Lessons from Butte, Montana: A Model for the World?

This dissertation is concerned with the actual experience of a hard-used high-mountain copper mining community called Butte, Montana. It is thus inextricably embedded in the particular while holding out hope that generally useful lessons might be learned from the particular experiences of this place, my home, Butte, Montana.

On the surface, and I suppose at some root level, this project in applied moral philosophy might seem merely a provincial concern for my home place. But a survey of contemporary historical, political, scientific, and ethical literature might lead you to a different conclusion.

In Harper's Magazine, Ed Dobb wrote, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places American came from." And it is. That is why the people in Butte often refer to the town as Butte, America. Butte's story, it seems is too big to be contained by the state line.

Butte, Montana is an indexical sign: a sign that is evidence of something else, like smoke is a sign of fire; a sign born of a causal connection to that which is signified; a sign that is in fact a product of that which is signified. If Butte is a sign, "one of the places America came from," what is its meaning? What truths does Butte as a sign reveal about the systems that created it?

Environmental historian Mark Fiege also believes that we can learn lessons by studying what he calls "hard-used places" because, like scars, they are evidence of our "deeply entangled and problematic relationships with the natural world."

The opening chapter of Pullitzer Prize-winning historian Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, focuses on contemporary Montana, including Butte, as what he calls a model for the world. "Montana is a perfect subject...". Like the historical subjects he discusses in the book, societies that emerged, flourished, and collapsed out of existence, contemporary Montana is precariously situated, dependent upon distant markets, and exists in a marginally productive landscape relative to other parts of the world. Moreover, "Montana suffers from the same environmental problems..." Plus, mining.

What may have begun as a provincial concern for my home is now much more, according to Diamond. The decisions made here, in Montana, are worthy of our attention because, like the Anasazi, the Easter Islanders, and the Maya, our condition is precarious and uncertain. And, our ability to recognize and cope with our environmental problems softly determines the nature of the world we pass on to future generations.

Hard-used places like Butte are like scars, reminders of past actions and the sometimes painful consequences of those actions. The only alternative we have to learning lessons from these places is to ignore them, to let inertia move us instead of our values, interests, and beliefs, and to close our eyes to what is in front of us and pretend it does not exist. But it does exist, and so, if we believe in learning and growth--education and the pursuit of wisdom--we must look to the scars of the hard-used places and signify them, make them meaningful, and learn lessons from them.

At the dawn of the 20th century, young Mary Maclane wandered the gullies of Butte, Montana, which was then an open-air mining and mineral processing factory. She wrote, "Butte and its immediate vicinity present as ugly an outlook as one could wish to see. It is so ugly indeed that is near the perfection of ugliness. And anything perfect, or nearly so, is not to be despised. I have reached some astonishing subtleties of conception as I have walked for miles over the sand and barrenness among the little hills and gulches.”

My intentions in this research, like those of Fiege, Diamond, and Maclane, are to learn lessons from this hard-used place and hard-used people.