Chapter 1
Integrated Crises in
Democracy and Ecology in Montana
This thesis is predicated upon a warranted assertion that our very real and pressing problems in the public sphere (our democratic crises) exacerbate our very real and pressing problems in the ecosphere (our environmental crises). Put another way, our democratic public problem-solving systems are themselves in crisis, and because of this, seem to be ill-suited to the task of effectively coping with our serious environmental problems.
By crisis I mean a time of acute difficulty, a problem that presses for solutions, a decisive moment. Crises are crucial stages in the lifespan of dynamic systems (like democracies and ecosystems). Crisis states are problematic circumstances, turning points that require immediate, measured responses in order to avert impending disasters. Today, the term is frequently used to describe the scale and scope of the problems we confront in politics, economics, ecology, and culture. A defining characteristic of the present moment may well be our seemingly perpetual state of complex and integrated crises.
This chapter will describe integrated crises in democracy and ecology at global and local levels, paying special attention to the particular experience of the hard-used hard rock mining community of Butte, Montana, USA. Butte is my home town and ground-zero within the largest complex of toxic Superfund sites in the nation. The 120-mile stretch of injured watershed from Butte to Missoula, Montana is the result of over a century of hard rock mining and mineral processing in a harsh, rugged, and sometimes unforgiving landscape.
For 25 years, Butte and its neighboring communities within the Upper Clark Fork River watershed have participated in a grand political, economic, ecological and social experiment--an extreme makeover of an entire watershed and its communities. This experiment was initiated under U.S. Superfund law. The goals of this law are the restoration of ecological health to a hard-used place, and the restoration of environmental justice to a hard-used people.
Environmental Problem Solving in Montana:
A Model of the World?
In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005), Jared Diamond ably demonstrated that the effectiveness of a civilization's problem recognition and response systems softly determines the future viability of that civilization. Societies that recognize and adapt their collective behaviors in response to pressing needs continue to exist. Several socially complex pre-modern societies--the Maya, the Easter Islanders, Greenland Norse, and the Anasazi, to name a few--failed to recognize and/or effectively respond to the social and ecological crises they faced. These societies blinked out of existence. They collapsed.
Diamond, a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and UCLA geography professor, intended that Collapse might help us learn "practical lessons" from the past, lessons applicable to the complex social and ecological crises we currently face. While Diamond does not believe the U.S. is in imminent danger of collapse, he does believe that certain places in the United States today are good analogs for comparison with past societal collapses. The state of Montana is his primary example and case study.
In the first chapter of Collapse titled Under Montana's Big Sky, Diamond wrote, "Montana provides an ideal case study with which to begin this book on past and present environmental problems" (p.32). Why? Because the state is precariously situated; it persists but, at least in certain respects, it hangs in the balance. Montana is distant from the markets and metropoles upon which it depends, for example. The state is known for its beautiful vistas and landscapes, but relative to lands closer to the equator, Montana is only marginally productive. We do not often think of Montana as environmentally imperiled, but according to Diamond, "Montana's environmental problems today include almost all of the dozen types of problems that have undermined pre-industrial societies in the past, or that now threaten societies elsewhere in the world as well" (p.35).
In short, Montanans are like the Maya and Anasazi in certain ways. The decisions Montanans make softly determine the state’s future viability. Will contemporary Montanans recognize and effectively cope with their immediate and pressing environmental problems? Or, will we fail to act? Will we falter? Will we act decisively but make poor decisions? Will Montanans choose to fail or succeed? According to Diamond, we ought to monitor what happens in modern Montana because it may well be "a model for the world" (pp.73-75).
Before I turn to a discussion of the integrated crises in democracy and ecology as they are expressed in the environmental restoration projects of Butte, Montana, I will outline the contours of both the democratic crisis and our environmental crisis in broad strokes. This discussion is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather, it is an attempt to identify and describe each crisis alone before considering them as an integrated phenomenon.
U.S. Democracy in Crisis
In a 2005 keynote address to journalists and media professionals, Al Gore warned, “American democracy is in grave danger.”
It is no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know that I am not the only one who feels that something has gone basically and badly wrong in the way America's fabled marketplace of ideas now functions.
Critics from across a broad spectrum of American political thought—from Ron Paul to Dennis Kucinich—tend to agree (though for sometimes wildly different reasons) that in the United States we have a “democracy in the balance” (Gore, 2008). American democracy is in a state of crisis.
Four Ways to Think About American Democracy
For this purpose of this discussion, I define democracy in four ways: (1) democracy as an expression of popular sovereignty—democracy as “people power”; (2) democracy as a systematic method of recognizing and addressing problems of a diversely constituted public—democracy as public problem solving; (3) democracy as a purposeful, open, and free public conversation—democracy as deliberative discourse; and (4) democracy as a way of community life—democracy as culture.
