s not humane, it’s not right. It’ll be being paid for by children who’s not even here yet. To me, to pump water like that for the sake of gold . . . why not keep the water clean so people can drink? The gold mining that destroyed California with the mercury was on the surface, but what’s happening now is underground. How do you control that? How do you deal with underground contamination? Are they going to tell me that they’re going to control underground water contamination when we can’t clean above-ground contamination?

To me water is a gift of life.

If gold has been prized because it is the most inert element, changeless and incorruptible, water is prized for the opposite reason—its fluidity, mobility, changeability that make it a necessity and a metaphor for life itself. To value gold over water is to value economy over ecology, that which can be locked up over that which connects all things. The oldest story I know about gold is really about gold and water, and I thought of it when Chris Sewell, who heads the Western Shoshone Defense Project, took me to look at the recharge ponds and the acid mine drainage of the shut-down Buckhorn mine, just over the mountains behind the Danns’ home. A few newly bulldozed embankments were all that kept the acid out of beautiful Willow Creek, which runs between the two sides of the mine. A scientist had told Chris that when the acid was still running down the mining road into the stream, the road was full of dead earthworms, and the stream was dying.

King Midas, says Ovid, was “delighted with the misfortune which had
befallen him,” until even the water he tried to drink turned to gold as it touched his lips. Parched with thirst and surrounded by gold, he begged the god Bacchus to take back his gift. Bacchus sent him to a sacred spring to “wash away his crime” and recover his ability to drink, to touch, to live. Afterward, Midas hated riches and dwelt in the forest. Midas is also the name of a tiny town just up the road from the huge Twin Creeks mine—the mine that, when it proposed putting a huge tailings pile over the site of the 1911 Shoshone Mike massacre, assured Western Shoshones that those tailings would “protect the site in perpetuity.” Twin Creeks was pressured into putting its waste elsewhere, but many other archaeological and sacred sites have been erased or desecrated by mining.