Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story About Copper, the Metal that Runs the World by Bill Carter

Author:Bill Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

10

$300 Billion vs. a Fish

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

—George Orwell

A few days later, I am in a room on the second floor of the Millennium Hotel in Anchorage. Waiting. The hotel is near the airport, and my window faces a large circular pond where dozens of float planes are parked, idly waiting for their next departure into the hinterlands of Alaska. The hotel, popular with travelers stuck waiting for an early flight to the Lower 48, has a 1980s feel to it, with worn-out yellow-and-brown carpets and fluorescent lights in the hallways that are either much too bright or dark and flickering.

To kill time, I am reading a book by Farley Mowat titled No Man’s River, a tale of his journey on a remote river in northern Canada in the late 1940s, a time when places were still hidden from modern society. Where living off the land was the only choice. This story gives me a familiar longing for a time long ago when surviving the cruel elements added up to something. Feats of survival were the measure of a man’s worth. Of course what is often forgotten in such a haze of nostalgia is that their deaths were also often cruel twists of fate at the hand of nature.

I just returned on a chartered jet from Iliamna, courtesy of the Pebble Partnership, with the mining executives who took the helicopter tour of the Pebble mine site. Everyone but me had been overcome with glee as we flew above the untouched land. Where they saw the future sites of leaching piles and crushing plants, I saw tons of waste bleeding toxic chemicals into a pristine watershed. They saw copper being shipped to an insatiable China and I saw a fishery experiencing the beginning of the end.

I am never quite sure how I am able to get on planes and helicopters with such people, meaning why they allow me to tag along. I have always enjoyed meeting people I would normally never know. No matter how much I disagree with their perspective, I like the educational process of hearing them out. Besides, in this case I find it illuminating to see up close the public relations machinations of the mining industry. How they strategize. How they work extremely hard to convince people, just enough people, that they are doing the right thing. They knew I was a writer. They also knew I was a commercial fisherman. Thinking back, I can only assume I was granted access because I was from Bisbee, a town steeped in mining history. Either way, it didn’t take long until they saw me as one of them, a company man.

I put down the book and scan through my notes from my trip to Iliamna. I look at the shorthand: money, dirty politics, fighting families, an unsolved murder, wild land like no one can imagine, a helicopter ride to a deep valley circled by windswept mountains where,

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