First, the radical meaning of democracy is “people power.” The word is derived from Greek roots demos (the people) and cratia (power, influence). Democracy is any form of government in which the people hold the power. Democracy is, according to Aristotle, "that form of government in which the greater number are sovereign" (Jowett & Twining, 1957: 96). Democracy, as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address, means "government of the people, by the people, for the people." According to the Oxford English Dictionary, democracy is "that form of government in which the sovereign power resides in the people as a whole, and is exercised either directly by them (as in the small republics of antiquity) or by officers elected by them." Democracy means people power.
Second, democracy is a public problem recognition and response system. According to the U.S. State Department web site, “Democracy is in many ways nothing more than a set of rules for managing conflict.” As Xavier Briggs put it in Democracy as Problem Solving (2008: p. 4, 8):
At their best, democracies confront important public problems…The theory and practice of what makes democracy work necessarily include the study of problem solving in action and of the collective capacity to problem-solve—not only to deliberate about the world and set directions for government, but to change the state of the world through collective action, not only to devise and decide but to do.
Third, democracy is a purposeful and ongoing conversation—deliberative discourse. For John Dewey, the ideal democratic community—“the Great Community”—should be a “communicating community” (Dewey, 1927). Our decision making processes should be born of open and free discourse within the public sphere. And, these conversations should be pointed, that is, deliberate—purposeful and methodical conversations aimed at addressing the problems we share. American democracy is how the people influence problem solving processes through deliberative discourse. This conception of contemporary American democracy is captured by the terms political theorists like John Dryzek (1997) and Collin Farelly (2005) use today to describe American democracy: deliberative and discursive democracy.
Finally, democracy is a way of life—a culture. Democracy is more than democratic structures and rules, it is also cultural practice. “A healthy democracy depends in large part on the development of a democratic civic culture” (U.S. Department of State web site). Democracy requires certain cultural structures and processes, a democratic communication framework. John Dewey (1927) described democracy as the very “idea of community life”:
The idea of democracy is a wider and fuller idea than can be exemplified in the state even at its best. To be realized, it must affect all modes of human association, the family, the school, industry, religion. And even as far as political arrangements are concerned, governmental institutions are but a mechanism for securing to an idea channels of effective operation. . . . Regarded as an idea, democracy is not an alternative to other principles of associated life. It is the idea of community life itself.
These four aspects of democracy, of course, are not a comprehensive way to look at democracy. But, they do provide us a framework for understanding the nature of our democratic crisis.
The Is/Ought Gap: A Democracy in Name Only?
Is the United States a democracy in the radical sense of the word; that is, does our democracy express the will of the people? Does our democracy effectively cope with our common problems? Does our democracy emerge from free, open deliberative discourse in the public sphere? Is our democratic way of life—our democratic culture—flourishing or languishing?
First, let’s consider popular sovereignty. In the sociological sense, according to Max Weber, power is the ability to realize one’s visions, even in spite of resistance. The radical meaning of democracy is people power; but in practice, our forms of government tend to leave people feeling impotent—powerless. “A great many people do not like what is happening to their lives and their country, and what is being done in their name, but [they] feel isolated and helpless, victims of forces beyond their control” (Chomsky in Lappé, 2006).
For Frances Moore Lappé, the fundamental aspect of our prevailing crisis in democracy lies in our collective perception that that we are incapable of solving problems we confront. “The problems aren’t the crisis…the crisis is our feeling of powerlessness to address them” (2006: p.5). If democracy means people power, but the people feel powerless, a chasm exists between what is and what ought to be. Our democracy is not thick, it is thin; it is not alive, it is dead.
Second, does U.S. democracy effectively cope with the real and pressing problems we face in our daily lives, problems in education, healthcare, the economy, or the environment? The current state of dis-ease in each of these aspects of the American experience would suggest that our democratic decision making structures and processes are ineffective at solving, or even adequately coping with the problems that press for solutions.
Our public K-12 education systems are underachieving and producing students ill-prepared for the rigors of the 21st century global economy. Our healthcare system leaves the most vulnerable among us uninsured and uncared for. Those lucky enough to be covered end-up struggling their way through bureaucratic mazes to meet basic healthcare needs, and still often come up short. The U.S. economy has crashed to a level not seen since the Great Depression leaving millions without work and with dramatically depleted retirement savings, as we simultaneously “rescue” the corporate lenders responsible for the crisis in the first place. Environmental problems, from local watershed pollution to global climate change, immediately affect the health and well-being of every human being on the planet. Our problems are many and varied, I argue, partly because our democratic problem solving systems are failing realize the promise of democracy.
