Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- How We Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Park
- The Success of the Military Coup
- Boys in Custody and the Women Who Abuse Them
- Everything Is Risky, Except Being 7 Years Old
- The Man Who Wants to Shoot Islamist Terrorists Straight to Hell With Pork Bullets
- The Guerrilla War on Cancer
- The New Bronze Age
| How We Can Learn to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb Park Posted: 08 Jul 2013 05:47 PM PDT  Are we ready for a national park commemorating the atomic bomb? A bill to create just such a park, the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, passed the House and is in the U.S. Senate now, with the idea of linking the three places most associated with the development of nuclear weapons into a collective unit open to the public. And the idea is doing better than it did in the last Congress, when the House voted it down. All told, there are currently 401 sites being administered by the National Park Service, 59 of them "official" national parks like Yosemite and Yellowstone (or Kobuk Valley and Pinnacles) and the balance national seashores, battlefield parks, monuments, recreation areas, and the like. With a few possible exceptions, like Civil War battlefields, all provide a simple narrative—this is majestic, this is fun, this is important, or even pushing the boat out a little, slavery is bad. The narrative is a little trickier when we talk nukes, even if we’re talking history with a capital “H.” The goal of the Manhattan Project project would be neither to praise nuclear weapons nor to bury them, but to preserve some key sites and "provide for comprehensive interpretation and public understanding of this nationally significant story," according to the bill spearheaded by Washington state's Sen. Maria Cantwell. Adding to the complexity, the three (initial) locales are in three widely separated states, some of the sites are still umm, contaminated, and facilities currently held by the Department of Energy would remain in their remit, with the Park Service offering public education. The idea of commemorating the bomb’s development at this level has been around for at least a dozen years, and in 2004 Congress directed the departments of the Interior and Energy to study the idea and report back. Two years ago Sunday, the Department of the Interior did so, recommending that Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Hanford, Washington, be folded into the prospective park. The Congressional Budget Office in May estimated the start-up costs would come to about $21 million over the next four years.  There was a time that Oak Ridge didn’t want to toot its own horn. (PHOTO: PUBLIC DOMAIN) In a sense, a de facto Manhattan Project park already exists in its constituent pieces. There's a now 64-year-old Museum of Science and Energy at Oak Ridge, and an interpretive center at Hanford, and the Bradbury Science Museum and Los Alamos Historical Society (the latter alongside the Atomic Heritage Foundation) do yeoman's work in New Mexico. At Hanford, Reactor B—Easy-Bake Oven for the world's first plutonium—became a National Historic Landmark five years ago. In addition, two decades ago DOE designated eight different sites as “signature facilities,” six of them at the three putative park locales. The other two are the metallurgical lab at the University of Chicago, where the first controlled fission reaction occurred, and the Trinity Site 210 miles south of Los Alamos, where the world's first atomic bomb—dubbed “Gadget”—was tested. The National Park Service already takes care of the ranch house a few miles from Trinity's ground zero, even though the public is only allowed to visit this particular National Historic Landmark two days—make that one day, thanks to budget cuts—out of the year. In a sense that's OK; writer S.L. Sanger described it as possibly "the most nondescript of all spots in America where something truly momentous occurred." The DOE has long argued these facilities have "extraordinary historical significance"—at the World Heritage Site level—and “deserve commemoration as national treasures. There's both a certain irony and a certain completeness in suggesting World Heritage status. In 1996 the U.S. abstained from voting to include the Hiroshima Peace Memorial on the list since it was a "war site" and it presumably would lack the historical context of why the U.S. felt compelled to drop the bomb. But at the same time, the State Department suggested an "alpha to omega" proposal that would twin the Hiroshima with Trinity or the University of Chicago lab as a joint World Heritage Site. Writing about that controversy in a chapter for the book A Fearsome Heritage, Australia’s Olwen Beazley cites conversations he had with a U.S. representative to the World Heritage Committee who cited the brouhaha the Smithsonian had just had over an exhibition of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. At the time, Tom Crouch, curator at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, asked: "Do you want to do an exhibit to make veterans feel good, or do you want an exhibition that will lead our visitors to think about the consequences of the atomic bombing of Japan? Frankly, I don’t think we can do both." With that mess under its belt—the Smithsonian blinked, canceling the exhibit until a less controversial one could go up—Beazley writes that the U.S. was not against the Hiroshima nomination per se, "but was just trying to protect political interests at home." It's not difficult to imagine the federal government facing similar contortions this time, even with the passage of almost two decades more. “The primary issue in both chambers,” the president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation opined in the Los Angeles Times last month, “remains the concern that preserving and interpreting the Manhattan Project sites would inappropriately celebrate the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the close of World War II.” Even with passage of the bill those with ideological axes will have their grinders poised for quick work. Criticism might this time come more from the left, which in the 112th Congress opposed the Manhattan Project park idea as a form of nuclear cheerleading. "The 'Bomb Park' is a mistake. We should not spend another $21,000,000 more to 'spike the nuclear football,'” former Congressman Dennis Kucinich said last year. “We are defined by what we celebrate. We should not celebrate nuclear bombs." He argued that any park instead should mark efforts toward nuclear disarmament, and not "admiration at our cleverness as a species." Given that President Obama is a partisan of both disarmament and the park proposal, perhaps we can acknowledge history and yet still have a future. As the Smithsonian's Arthur Molella wrote a decade ago in History and Technology: An International Journal, "Once literally hidden cities, they remain steeped in Cold War culture and ideology, yet they face uncertain futures as weapons production needs change, hazardous waste dangers become more apparent and homeland security is threatened." But in the end, he saw these facilities as a boon for understanding "the Bomb," even as anthropologist Janice Harper, in Anthropology in Action, wondered two years later if any nuance might be glossed over in "just another roadside attraction." In his new book, The Archaeology of Science, behavioral archaeologist Michael Brian Schiffer argues that there are things to learn from places like Los Alamos beyond the cultural or social navel-gazing that inspires dissent. That practical bent is also observed by Douglas Mercer, who wrote in Museums & Social Issues that Reactor B specifically could be a sort of ground zero for talking about nuclear clean-up, "the vita activa of long-term stewardship." The just-passed 150th anniversaries of the battles of Gettysburg and Vicksburg suggest that even divisive topics can be dealt with soberly and honestly with the passage of time. Maybe the same will be true now of some more recent, and radioactive, history. |
