Environmental Research in “The Last Best Place”
Look at the picture at the very top of this blog. It is the Clark Fork River as it winds its way through the Ponderosa Pine forests of western Montana towards to city of Missoula. The Clark Fork is one of many spectacular rivers in this remarkably historic and scenic state, with many stories to tell. There was Glacial Lake Missoula thousands of years ago during the last ice age, Indians taming and caring for this land for many centuries , Lewis and Clark trekking through just two hundred years ago, and within the next century after that, some of the most intense base metal mining in the world. And today, there is a modern society that calls these hollowed lands “the last best place”. And they are riight . . . Montana is magical, wild, and with a look and feel all its own, from the wide open, big sky prairies far to the east, to the rugged and wide-open wilderness of the west. And as the fourth largest state, there’s a lot of both!
And what has all this amounted to? Like anywhere else, human habitation and use has been good, and not so good. In the latter category, a century and a half of mining in the Butte, Anaconda area has created the largest Superfund Complex in the United States. Approximately 1,600 square kilometers of land are seriously contaminated with excessive amounts of copper, zinc, lead, and arsenic, not good if you happen to be a living organism. Local, state, and federal officials, not to mention the citizens of this great state, want the contamination issues resolved. That’s where we, as Earth scientists that study the environment, come in. Our job, collectively, is to figure out what nature with man’s overprint has given us, and how the system works. Then it’s up to politicians, citizens, lawyers, engineers, and business leaders to do something about it.