What about the discursive and deliberative aspects of our contemporary crisis in democracy? In The Assault on Reason (2008), Al Gore identified the problem when he wrote:
There is…something fundamentally new and different about our current crisis of democracy…It is based on several serious problems that stem from the dramatic and fundamental change in the way we communicate among ourselves” (15-16).
The technological mediation of human communication in the 21st century, the rhetorical tendency toward debate and argument instead of deliberative dialogue, dogmatic attitudes and failure to think critically, public apathy and alienation from political communication, structural obstacles limiting access to vital information, and decreasing opportunities for meaningful public participation in decision making all contribute to the discursive aspects of our contemporary democratic crisis.
Finally, what does the democratic crisis look like in terms of democratic culture, democracy as a way of life. Harvard Sociologist Theda Skocpol documented the shape-shifting of America’s vibrant participatory civic culture (the democratic culture that so fascinated Alexis de Toqueville in the 1830s) into a management culture that relies on dues-paying members and boards of directors. Before, people directly participated, today they are members of “member-less” organizations. The title of her book, Diminished Democracy (2004), suggests that contemporary American civic culture is somehow lacking in important ways, it is less than it ought to be.
Each of these four ways of viewing democracy reveals an incongruity between the way things are and the way things ought to be based on our basic pragmatic standards for U.S. democracy—we have a meaningful “is/ought” gap. There is inconsistency and a failure to realize our guiding ideals and principles. Our democracy suffers Habermas’s performative contradiction—it does not walk its talk; it is not true to its promises. Government action, though consequential, is too often the expression of bureaucratic inertia, or market forces, and not, as democracy requires, a response to the needs of the public.
Our guiding pragmatic conception of democracy is not just a form of government—it is a way of life, the very “idea of community itself.” As such, democracy affects all modes of human association and decision making. Democracy disconnected from social practice is irrelevant and disconnected, like the free-floating signifiers of the post-modernists.
Winston Churchill said, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Democracy is messy and difficult and seems to move in lurches and fits, toward and away from our collective democratic ideals.
But, the main points are these: if the people are powerless to influence decision making, if our problem solving systems do not or can not recognize let alone solve our problems, if public participation is smoke and mirrors obfuscating the real mechanisms of decision making (often bureaucratic inertia and market forces), and if our democratic way of life—our culture—is languishing, what we have is a democracy in name only. This constitutes a democratic crisis.
Ecological Crisis: Something New Under the Sun
In the previous section I tried to describe the chasm that exists between our pragmatic democratic ideals and our actual “democratic” practices, and I further suggested that this inconsistency constitutes a crisis in democracy. When we fail to stay true to the promises of democracy, we fail to realize the promise of democracy.
In this section I intend to describe the ecological crisis we face. From the polluted rivers that flow through and connect our communities to global climate change, each and every human being on the planet confronts some category of serious environmental threat today.
In part, the simple act of living is difficult and necessarily a problematic endeavor. Life is struggle. But, the problems we confront today are new problems we have added to the struggle of life, problems we have only created in the last several hundred years.
In Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the 20th Century (2000), environmental historian J.R. McNeill’s book title is a challenge to the Biblical wisdom found in Ecclesiastes:
“What has been is what will be
and what is done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun…”
According to McNeill, there is in fact something new under the sun. Human societies have transformed in significant ways, and their modes of social organization, their political economies, their energy and technology regimes, and their “ecological revolutions” (see Merchant, ) have resulted in fundamentally new relationships between humans and the environment.
This section describes the precarious nature of our global environmental crisis, and concludes by identifying the symptoms of crisis—the ecological signs, indexes, and indicators of the scope and scale of our contemporary environmental crisis.
Earth in the Balance: The Vulnerable Planet
Critics often charge influential environmental thinkers with presenting apocalyptic, millenarian, or doomsday scenarios in the titles of their major works on the present state of the environment. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance (1993), and John Bellamy Foster’s The Vulnerable Planet (1999) are a few such titles. Foster (2002) noted that critics try to paint the authors as emotional, irrational criticizers of a fundamentally robust and integral global ecosystem. David Harvey, one such critic, wrote:
The subtext is that the earth is somehow fragile and that we need to become caring managers or caring physicians to nurse it back from sickness into health…Against this it is crucial to understand that it is materially impossible for us to destroy the planet earth, that the worst we can do is to engage in material transformations of our environment so as to make life less rather than more comfortable for our own species being…(cited in Foster, 2002: 69-70).