| The Success of the Military Coup Posted: 08 Jul 2013 12:51 PM PDT  Last week, on July 1, the Egyptian army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, went to the country's president and demanded that he resign. “Over my dead body!” President Mohamed Morsi, the democratically elected head of government installed after a 2012 coup that deposed the 30-year presidency of Hosni Mubarak, reportedly responded. Two days later, on July 3, the general announced that Morsi was out and that the head of the constitutional court was now the interim president of Egypt. The event had the advantage of popular support—protestors took to the streets to demand Morsi's removal on June 30 and cheers erupted across the country after the military announced it was "suspending the constitution and appointing the head of the constitutional court as interim head of state"—but it was still highly controversial. "How is ousting a democratically elected leader a win for democracy?" Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel tweeted. And as Barack Obama put it the night after Morsi's ouster, he was "deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove [President Morsi] and suspend the Egyptian constitution." Coups just aren't the way healthy democracies do business.  Gen. Raoul Cédras (right) peers at Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, shortly before ousting him from power in 1991. But while any coup around the world is troublesome for advocates of good government, it turns out that our coups are getting better, and less common. The coup has been around almost as long as mankind has had government. Napoleon, Julius Caesar, and Leonid Brezhnev all came to power that way. There are currently 15 world leaders who got their jobs via the coup, including the heads of state of Oman, Fiji, Madagascar, and the Congo. One source says the term coup d’état was first used in this (government overthrow) sense to describe Napoleon’s seizure of power in France in 1799. This isn't entirely well sourced, but Napoleon is as good a place to start as any. We've even had a coup in the United States. In an event known as the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898, following Reconstruction, a mob of 1,500 Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from the legitimately elected Republican government of Wilmington, North Carolina, made up of a white mayor and a biracial city council, and installed their own politicians. Some pundits claim that such a means of changing government really isn't so bad. As Paul Collier argued in the Washington Post back in 2008, writing about Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe:
But if our own coups are rare, we often participate in those of other countries. In 1983, in Grenada, the U.S. military overthrew the government of Hudson Austin. The United States was heavily involved in the 1973 Chilean military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende when he proved too socialist—eventually Augusto Pinochet took over and established a brutal (and business-friendly) dictatorship. And in the infamous TPAJAX Project of 1953, the U.S. overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran when he nationalized the country’s oil industry. Historically, the coup d’état has been one of the most common ways of transferring power in countries that don't have stable democracies. Dictators often want to stay in power indefinitely, until death; coups are the primary way that they are removed from office when things sour. But a military coup is just a tactic. Military coups can, as we saw in Egypt a year ago, also topple democratically elected governments. But the mere presence of a military coup isn't necessarily good or bad. Many governments have come to understand how useful coups can be for an opponent—any opponent. In 1949, Costa Rican President José Figueres Ferrer abolished the country's military after victory in a 44-day civil war, and moved its military budget over into security, education, and culture. This was done in order to safeguard democracy; the country had come to realize that all its military ever did was overthrow governments. It's not like Costa Rica needed a massive defense system to fight back against an invasion from Bermuda. Haitian dictator Francois Duvalier, however, gutted his country's military in order to curtail democracy. One of his most interesting actions after winning the presidency in 1957 was to scale back the power of the military by replacing the entire general staff with loyalists and then creating a vast personal volunteer army to protect his own interests. In 1959 he created a rural militia, the Milice Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (or Tonton Macoutes after the Haitian term for bogeyman). In just two years this personal security force grew to twice the size of the real army. This was in a specific effort to prevent a military coup. The Tonton kept the country relatively coup-free (and the Duvalier family in power) for 29 years. When the president's son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, was finally overthrown in 1986, his successor eliminated the Tonton Macoutes and restored most of the power of the Haitian military. Since then Haiti has had four coups. But coups may be getting a little better—not just at successfully removing dictators from power, but at allowing people to choose their own representation. New research by political scientists Nikolay Marinov and Hein Goemans indicates that, since 1991, most of the world's coups have resulted in elections.
There are fewer coups, and those that do occur are far more likely to result in elections within five years. Marinov and Goemans posit that it's international pressure that helps determine the aftermath of these events. Countries that are heavily dependent on Western aid are more likely to hold elections after coups than those that aren't. This was not true before 1991. On the ground, in real countries, this gets a little complicated, however. Technically, there was a coup in Egypt. And it was followed by an election within five years, resulting in a democratically elected government … which was then overthrown by another military coup. The final outcome of all of this is unclear. The coup offers the tempting idea that if a government is having trouble, mostly with the economy, but often also with establishing its own authority, it might just make sense to sidestep democracy—perhaps just briefly—and overthrow those in power to restore order and reset priorities by putting someone new in. This is troubling. As Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker:
If a coup isn't a sign of a healthy democracy, it's also not necessarily a sign that things are getting worse. Stable democracies don't have military coups; but democratizing nations have lots of them. It may, indeed, just be part of the natural process of becoming a democracy with the rule of law. Maybe. |
| Boys in Custody and the Women Who Abuse Them Posted: 08 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  The older authority figure wins the trust of the young target by cultivating a false friendship, having heart-to-heart conversations, giving gifts, offering protection. And then the sex ensues, sometimes forced, sometimes seemingly consensual. It is a classic predatory tactic known as “grooming,” and no one familiar with it could have been terribly surprised when a new report from the U.S. Department of Justice declared that young people in the country’s juvenile detention facilities are being victimized in just this way. The youngsters in custody are often deeply troubled, lacking parents, looking for allies. And the people in charge of the facilities wield great power over the day-to-day lives of their charges. What was a genuine shock to many was the finding that in the vast majority of instances, it was female staff members who were targeting and exploiting the male teens in their custody. Abused youngsters said that officials lured them into sexual relationships by giving them special treatment, treating them like a favorite, giving gifts and pictures.The phenomenon—a particularly unexamined corner of the nation’s long-troubled juvenile justice system—presents an array of challenges for those concerned about better protecting young people in custody: encouraging male teens to understand such sex is, in fact, a crime, that it is never really consensual, and that its long term effects can be seriously harmful; requiring corrections officials to stop blaming the young boys and meaningfully punish the female staffers; and establishing standards of conduct meant to end the abuse. “Many corrections leaders continue to minimize this abuse, arguing that it’s the kids who are manipulating the staff, that these boys are asking for it,” said Lovisa Stannow, executive director of the California-based non-profit Just Detention International, which advocates for the elimination of prison rape. “That’s simply not good enough.” The Justice Department first discovered the startling form of abuse in 2010, when it surveyed more than 9,000 youngsters living in juvenile halls and group homes. More than 10 percent of the respondents said they’d been sexually abused by staff and 92 percent said their abuser was female. In the last three years, the numbers haven’t changed much. The Justice Department released its second report last month, and this time researchers surveyed more than 8,700 juveniles housed in 326 facilities across the country. In all, the facilities house more than 18,000 juveniles, representing about one quarter of the nation’s total number of youngsters living in detention centers. Drawing on their sample, Justice Department researchers estimate that 1,390 juveniles in the facilities they examined have experienced sex abuse at the hands of the staff supervising them, a rate of nearly eight percent. Twenty percent who said they were victimized