Big Steve, a contractor friend from Oracle, left Arizona in the 1970s and moved to Galveston, Texas, which, in the mid-1800s, had been a sort of Gulf Coast Bisbee: a thriving, deep-watershipping boomtown. Alas, the city’s boom went bust when Houston had its harbor dredged. Poor Galveston just disappeared from view, except for a bad hurricane or two. A century went by and then the oil biz in Houston boomed. The fat-cats started buying weekend homes in Galveston, but after so much mildew and neglect, the houses there were in bad shape. Big Steve specialized in restoring Victorian mansions with fancy woodwork. In that sense, his ship had come in. So, in 1981, as a friend and carpenter, I moved to Galveston.
Like any living thing, of course, I craved companionship. Every day, after work, dehydrated to the bone from eight hours of profuse sweating in South Texas’ climate from hell, I’d gobble down a beer or two, then swim out beyond the surf, and just lie floating in the warm brown Gulf of Mexico. Eventually, well after dark, I’d slither back ashore, relaxed, hungry, and bored. That left a bunch of empty nights to fill.
But then I met Victoria, a bright, cheerful woman; fine company in the kitchen, the library, and the boudoir. We began spending most of our free time together. After several months of hanging out, she confided to me that, years earlier, because of an unfortunate family history of uterine and ovarian cancer, she’d been advised to have those time-bomb organs taken out, to reduce risk. And so, when she was 23, a dozen years before we met, she’d yielded to the doctors’ wise advice. The surgery went very well. Her scars were quite invisible and you — except for being told — would not have known that surgery had ever taken place.
You may be wondering why I’m telling you this, and what it has to do with Patagonia. It’s simple. If Wildcat Silver, or Rosemont or any other mining company could guarantee that they would — or even could — extract their ore without poisoning or depleting our air, water and wildlife — and convincingly promised to restore the area to an acceptable look and feel when they got done, instead of leaving some blighted moonscape, I’d be much reassured and less mistrustful than I am.
I find it curious and unacceptable that the government, when it rolls over on its back, as it almost always does, and says “yes” to mining, as it almost always does, puts no teeth in its reclamation and restoration requirements. Why not demand the establishment of an escrow account with a realistic amount of money set aside to guarantee that the environment won’t be trashed? My guess is that the number of dollars required to do that would be so large as to jeopardize the profitability of such projects, which would therefore not be undertaken. Neither Wildcat nor Rosemont, charming and publicity-savvy as they’ve become, pretend to be charitable institutions.
In the land of the free and the home of the brave, money, of course, is the name of the game. There are, then, no such guarantees. Instead, we’ll all be outraged and surprised when, twenty-some years down the road the silver ore runs out and the company blows us a kiss, skips town, declares bankruptcy, changes names, woos new investors, and starts up all over again in, say, Montana, where, as required by law, the Forest Service solicits public comment.
Might one perceive a pattern here?