Foster noted that Harvey is correct when we apply a geological time-scale to our analysis of global climate change. The earth as a dynamic and living system has existed without humans for almost all of its existence, and life from bacteria to mammals will likely live on after we pass from the planet. But, we are human, and a more human time-scale of analysis suggests that human-hastened planetary change and instability will likely shock our social orders into extinction or into radically new forms. The earth will live-on with or without us, this is true, but Harvey’s statement is only an interesting (but practically irrelevant) thought experiment. What matters is what is in front of us now, how we respond to crisis will determine what we leave to future generations.
In Marx’s Ecology (2001), Foster described our problematic relationship with our environment as another form of alienation—a “metabolic rift.” The scale and intensity of our biophysical transformations have fundamentally altered the dynamics of the living systems we depend on for continued survival. Humans have always lived in unsustainable ways on a small scale (Easter Island, for example). What is new is the scale and intensity of our ecological metabolism and the resulting rift. Our metabolic footprints are bigger, deeper, and longer-lasting. The earth’s responses to our new way of living in relationship to the planet are increased volatility and decreased ecological resilience. The earth and its inhabitants hang in the balance.
Before Al Gore wrote about our “democracy in the balance” (2007) he wrote of our “Earth in the balance” (1993):
Now that our relationship to the earth has changed so utterly, we have to see that change and understand its implications…Global warming, ozone depletion, the loss of living species, deforestation—they all have common cause: the new relationship between human civilization and the earth’s natural balance (31).
In The Vulnerable Planet (1999), John Foster put it this way:
Human society has reached a critical threshold in its relation to its environment. The destruction of the planet, in the sense of making it unusable for human purposes, has grown to such an extent that it now threatens the continuation of nature, as well as the survival and development of society itself.
The precarious nature of our ecological conditions render the planet vulnerable—it exists in harm’s way. Ecological problems are human problems because humans are ecologically situated and dependent upon their environments for continued existence. While the earth—especially when considered in geological time—is not in immediate peril, human societies are, at the very least, precariously situated—poised somewhere between order and chaos.
Signs of Ecological Crisis
What forms do our environmental problems take? What are the indicators of environmental crises? John Foster’s (1999: 11-12) “long list of urgent problems” includes:
…overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.
Jared Diamond (2005) lists a dozen of what he calls “the most serious environmental problems facing past and present societies” (p.486). The first four concern destruction or losses (destruction of habitat, threats to wild food populations, loss of biodiversity, and loss of farmland and soil); the next three involve ceilings on natural resources (loss of the world’s major energy sources, pollution of freshwater resources, and loss of photosynthetic capacity); the next three are about “harmful things that we produce or move around” (toxic chemicals, alien species, and global climate change); and the last two deal with human population (human population growth and increased human impact).
According to Diamond, each of these problems are connected to and sometimes exacerbate the others. Human population growth and the growth in the use of toxic chemicals, for example, sometimes combine to contribute to global climate change, the destruction of habitat, and threats to wild food populations. Moreover, each of these problems alone, and all of them together, "are like time bombs with fuses of less than 50 years” (p. 498). These problems press for solutions and thus constitute an ecological crisis.
Integrated Crises in Ecology & Democracy:
The Case of Butte, Montana
I started this chapter by asserting that our real and pressing problems in the public sphere (our democratic crises) exacerbate our real and pressing problems in the ecosphere (our environmental crises). These distinct and recognizable categories of problems—democratic and ecological—are mutually affective things, co-evolving phenomena. Because democracy is one way we recognize and cope with common problems, when democracy is in crisis, our problem-solving capabilities are diminished. Thus, our democratic crises lead to dysfunctional problem solving, which by definition, fails to adequately cope with other kinds of problems, such as those we confront in our environment. The ecological problems associated with our earth in the balance, our vulnerable planet, will not likely be solved by our dysfunctional democracy in practice. These crises are complex and integrated. My research is an attempt to identify, define, and cope with these problems.
Butte, Montana
Abstract notions such as the one I have presented above—integrated crises in ecology and democracy—are practically insignificant if they fail to help address the real problems of real people. This is a fundamental tenet of John Dewey’s notion of Pragmatism as amelioration and problem solving. Put differently, academic inquiry is irrelevant if it fails to arise from and address real human suffering. Therefore, I begin this systematic look at the integrated crises I have situated at the heart of this work by examining the particular experience of one of the places Jared Diamond suggested we use as a model for the world: Butte, Montana.
This research is born of my experience growing up in Butte, Montana—a "hard-used place" populated by a hard-used people (Fiege, 2000). The community of Butte emerged as the epicenter of industrial hard rock activities during the Civil War Reconstruction Era in the Rocky Mountain West. Butte was born where the Western frontier and the industrial revolution overlapped and merged. Mining continues to be an important part of Butte’s economy, though less so now than during the previous 140 years.