by staff said it happened on more than 10 occasions. Nine out of 10 victims were males abused by female staff. Nearly two-thirds of the abused youngsters said that the officials lured them into sexual relationships by giving them special treatment, treating them like a favorite, giving gifts and pictures. Twenty-one percent said staff gave them drugs or alcohol in exchange for sex. Stannow said that the rate of abuse perpetrated by female guards on male victims is the result of a “dangerous combination” of cultural and institutional problems, not the least of which is the fact that women forcing males into sex does not comport with society’s conventional definition of rape. “When you have an extreme power differential and absolute unchecked power, bad things start happening,” Stannow said. “When you combine this with a culture where sex abuse by females on males isn’t taken seriously, then you have the perfect set-up for women with all this power to get away with it.” Stannow and others say that the young male victims themselves may not even consider their relationships with women to constitute sex abuse. They might consider it consensual because they didn’t actively fight off their abusers. “The biggest concern for me is what this means they’re not getting inside detention, which is a positive relationship with adults and with authority figures. They’ve not learned what those positive relationships should be like, and, for many, they’ve never had them in their life,” said Michele Deitch, an attorney and senior lecturer at the University of Texas’ School of Public Affairs in Austin. “These boys aren’t getting the kinds of treatment and programming that are supposed to make them more productive citizens and healthier youth,” said Deitch, who focuses on improving safety conditions in prisons and juvenile detention centers. “Many have experienced trauma their entire lives and now this is just more trauma for them to deal with.” Reggie Wilkinson, the former director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said that consensual sex between a corrections officer and an inmate is impossible given the power imbalance between the two. But he also said that, in some cases, both female guards and the boys they molest share some responsibility. “There’s no such thing as consensual sex when you are supervising someone, regardless of their age, but the reality of it is that some of the guys in prison are very persuasive and some of the women are very persuasive,” Wilkinson said. “I’m not sure anybody has got a real handle on why the Bureau of Justice Statistics is finding these kinds of numbers, but it’s on the radar screen of a lot of people.” Wilkinson and Stannow agree that it is important to keep women as detention facility personnel. They often do great work. But the predators, they say, must be identified, halted, and prosecuted. “I think in many cases female staff are better suited than males,” Wilkinson said. “A good mix of staff is what we always want. That so-called motherly impact is a big deal and women who are stern but fair with the inmates I think can perform that job as well as any male could.” This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Everything Is Risky, Except Being 7 Years Old Posted: 08 Jul 2013 10:28 AM PDT  There is a chance, while you’re reading this, that your computer explodes. There is also a chance that your roof collapses, a wolf breaks through your front door and eats you, an alien pod sucks you up through an alternate dimension you didn’t even realize existed, or a sudden giant sinkhole engulfs your house. That’s all to say, everything we do, including “nothing,” carries with it some risk. An inherent truth of the human condition: it will end. When that will happen depends on an unquantifiable number of factors—but the factors themselves? Actually quantifiable! In their new book The Norm Chronicles, Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter tell the story of three characters—Prudence, Kelvin, and Norm—through a number of situations. The book teases out and explains the risk accompanying a number of everyday scenarios, while explaining how different people might react. The main unit of risk-measurement is the MicroMort, which is a one-in-a-million chance of death. For example, a soldier in Afghanistan faces 47 MicroMorts a day, while giving birth exposes a mother to 120 MicroMorts. The three characters then make their decision by either weighing the risks of a given situation, being paralyzed by them, or just not caring at all. We spoke to Michael Blastland about his book and about being aware of risk in the world. So, this is a generic start-off question here, but I think it’s a valid one, as writing a book like this would probably make you consider your own mortality more frequently than others. What made you write this book about risk and the probability of death? Risk can also be a tyranny—with death and danger seemingly lurking behind every lamppost—and it can sometimes feel as if every news source and authority wanted to make us the slaves of nightmares. The way most of this is communicated, at least in the U.K., is horrible: confusing, often alarmist, often innumerate. We thought a couple of neat ideas could make it clearer—the MicroMort and MicroLife—cheery little units of fatal risk to help put it all in proportion. We also wanted to break some rules and mix the stats with the more human, storytelling side of chance and danger. And we wanted to throw in a couple of big ideas—like probability not existing. So I guess you could say we were motivated by reckless bravado to explore this richness by bringing these many different perspectives together, since that seems to us to be what risk really is: a great clash of diverse perspectives. “Being seven years old today in the U.K.—and probably the U.S., too—turns out to be about the safest thing anyone can be, ever.”What can people gain from being aware of the inherent risk in everything they do? There needs to be some balance, so you’re not, you know, calculating every breath you take, right? On the whole, is an average day more or less risky than people might imagine? What activities surprised you the most in their riskiness and non-riskiness? Of the characters in the book, which one do you personally most associate with? What is the risk associated with writing a book about risk? |
| The Man Who Wants to Shoot Islamist Terrorists Straight to Hell With Pork Bullets Posted: 08 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  Bullets with a lethal dose of pork. A progressive group is petitioning Idaho's governor to ban their sale. A firearms blogger calls them useless crap and says the shooting community "is better than this." And an Israeli blogger wonders if the IDF already uses them against Arab enemies. Brendan Hill, a small-business owner and Tea Party conservative in northern Idaho, has shot, shall we say, into his 15 minutes of fame pitching Jihawg Ammo. Bullets, he says, that are tipped with a pork-infused ballistic paint of his own concoction. Bullets that purport to do to jihadi terrorists what silver bullets do to werewolves—consign them to hell. But even Hill says the prospect of his customers actually needing the bullets for home defense is, "I'm the first to admit, let's face it, not very likely." “Our product is a means for them to stick up their proverbial middle finger at fill in the blank—Obama, Nancy Pelosi, even back to Bill Clinton.”The Internet was abuzz in late June with both humor and horror that the bullets, tipped in bright-pig-pink that Hill claims will terrify radical Islamic terrorists at the prospect of an unclean death (contact with pork being prohibited), and thus deny them a heavenly afterlife. "Do 72 virgins a favor," the Jihawg Ammo website reads. Text on the site, and Hill himself, say the bullets are intended for deterrence, not for battle. Well. Hill's central claim that the ammo is haraam, or unclean, has been pretty robustly debunked by religious scholars who note that Jihawg cherry-picks the Koran proscription against pork in Chapter 2, Verse 173 that "the flesh of swine" is forbidden, but fails to note the ending of the verse that "Allah is forgiving and merciful" and there is no sin for consuming pork in circumstances of dire need, or from accidental contact. Such as being shot in Idaho. Hill is a native of suburban Spokane who volunteers in community events. He's organized visits by athletes to spend time with children in hospitals, driven, he says, by his own sense of isolation and anxiety when one of his kids was in cancer treatment at a year old. He's been described, by those who've worked with him, as good-hearted, but weird. In a telephone interview that ranged from Thomas Jefferson dispatching the Navy and Marines to fight Barbary pirates in 1801 to last spring's Boston Marathon bombing to an increase in concealed carry permits leading to a decrease in violent crime, Hill explained what, exactly, are these bullets for? Here's the crux of it.
