Green Greens - The Push for a Restoration Economy

By Justin Ringsak, Unfiltered 11-29-07

Conventional wisdom regards environmental restoration as a cost, but, throughout the West, that old notion is being turned on its head. These days, there is a new phrase on the tongues of progressives and greens, a phrase that conjures up images of hundred dollar bills floating down pristine mountain streams: “Restoration Economy.” Organizations such as Western Progress, a western policy think tank with the support of former Montana Congressman Pat Williams, and the New York-based Progressive States Network (that’s right, New York), are banking on the reality of that tagline.

The two organizations recently published a report addressing the issue, “Building a Restoration Economy: Legislation and Practices at the State Level” (http://www.progressivestates.org/files/restorationeconomy/restorationeconomy.pdf), in an effort to show how the concept of a restoration economy has already borne fruit in the West. It’s an intriguing concept, and one that, according to the report, is working, though unfortunately the report, much like a good fishing story, is big on rhetoric and a bit low on hard data. It states that Montana “was the clear leader in promoting the development of the restoration economy” because it has “a dedicated office within the Department of Natural Resources and Conservation and funding for restoration economy programs from the legislature.” That is all well and good, but pardon me if I am not falling over with boundless enthusiasm for the restoration economy because of “a dedicated office.”

If Montana, or any western state, is going to have a true restoration economy, it will be based on the ground, along the rivers and up in the mountains, not in any office. Case in point: the Upper Clark Fork River Basin, which, as the nation’s largest (and, of course, sexiest) contiguous Superfund site, can be viewed as a sort of restoration economy prototype. And there is a lot of restoration to be done. Let’s take a quick inventory.

100-plus years of hard rock mining have left us with, starting at the Clark Fork River headwaters near Butte and moving downstream to Missoula:
-Lots and lots of fun waste rock on and around the Butte hill
-A tailings dump buried beneath the Butte Civic Center
-A tailings-lined Silver Bow Creek so altered from its natural state that no one really has much of an idea what that natural state might have looked like
-Beautiful Lake Berkeley
-The black slag piles and other remnants of smelting near Anaconda and its monolithic old smokestack
-The artist-formerly-known as the Opportunity Ponds (which are dry and not ponds at all), now known as the BP/ARCO Toxic Waste Repository, a joyous collection of smelting waste and tailings that covers hundreds of acres near the town of Opportunity
-“Slickens” throughout the Deer Lodge valley, patches of soil where little to no vegetation will grow due to tailings deposition and/or the long legacy of air pollution that resulted from smelting operations in Anaconda
-And a couple million cubic yards of tailings that were washed up against the Milltown Dam near Missoula in a 1908 flood, that are now being removed, along with the Dam, and hauled by rail back upstream to the BP/ARCO Toxic Waste Repository, where they magically become "rich topsoil"

Clearly, the restoration business in the Upper Clark Fork is booming. Some substantial restoration work has already been completed. Tailings have been removed from Silver Bow Creek, it has been fairly successfully revegetated from Butte west to Ramsay, and the restoration is continuing to proceed downstream. The Milltown Dam removal is already underway. The majority of the waste rock on the Butte hill has been capped with 18 inches of clean topsoil. Anaconda has a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus on top of one old smelter site, complete with sand traps made of black slag dust that I’m sure have caused many visitors to go, “What the hell is that?” In a nutshell, restoration has been going on in the Upper Clark Fork for over a decade, and it will continue for the foreseeable future.

Is all this restoration contributing to the economy of the region? Ballpark estimates put the total dollar amount that will have been spent on restoration, once all is said and done in some distant tailings-free future full of clean streams and happy woodland creatures, at over one billion dollars. That’s some good economy.

But where does the money for a restoration economy come from? In the case of the Upper Clark Fork, it comes from industry. In 1998, the State of Montana partially settled its Natural Resource Damage Claim against ARCO, the responsible party for environmental damages under federal Superfund law, for $215 million; several portions of the lawsuit are still underway. $86 million went to clean up Silver Bow Creek, and the remaining $129 million, for the restoration of the Upper Clark Fork, is administered by the state’s Natural Resource Damage Program, with $54 million and change granted out from 2000 through 2006 for restoration projects around the basin. That’s a lot of restoration, and, considering that the Upper Clark Fork, including Missoula, has a population of only about 165,000, that’s also a huge economic impact and one that does indeed compare to the natural resource industry’s impact. When it reopened in 2004, the Montana Resources mine in Butte had a payroll of about $15 million plus profit-sharing bonuses. Restoration may soon rival the natural resource industry in economic importance in the basin, if not surpass it.

The potential benefits and pitfalls of a restoration economy are clearly on display in the Upper Clark Fork, and, as groups like Western Progress and the Progressive States Network continue to push the idea, the rest of the West would be wise to keep tabs on Montana’s redheaded stepchild of a river, and to note how communities in the basin are holding industry accountable for the true costs of natural resource extraction, restoring their environments and strengthening their economies at the same time.

Let’s hope that the infusion of a profit motive does not sacrifice restoration quality for quantity, as is often the case when economies scale up. It is important for those invested in preserving the natural world to remember that, while it might be nice to make some cash along the way, restoration is a valuable and worthwhile end in and of itself. And let's also remember that, while restoration economies are a nice idea whose time may have come, they are not magic tickets to some new Western paradise where everything is clean and wild and everyone is rich and fat. Then again, looking at a sandhill crane wade in a restored Silver Bow Creek, maybe they are magic. Just a bit.

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