Hard rock mining is one of the most ecologically transformative processes humans engage in (McNeill, 2000; Hooke, 2000). In Butte, massive amounts of earth have been mined: blasted, shoveled, treated, and dumped. For every ounce of gold or pound of copper, tons of waste rock are produced (Power, 1996). Open mine pits measured in miles, like the Berkeley and Continental pits (see figure 1), border the community of roughly 34,000 people. In Butte, mountains of mine waste create man-made foothills to the Continental Divide. The community's horizontal contours are a fluid and dynamic feature of the landscape. Significant mountain peaks and old neighborhoods (like East Butte, Meaderville, and McQueen) have disappeared as, ever so slowly, the mine pits grow wider and deeper.
Hard rock mining and processing dramatically altered the dynamics and integrity of the living communities—human and more-than-human—in Butte's Summit Valley. For most of Butte's history the idea of protecting the environment was a non-issue. Although this impulse was expressed through ephemeral toxics movements in the early part of the 20th century (MacMillan, 2000; Diamond, 2005), industrial mining activities continued apace with little or no regard for the health and wellness of the living communities residing atop "The Richest Hill on Earth"—that is, until the second half of the 20th century and the rise of a broad-based environmental movement in the United States.
In the 1960s and 70s, diverse coalitions of citizens united under the banner of environmental protection. In 1973, they rewrote Montana’s State Constitution. Article II Section 3 of the document defines the right of every Montanan to live in a clean and healthful environment. During this same period, federal and state governments enacted new laws designed to protect human health by insuring that the environments within which humans live and recreate themselves are also healthy (e.g., Clean Water Act, etc.). Under the Nixon Administration, agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were created to execute U.S. environmental law and policy.
However, by the end of the Carter Administration mediagenic environmental tragedies like Love Canal made clear the impotence (powerlessness) of existing environmental protection systems. As one of his final acts, in December of 1980, President Carter signed into law the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA, or Superfund). Superfund put teeth in existing environmental laws, provided opportunities for public participation in environmental decision making, established a tax on environmentally destructive industries (this tax funded the "Superfund") to be used to reclaim and restore hard-used places, and created legal mechanisms for recovering environmental clean-up costs from responsible parties.
One of the first tasks of the EPA under Superfund was the creation of a National Priorities List (NPL)—a list of the country's most pressing environmental problems. In 1982 four sections interlocking around the stream channel of the Upper Clark Fork River, originating in Butte and extending to the Milltown Dam near Missoula, were included on the EPA'a NPL. According to Jared Diamond (2005), “The Clark Fork River, including the Berkeley Pit, is now the largest and most expensive Superfund cleanup site in the U.S.” (p.39).
For 25 years, federal, state, and local governments have been working with the responsible corporate parties and citizens groups to create an extreme make-over of polluted watershed and its communities. The process is a slow and complex experiment in environmental remediation, restoration, justice, and democracy.
The Upper Clark Fork River Superfund projects are often propped up as exemplary models for environmental problem solving by the federal government and the responsible corporate parties. Local government and citizens groups, however, frequently voice dissatisfaction with the structures, processes, and consequences of the system in practice. Some feel as though they've been left out, others are included but marginally. They feel as though their participation fell far short of the EPA's guiding ideal of "meaningful participation"—the procedural measuring stick for the agency.
According to environmental justice advocate, Dr. John Ray, several problems converge in Butte’s Superfund projects. First, the environmental contamination is concentrated in areas inhabited by the poorest of Butte’s citizens.
The [Butte] area is contaminated with arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, and copper. The site is also unique in that people live and work amidst the toxics. The Butte Hill also has a disproportionate number of low-income citizens. The dust in many of their homes and yards is contaminated with lead, arsenic, and mercury. Health surveys of the area show elevated levels of cancer and other illnesses directly related to heavy metals exposure (2005).
Second, the low-income people most directly affected have been ignored. “EPA ignored the overwhelming public comments opposing its preferred waste-in-place (i.e., threat-in-place) remedy. Ignoring public comment is contrary to EPA national policy and contrary to sound, democratic public decision making” (2005).
Along the Upper Clark Fork River Basin complex of NPL Superfund sites, the ecological crises associated with mega-mining and its aftermath are thus, in the view of the affected publics, exacerbated by democratic crises in decision making. These integrated crises have prompted this academic project in applied moral philosophy—a search for a humane, practicable, rational, and scientifically informed normative theory of ecological democracy, one that takes both nature and culture seriously.