Brendan Hill: Dr. John Lott of the University of Chicago, he's the main economic guy who correlates all these FBI statistics, he is actually right when he says, “More guns, less crime.” We're taking that same principle: more Jihawg Ammo, less likelihood of a jihad attack. How do we know that? We have two instances recently this calendar year. We have the Tsarnaev brothers in Boston and we have those two crazy guys over in England who shot it out with the police because they didn't have fear. In fact the guys in England, they waited around! Let's ask the question, because it's a real question, if the cops were carrying Jihawg Ammo and it was known publicly throughout the world that they were carrying it, do you think they would have stuck around? Kevin Taylor: This is all being billed for home defense…. KT: I'm thinking, in my world view, the likelihood of jihadis coming to Spokane or North Idaho or…. KT: Or Boston, are pretty remote. KT: That's before 9-11, I don't know if that counts. KT: To be devil's advocate: If we look at all the violent acts committed by people against law-abiding citizens, the number committed by jihadis in this country, I think, are really minuscule. KT: I'd say almost none. KT: I'd say less than a handful if you go over time. KT: I guess I'm not going to lose sleep at night if I don't have Jihawg Ammo in my house. KT: So I'm wondering, when I see the humor and whatnot [cartoon characters and jokes on the website], I'm wondering if that's a selling point to make it—and I don't want to use the term a novelty or a gag thing, because it's real ammunition as you point out…. Hill defines Islamic radicals as those who advocate Sharia law and contends they are increasing throughout Western Europe via immigration and higher birth rates and this leads to people like the Tsarnaev brothers being recruited in Boston. That's that first point. The other side of it is … what we have really tapped into is this emotion on the right. There is a huge segment of society, let's just call it the red states, or those who are red who are stuck in the blue states, who for so long have been pushed into a corner by political correctness. Our product is a means for them to stick up their proverbial middle finger at fill in the blank—Obama, Nancy Pelosi, even back to Bill Clinton. They're pissed off and they're tired of playing nice, and being told they have to play nice while the other side plays dirty. Our product is a release for these people to say, “I'm buying a box because screw you, Obama, we know what's coming if we don't stand our ground.” That's the real power of our product—it's not the ammo, it's the message that it sends that we are American, we believe in American values and we're going to stand for 'em. I'm going to do it by buying this product, buying a shirt, putting a sticker on my car. That's the real message to our product. KT: So you have other merch? |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Richard Nixon initiated the War on Cancer by signing the National Cancer Act of 1971. It's been 42 years since then, so why haven't we defeated cancer? Scientifically, the War on Cancer has been a smashing success: We understand the basic biology of cancer better than that of any other common disease. And now we’re beginning to understand why we haven't cured cancer. Researchers have lately been working to comprehensively map cancer genomes. Their results show just how frustratingly complex cancer really is, and how hard it is going to be to find widely effective cures. Cancer is caused by genetic mutations that drive cancer cells to toss aside all natural checks and reproduce themselves uncontrollably. Mutations that drive this process are called "driver mutations." In the decades after National Cancer Act, scientists noticed that driver mutations seemed to occur in the same handful of genes over and over. Not surprisingly, most of the genes that pick up driver mutations play key roles in cell reproduction. This finding led to the idea that cancer is caused by damage to a select group of cell-reproduction genes, and that different cancer types could be cured by designing smart drugs that specifically target those mutated genes. After billions of dollars and many overly ambitious projections of victory, it is becoming clear that the War on Cancer can't be won with a massive offensive assault.The poster child for this idea, and one of the earliest successes, is the drug Gleevec, which directly targets the protein produced by a particular mutation common in certain leukemias. Most chemotherapy is a blunt instrument that indiscriminately poisons any rapidly reproducing cells in the patient's body. Gleevec and other smart drugs are more like laser-guided bombs, potentially able to destroy the cancer target while limiting damage to healthy cells. Ideally, the result is a more effective cancer treatment with fewer side effects. Smart drugs have been highly successful in very specific cases, but they haven't been the turning point in the War on Cancer that we hoped they would be. Many cancers turned out to be invulnerable to drugs that target a single mutation. Scientists reasoned that if we could find more cancer driver mutations, we could design new drugs that target those mutations and thus successfully treat a much wider range of cancers. And so the idea of systematically analyzing cancer genomes was born. CANCER GENOME PROJECTS ARE the latest front in the War on Cancer. The U.S. National Institutes of Health created The Cancer Genome Atlas (whose acronym, TCGA, consists of the abbreviations for each of the four chemical letters in DNA), and the United Kingdom's Wellcome Trust is assembling the Catalog of Somatic Mutations in Cancer (COSMIC). The goal of projects like these is to exhaustively map out the genetic terrain of cancer by identifying every mutation in the genomes of tumors from tens of thousands of cancer patients. The hope motivating these projects was that scientists would discover a core set of cancer driver mutations for each type of cancer, mutations that could be targeted with smart drugs. What researchers have discovered instead is that cancer is a much more fiendishly complicated genetic mess than we ever imagined. Instead of a handful of cancer-causing driver mutations for each cancer type, scientists have found that there are many different genetic paths to the same cancer. Many driver mutations for a particular cancer type occur in less than 20 percent of cancers of that type, which means that drugs targeted at that mutation will only help a minority of patients. A recent review of the subject noted that the COSMIC project has cataloged more than 800,000 mutations, covering nearly every gene in the human genome. The authors of the review suggested that "the cast of genes involved in any single cancer type will be in the neighborhood of 50–100." Cancer genome projects are now running into the problem common to all big data projects: sorting out the signal from the noise. Many cancer genomes are filled with mutations. Some are drivers, but others