Big Sky stays dark for mining

For the uninitiated, I-147 isn’t the number of an obscure feeder route to the Interstate highway system in the trackless wilderness of the Ouachita Mountains. It is, rather, the recently defeated ballot measure that would have removed the prohibition on using cyanide solutions in precious-metal mining in Montana.

Democracies are democracies, and citizens do make choices. In plebiscites like the Montana ballot initiative, they make them quite directly. So nobody should be crying foul about Montanans making a decision that was left to them to make.

Other citizens, and companies, also make choices, and the implications of I-147’s defeat will figure in the kinds of choices they make, too. And if Montanans who voted against it imagined they were simply obliging mining companies to operate differently, they were gravely mistaken. Mining projects need the best and most economic technology they can get, or they won’t be built.

To say that is not to take a swipe at Montanans. It’s neither fair nor productive to expect every voter to know whether leach pads or vat circuits that use cyanide are safe enough to satisfy their concerns about health and the environment.

Neither is it a swipe at direct democracy — Montana’s got laws, and ballot initiatives are part of them. The mining industry, and everyone else, can and should live with that. We think it illustrates the best argument that exists for representative democracy, where the people can elect representatives to consider policy more deliberately and carefully than anyone who has to juggle citizenship, a job, a business, a family, and everything else.

And we did see the marks of a classical anti-mining scare campaign in the opposition to the ballot measure. Cyanide, because of its acute toxicity, pushes some of the hottest buttons in public consciousness, and the measure’s opponents made sure they pushed all of them. Mining, unfortunately, has a history of pack-up-and-go closures in Montana, which have soured many people on the idea of mining in general. The campaign against I-147 wouldn’t have been nearly as effective without the Zortman mine closure to point at, for example.

Even at that, the state’s attitude to mining wasn’t so bad that citizens simply tuned out the argument in favour of the measure. In the weeks before the vote, some of the initiative’s opponents were at pains to insist that they were not against gold and silver mining. There were alternatives, they swore. We still think someone should have pressed them to name a few.

Others didn’t even make that nod, preferring theatrical moral positions instead, and claiming “all the gold in the world isn’t worth this kind of destruction.” Pile on the purely illiterate, like the Montana Association of Churches, which supposed that because “16 out of 18 leading U.S. zinc mines do not use cyanide,” gold and silver mines have reasonable alternatives to it as well.

And naturally Montana’s “blue counties” — Missoula and Yellowstone, with the large state universities — voted against I-147. In contrast, Silver Bow Cty., where the people presumably have some grip on the technical question of cyanide use, voted about 70% in favour.

It’s instructive to consider what is still, in theory, not prohibited in Montana. There is no prohibition, for example, against an amalgamation plant, though exemptions exist for “small miners” using mercury “in a contained facility.” Nobody is prohibited from using a roaster.

Yet mercury is a vastly riskier substance than sodium cyanide, and amalgamation units passed from the mining scene years ago as polluting and dangerous technologies. Roasting plants, which desulphurized pyrite to liberate gold, left a down-wind plume of vegetation kills and acidic watercourses. Extractive metallurgists long ago made the more responsible choice when they made cyanide the standard technology for gold extraction.

It would be mere rhetoric to ask opponents of cyanide use if they’d prefer those ugly old technologies. Of course they wouldn’t. They just don’t like cyanide either, and haven’t got a clue what miners should use instead. Some, at least, believe they have the luxury of not caring.

In that, they may be right. Montana may get along quite well without gold and silver mining, and Montanans have every right to make that choice. But it is foolish to assume that an arbitrary law like Montana’s cyanide ban doesn’t affect the choices explorers and miners make too.

Whether I-147’s opponents admit it or not, Montana did vote against precious-metal mining.