2008 Woodie Awards
Lecturer promotes green initiatives.
Charlie Eichacker
Issue date: 4/30/08 Section: News
|
After a brief introduction by Assistant Director of the Goldfarb Center Marnie Terhune, Opper opened his lecture by discussing his experiences as a student, his early attempts to be an environmentalist and how those attempts translated into the responsibility he now faces as director of his state's environmental policy body. He quickly moved into providing a background description of Montana, the fourth largest, yet forty-eighth most densely populated state in the union. According to Opper, the state can be divided into two parts, "the western part of the state that everyone seems to want to own a piece of, [where] we've got some real issues with subdivisions and development," and "the eastern part of the state that has a lot of energy resources: oil and gas, and particularly a lot of coal."
Opper next discussed the brief tide of liberalism, contrasted with the conservatism that dominated the state over the last few decades. This liberalism spread through the state in the 1970s, and with the recent failure of the Montana branch of the powerful Anaconda Copper Mining Company in Butte, led to the 1971 passing of the Montana Environmental Policy Act (MEPA). MEPA was a sweeping piece of environmental legislation that ultimately ushered in the rise of his own Department of Environmental Quality. But due to MEPA's lack of lasting popularity with the Republican legislature, "they really gutted this piece of legislation" in 2001. The legislature determined that the act was "procedural" rather than "substantive" and thus, they restricted much of the work the agency could originally do.
Following this discussion of past environmental policy in Montana, Opper shifted the focus of his talk to a few of the most important issues the state currently faces. The first one he discussed was Butte, a Superfund site. Superfund sites, he explained, are "areas that are contaminated enough that the federal government steps in and works with the state to do some cleanup work." This particular superfund site, which is the largest one in the nation, starts at a mining area in Butte and stretches 125 mile down the Clark Fork River, all the way to the Milltown Dam outside Missoula. The materials from those mines were processed by sandwiching them in between timber and igniting them, creating a black ooze, rich in chemicals. But those chemicals seeped into the earth and the smoke from the fires blew into the town, resulting in the deaths of numerous residents. Then, in 1908, a storm swept through the site and washed all the toxic tailings from the mines down to the dam, rendering it an environmental catastrophe. Only in the last two decades has Opper's agency been able to breach the dam and gradually remove those deposits of toxic materials from the River.
Be the first to comment on this story