are merely "passenger mutations" that just come along for the ride and have no functional role in causing disease. Driver mutations are expected to be common, showing up over and over in different patients, while specific passenger mutations should be rare and occur no more often than random chance. However, sorting out drivers from passengers turns out to be not so easy; scientists are finding that rare driver mutations can account for a large fraction of cancers. So is there any hope at all of finding a cure for cancer? After more than 40 years, billions of dollars, and many overly ambitious projections of victory, it is becoming clear that the War on Cancer can't be won with a massive offensive assault; the reality is that we are fighting a guerrilla war. Cancer genome projects are providing us with a high-resolution map of the terrain, but it is more difficult than we thought to pick out the important high ground. There will be no dramatic announcement that we've cured cancer. What we'll continue to see is what has happened ever since the National Cancer Act of 1971: incremental, but steady progress, progress that is sometimes hard to see in our aging, increasingly cancer-prone population, but progress that nevertheless will alleviate suffering, prolong lives, and, in some cases, produce cures. |
| Posted: 08 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  In 2001, the giant mining firm Rio Tinto made a momentous decision: Its Bingham Canyon Mine—the oldest and richest open-pit copper mine in the world, in operation since 1906 and the largest man-made excavation in history—would be shut down. Since the early 1980s, the copper industry had been in a prolonged slump. As Europe and North America shifted from manufacturing to service economies, demand for copper flatlined and its price stagnated. Mine operators were making cents on the dollar. Bingham—a huge crater in the heart of the Oquirrh Mountains, 20 miles from Salt Lake City—was at a tipping point. To keep producing, the pit would have to keep expanding, and each expansion would be more expensive than the last. Eventually, the costs would outweigh the returns. Closure of the pit was slated for 2013. It would be the end of an era. That end did not come. If you visit Bingham Canyon today, you'll find a fleet of house-size dump trucks descending into the pit, loading up on rock, and climbing back up and out, around the clock. The pit is being widened and deepened to expose new ore, even as current mining operations continue. But the pit is not the whole story. Rio Tinto is planning to build a second mine on—or rather, under—the site. The aboveground operation will now be shut down around 2029. But Bingham Canyon is likely to go on. According to the current plan, the giant pit will give way to a giant underground mine, already in the early stages of construction, 2,000 feet beneath the pit's floor. The plan calls for five blocks of ore, each more than half a mile square and a third of a mile tall, to be carved out of the solid rock underneath the pit. In theory, the void created could swallow midtown Manhattan from 33rd Street to 57th Street; 500 feet of empty air would hang above the spire of the Empire State Building. The project would completely transform the mine's operations. Ore from an open pit is dug from above, like sugar spooned from a bowl. Ore from an underground mine is dug from below, like sugar spooned out from the bottom of a pile, except that the sugar is a city-size slab of solid rock. The metamorphosis underway at Bingham Canyon is astonishing. And it is not unique. "The same thing is happening at Freeport," said Barry Gass, then the project director of underground development at Bingham, referring to a major mine in Indonesia. "The same's happening at Escondida [Chile]. The same's happening at Oyu Tolgoi [Mongolia]." Likewise at Malanjkhand, India's largest copper pit. Chuquicamata, a Chilean pit mine second only to Bingham in scale and age, is going underground too. Palabora, in South Africa, already has. All around the globe, aging copper pits are being reborn as caverns. Brand-new copper mines, both open pits and underground, are also proliferating, in places that not long ago would have been unthinkable—too remote, too politically unstable. Even a partial list reads like an adventurer's itinerary: Aynak, Afghanistan; Schaft Creek, British Columbia; Las Bambas, Peru; Junin, Ecuador; Kamoa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the United States, planning is under way for Resolution, a mine 7,000 feet beneath Arizona, and for Pebble, likely a combination pit and underground mine, in Alaska. Each of these is a potential world-class operation, producing copper on the Bingham Canyon scale. Scores of smaller mines are under construction, too. An alien observing human activities from space could be forgiven for thinking we are only now entering the Bronze Age. “If you think about electric cars and wind turbines, they’re all part of this demand for copper. I mean, I drive a Prius. It’s full of copper! The more you move toward a lower-footprint future, the more demand there is for our product.”FROM MINE CLOSURES TO a mining boom in 10 years. What happened? In a word: China. Modern industries run on electricity. So do middle-class lifestyles. Copper wires carry almost all of it. As China's economy boomed over the past decade or so—as its industry and its middle class expanded—it more than tripled its annual copper consumption, to 7.9 million metric tons in 2011, making it the world's largest user. (The U.S., by comparison, consumed 1.9 million metric tons that year.) The effect on the price of copper was dramatic. In 2000, it cost just under $1 a pound, a price it had languished at for years. By the middle of 2007, just before the Great Recession hit, it had soared to $5 a pound. And though the price has settled a bit since then, it now fluctuates around a base of $3 a pound—a 200 percent increase in little more than 10 years. Disinterested industry analysts expect that base price to last for at least the next 20 years. So do self-interested mining firms. When I met Gass at Bingham Canyon last fall, he sketched a whiteboard diagram for me of the timeline of metals usage in industrializing societies like China and India. First comes iron, the basis of simple industry and infrastructure like railroads. Then comes copper, supporting advanced industry and the electrification of homes. Finally comes aluminum, for cars, appliances, and airplanes—the fruits of wealth. "A lot of this has happened," Gass said, jabbing a finger at iron's portion of the curve. Then he pointed at copper. "This is happening." Copper mining, even by modern best-practices guidelines, is a hugely costly endeavor from an environmental standpoint. The mines themselves are vast. Processing the ore consumes enormous quantities of fuel (often coal) and water. The waste rock produced—known as tailings—is suffused with toxic substances, including sulfuric acid, arsenic, lead, and cadmium. These substances are intrinsic to the ore, not a byproduct of processing. They cannot be avoided, and they render the tailings dangerous for tens of thousands of years. It is these costs that opponents of the proposed Pebble Mine, to take an example close to home, are alarmed by. It is one thing to accept a giant mine in the middle of a desert, like Bingham. It is another to accept one in a sparkling Alaskan wilderness in the middle of a volcanic mountain range, upstream from one of the world's greatest salmon fisheries. But there is a second side to modern copper-mine development. Big mines do not simply remove material and wealth. They bring it in. Of course, they always have, in a desultory way: a company would build a railroad for itself, and pretty soon a town would spring up beside the tracks. Miners would spend their paychecks; commerce would begin to flow. Brigham Young founded Salt Lake City, but Bingham Canyon helped transform it from an isolated religious enclave into a bustling capital. Increasingly, however, this process is being formalized. A typical mining contract no longer specifies just rents and royalties, payable to the state. It specifies exactly what the mining firm will build—a power plant, a water-supply system, a communications network—and how these things will be shared with the public. In exchange for the right to extract copper, mining firms are turning themselves into vehicles for transferring wealth, infrastructure, and technology directly to citizens. Countries with reserves hold the cards. Copper does not often appear in a pure form in nature, the way gold forms nuggets. Instead, it combines with other elements to form stony minerals, of which the copper makes up only a small part. Fifty years ago, ore from the average pit mine was 1.5 percent copper. Most of that rich ore is gone: The average today is 0.6 percent. For every ton of copper extracted, nearly 167 tons of ore is processed and nearly 167 tons of tailings produced. At the same time, the sheer size of the old pits is becoming a hindrance to their economic efficiency. Pit mining works when you can get a lot of ore out of the ground relatively quickly and cheaply. When a pit mine is young and shallow, that's easy. But, as any child playing in a sandbox quickly learns, to make a hole deeper, you have to make it wider. At Bingham Canyon, the latest expansion of the pit involves removing a wedge of rock a mile wide, 1,000 feet thick, and 3,500 feet tall from the pit's south wall. That rock is not ore; it's worthless junk, called overburden. The ore being targeted is buried beneath it. It will take an estimated seven years and more than $660 million in capital outlays before that ore is finally exposed. "Literally and figuratively, we've got a whole mountain to move," Gass said. "At some point, the dollars and cents of that don't make sense." Another liability of the giant old pits is landslides. While I was writing this article, Bingham experienced a huge one, which temporarily closed the mine and is expected to cut its 2013 production in half. So it has been decided that the latest pit expansion at Bingham will also be the last. The ore it exposes will be nearly exhausted around 2029, and it is then that operations would shift underground. A similar story is already playing out at many of the other old pit mines. At heart, the reason they are going underground—and the reason huge new mines are being developed in challenging places like Afghanistan and Mongolia—is not that it's cheap or simple but that it is cheaper and simpler than digging out a whole sandbox for the handful of pennies buried at its bottom. The situation is analogous to the one faced by the petroleum industry in the 1970s. At that time, there were fears that the world had hit "peak oil." In hindsight, only the easy sources were drying up. More difficult sources—the North Slope oilfields of Alaska, for example—remained, and have since been tapped. The so-called tough oil from these places enabled global economic expansion, with all its benefits, to continue. It also accelerated climate change and made disasters like Deepwater Horizon inevitable. The world is not running out of copper. But it is becoming harder to find and produce, and its social goods are accompanied by intensifying environmental ills. As Gass bluntly put it to me, "There's no more easy fruit." We've entered the era of tough ore.
The 150,000 tons of ore processed daily from Bingham Canyon yields about 820 tons of copper—and 149,000 tons of tailings. (PHOTO: RIO TINTO) I MET GASS AT Bingham Canyon on a raw morning last October. Dark-haired and solidly athletic, after years of globetrotting as a mining engineer, he still speaks with the accent of his native Zimbabwe. Although we planned to stay far away from any dangerous mining operations, he had me change into a set of safety gear, from hardhat to steel-toed boots, and strap on a thick belt with an emergency oxygen generator clipped to it. "I was in the South African gold-mining industry pre-1994," Gass said, pausing to let the Apartheid-era date sink in. "We had a fatality a week. At least one." The day I met him was the 456th in a row without an injury to any member of his crew. We hopped into a pickup and drove over a low ridge into the mine. When digging began, in 1906, the ore formed a squat pyramidal peak in the heart of the Oquirrh Mountains. Today the peak is long gone. In its place is a hole two and a half miles long, a mile and a half wide, and more than three-quarters of a mile deep. An early snowstorm had blown in, and from the rim of the pit, Gass and I watched as huge white tendrils of cloud broke loose and spiraled thousands of feet down toward its bottom. I said it looked like the mine was inhaling the storm. Gass said that it was: The pit is so big, it creates its own weather patterns. We followed the tendrils on a creeping half-hour drive down a steep corkscrew of crushed-rock road. All around us, the world's largest electric shovels were scooping blasted rock into some of the world's largest dump trucks. A dozen shovels, more than 100 trucks; 98 tons a scoop, 320 tons per load—Bingham Canyon shifts 500,000 tons of rock a day, more than two-thirds of it useless overburden. As the laden trucks drove out of the pit to dump it, their weight squeezed water out of the ground. It ran down the pit roads in streams. A fleet of some of the world's largest road graders follow the trucks, constantly repairing the damage. Beyond the pit's walls was the other half of the Bingham operation: ore processing. In facilities spread for miles across the Oquirrh foothills, the ore is crushed to powder, and the copper is separated, then smelted, and finally refined into 99.99-percent-pure ingots. To feed this chain, Bingham operates a 175-megawatt power plant that is fueled by coal delivered via rail every day. A pumping-and-recycling facility supplies tens of thousands of gallons of water per minute for the power plant and for various processing steps. The whole operation is constantly monitored by a network of computers and technicians. The 150,000 tons of ore processed daily yields about 820 tons of copper—and 149,000 tons of tailings. When the overburden is included in the tally, less than one five-hundredth of the total mass removed from the pit each day is copper itself. Gass and I arrived at the bottom of the pit. The view from there was no less astonishing than the one from above. The walls rise so steeply—in places at an angle of 75 degrees, not far off vertical—that the sky appears to be set inside a circle of stone. Earlier, while diagramming the mine, Gass had noted offhandedly, "We're already flirting with slope stability here," referring to the north wall of the pit, the steepest section; it was part of this section that collapsed in April, burying the floor of the pit under 165 million tons of rubble. Gass led me a few hundred feet down a tunnel, one of a pair now descending from the pit floor. At its far end, under a steady spray of newly liberated groundwater, we watched a technician prepare the rock face for further digging. It didn't look like much to me, but Gass was alive with anticipation. He saw things in the rock that I couldn't. AMONG METALS, ONLY SILVER conducts electricity more efficiently than copper, but it is too rare and expensive to be used on an industrial scale. Copper is also ductile, malleable, and highly corrosion-resistant. This makes it exceptional for wiring and plumbing. Several important fertilizers are copper-based; so are several important pesticides. Copper is not particularly strong, and it is dense. But what it does, nothing does quite so well. And what it does, no modern economy can do without. This creates a conundrum. Most of oil's qualities are not unique to it. A coal-fired or nuclear-power plant (or a hydroelectric dam, or a wind farm) produce exactly the same quality of electricity as an oil-fired plant. Automobiles can run just as well on corn ethanol, biodiesel, or energy stored in batteries as on gasoline. There are few such equivalencies for copper. At Bingham Canyon, I spoke with Rohan McGowan-Jackson, Rio Tinto's vice president of innovation and resource development. At the height of China's boom, when copper reached its record price of $5, "there were some uses of copper which changed," he acknowledged. "Eighty cents a pound, it makes sense to use copper for piping. Five dollars a pound, it might not." In that case, some plumbing was replaced by lesser materials, like PVC. But overall, McGowan-Jackson noted, demand for copper remained "pretty inelastic" throughout the price spike. And there are no challengers for the biggest prize: electrification. Other than in high-voltage transmission lines, where aluminum's light weight and low cost win out over its poor conductivity, where there is electricity, there is copper: in every home, every computer, every streetlight. McGowan-Jackson added a modern irony. "If you think about electric cars and wind turbines," he told me, "they're all part of this demand for copper. I mean, I drive a Prius. It's full of copper! The more you move toward a lower-footprint future, the more demand there is for our product." For anyone now eyeing their light switches with renewed guilt—I installed LED bulbs; now you're saying the wiring is dirty?— there is more bad news. Again, copper's intrinsic qualities prove to be a double-edged sword. It is eminently recyclable, but it is also exceptionally durable. Once a copper item—the wiring of an office building, for example— is installed, it tends to stay out of the material stream for years. In the scrap industry's terminology, it has a long resonance. Demand for copper, however, continues to grow, and so it largely has to be met with new material—with ore coming out of the ground. In any case, recycling copper is not necessarily better for the planet than producing new metal. Scrap copper tends to come in the form of wire wrapped in plastic or vinyl insulation. Isolating the wire involves a number of rather nasty processes, from simply burning off the insulation to melting it with solvents. There are, in fact, no more scrap-copper refineries in the United States, partly because our strict environmental laws have rendered them unprofitable. Instead, U.S. scrap copper is exported to places with looser standards—primarily China, where the scrap business is booming. In 2000, we sent $165 million worth of scrap copper there; in 2011, $3.5 billion worth. THE TUNNELS ARE ONLY the very beginning of the underground project at Bingham Canyon. According the plan, they will wind 2,000 feet beneath the ore body. Then, 300 miles of smaller tunnels will be bored across the rock, one above another, creating a dual-layered lattice. The layers will be connected by vertical funnel-shaped shafts. Finally, the ore above the upper lattice will be blasted, and the shattered ore will flow down the funnels to the lower lattice, from which it will be removed. Secondary problems will have to be solved. The rock is saturated with groundwater; thousands of drainage holes must be drilled, and a massive pumping system installed, to keep the tunnels from flooding. Because so many miles of latticework must be constructed, Rio Tinto plans to use speedy tunnel-boring machines rather than traditional drill-and-blast techniques. But machines that meet its needs—that can operate at steep angles and turn in tight radii—don't yet exist. They'll have to be invented. Rio also plans to use robotic trucks and scoops to remove the ore. ("We're going to drive them from the surface using PlayStation controls," Gass said.) That system will have to be custom-built, too. For Bingham, as for any mine shifting underground, the pay-off for all this preparation would be twofold. First, after the initial blast, the production of ore is self-sustaining. The ore body simply collapses under its own weight, and as one load of broken ore is trucked out, more flows in to replace it. It's a safe, predictable process; essentially, gravity does the work of dynamite. Second, unlike in pit mining, no overburden—the ore-free junk rock—has to be shifted. Underground mines shift ore and nothing else. The technique, known as block-caving, is not new, but the scale is. Copper mines are measured by the amount of ore they process. "Twenty years ago, a big underground mine would have been six, eight thousand tons a day," Gass said. "We're designing this to be over a hundred and fifty thousand tons a day"—as much as the pit now produces. After the first set of five block caves has been mined out, sometime decades from now, a second set below it may follow. A third, still deeper set is possible after that. Ultimately, more ore may be dug out from underground at Bingham than will be removed from the open pit in its entire existence. This explains why Rio Tinto is prepared to spend more than 10 years and $1 billion to move Bingham Canyon underground, and why timelines and expenditures like these are becoming the norm around the globe. Chuquicamata. Oyu Tolgoi. Malanjkhand. The names begin to sound like incantations. They conjure extraordinary visions and princely sums.
At the new Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia, workers are carving out a massive open pit mine, and two mile-deep subterranean block-caving mines. (PHOTO: RIO TINTO) THEY ALSO CONJURE CURSES and blessings in equal, or at any rate indivisible, measure. The list of machinery, manpower, and energy needed to run Bingham Canyon represents a huge environmental bill. And the list would be similar for most other copper mines. But the list also represents the rudiments of any industrial society. Electricity, water, transportation and communications networks, and highly skilled people to put it all to use: What a modern copper mine needs is hardly different from what a modern economy needs. And the developing nations where many of the new mines are being built have begun to exploit this fact. The mines are no longer treated simply as financial windfalls but as potential sources of infrastructure, technology, and human capital whose benefits extend beyond, and will outlive, the mines themselves. It is a prudent approach. Ore eventually dries up, but there will always be mouths to feed. An example to paint this picture: Oyu Tolgoi, Rio Tinto's giant copper mine 300 miles south of Ulaanbaatar, in the Gobi Desert, is nearing completion of the first phase of construction. It will begin as an open pit, then expand into underground operations in the coming decade. The first ore was to have been smelted in June 2013. Rio Tinto has invested more than $6 billion in Oyu already, and is committed to investing at least $5 billion more. This alone has significantly boosted the Mongolian economy. But the Mongolian government also owns 34 percent of the mine operation outright, and Rio Tinto will pay royalties on the ore it extracts and taxes on the profit it earns. Oyu's opening will immediately increase the government's annual revenue by a third. The mine is expected to stay open for 50 years. But the contract Rio signed with the Mongolian government goes beyond money. Ninety percent of mine workers must be Mongolians, and Rio must provide them with training and education. The company must build an airport (done) and a railroad (under construction), which will link Mongolia to the Chinese rail network and give the landlocked country access to deepwater ports. By 2017, all of the mine's electrical power must be generated in Mongolia. This agreement has helped the government raise $1.5 billion, through bond sales, for a new 1,200-megawatt power plant, which will supply electricity not just to the mine but to businesses and homes across the country. Before Bingham Canyon, Gass spent two years at Oyu, helping to develop the mine and its infrastructure. "It's real easy to plan," he joked. "There is nothing, so you have to build everything." The result, enforced by a binding contract, is a huge new copper mine—and a huge investment in human and physical capital whose benefits Mongolia will enjoy even after the copper is exhausted. Twenty or even 10 years ago, the contract for a mine like Oyu would have looked very different. The financial portion likely would have been a simple transfer of funds, with no government stake in the mine. Royalty and tax rates would have been lower. Infrastructure would have been solely the mining firm's decision with neither a formal statement of what would be built nor a plan to integrate it into the nation's social and economic fabric. I asked Michael Stanley, a geologist and economist at the World Bank who is heavily involved in mine development in Asia, to explain what has changed. First, he said, in the past two decades many countries have formalized state ownership of mineral resources. With the government owning the ore, mining firms are forced to deal with a single, powerful entity when making mine-development deals, and the communities that stand to be affected by the new mine can petition that entity. "It clarifies up front, at the point at which a [mining] license is issued, most all of the roles and responsibilities that fall to the mining companies, to the government, and to the community," he said. Second, with guidance from the World Bank and other development organizations, many countries have adopted a new, more lucrative method of selling mining rights. In the past, firms would negotiate for mining rights individually, behind closed doors; all too often, the only money that would exchange hands was a bribe to high officials in exchange for a license. By contrast, most nations now sell mining licenses in open, public auctions, called resource tenders. The government defines the terms of the licenses, and multiple firms compete. The only thing they get to define is the value and structure of their bid. "We discourage a lot of negotiation," Stanley said. "Or, in another way, what you'll be negotiating on is the unique aspects of a property. The conversation then gets down to: What kind of infrastructure are you going to build? How can it be shared? Who can it be shared with? And what do we have to do on the government side to make sure that it does get shared?" Stanley surprised me with his third point. The Internet, he says, has been a key factor in changing the way mine development is negotiated, because it has given formerly weak third parties—local communities, native peoples with traditional rights to mining lands, environmental groups—a voice in the negotiations and a sympathetic audience in the wider world. "A small group in any rural country can, with a Google search and the ability to speak some English, access that whole global experience. And they are. In 1985, it was very difficult for somebody in Mongolia to understand what was going on in mine development. Now you can push information to the community on their cell phones." In 2011, Stanley and a colleague wrote a report on the development of Afghanistan's Aynak copper mine that, in effect, is a guidebook for other governments and communities to follow. For some time after it was published, the report was the most-downloaded item on the World Bank website. For mining firms, these changes are about more than process. They are about the very nature of the business. Stanley estimates that 60 percent of firms' development budgets is now spent on things other than the actual excavation of ore. Rohan McGowan-Jackson, of Rio Tinto, gave me an even higher number: Up to 70 percent, he said, goes to "port, processing, water, power, land, relocation of people—all the stuff that is peripheral to actually getting into the deposit and getting it mined." Stanley believes that within a decade, mining firms will function essentially as private economic-development agencies, with mining merely providing the profit motive and the funds. In the struggle to access tough ore, construction of the mines themselves is, ironically, becoming secondary. "The front line is infrastructure," he told me, "and the second front is technology." IN THE END, THE math is not that hard. The world's population is growing, and growing richer. Demand for copper is rising. The pressure to dig deeper, on an ever-greater scale, ever further afield, is immense. It will be for decades. When working out the cost-benefit analyses of new developments, mining firms look ahead a quarter of a century and more. Their potential investments measure in the tens of billions of dollars; their calculations, understandably, err on the side of caution. When they make projections for the next 30 or 40 years based on $3-a-pound copper, as they now often do, they are not saying that the industry is headed for Easy Street. They are saying that tough ore will not get easier anytime soon. Which means that the ethical dilemma embedded in tough ore—that copper's increasing benefits to humanity come at an increasing cost to the environment—will not soon get easier, either. To be a member of any industrialized society—to read this magazine by the light of an electrical bulb, even a low-energy LED bulb—is to amplify both the benefits and the cost. That said, the proper time line on which to measure the impact of tough ore is not decades but millennia. The toxic tailings produced by copper mines must be sequestered behind dams—"in perpetuity," to borrow an Environmental Protection Agency term—for thousands of years after the mines close down. So the basic question asked by companies, governments, and communities considering the development of a new mine—"Is it worth it?"—involves generations that will only bear its costs, without reaping its benefits. As Gass and I drove out of Bingham, I asked for his thoughts on Pebble, the proposed mine in Alaska—the one whose tailings would sit above the Bristol Bay salmon grounds; above beautiful Lake Iliamna, with its rare native species of freshwater seal; above a seismic zone that routinely jolts the region with powerful earthquakes. The process of submitting state and federal applications to build Pebble may start later this year. Gass didn't have to think long. "At $3 a pound"—the current price—"maybe we'll decide it's not worth it," he said. "But when copper's $400 an ounce and Pebble is the last ore on Earth, it'll come out of the ground." Copper is vanishingly unlikely ever to approach such a price. Nor will it conceivably ever run out, even if, in some impossible geochemical trick, all the world's ore disappeared tomorrow: There's copper dissolved in seawater; we would just have to boil the oceans to get at it. Gass' point was that, for now, we as a society may decide that what Pebble would destroy is more valuable than what it would produce—but he was also saying that our moral calculus, like the price of copper, is swayed by demand. I am not convinced that Pebble, or any other giant mine now under consideration, will need more than $3 copper to be born. When I visited Bingham Canyon, I stayed in Salt Lake City, and the two people I mentioned the mine to—a waitress and a hotel clerk—had no idea it was even there. These were longtime locals. It struck me that for all their size and impact on the land, even the biggest mines can leave a small footprint on the mind. The thought struck me again as Gass and I left the Bingham Canyon. The pit disappeared into the snow clouds behind us; in front of us, a range of low mountains came into view. If you didn't know that they were made of the waste rock that came out of it, you could have forgotten that the biggest hole on Earth was there. |
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