Boom, Bust, Boom: A Story about Copper, the Metal That Runs the World - Softcover

Carter, Bill

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1439136580 ISBN 13: 9781439136584

Publisher: Scribner, 2021

Synopsis

A SWEEPING ACCOUNT OF CIVILIZATION’S COMPLETE DEPENDENCE ON COPPER AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR PEOPLE, NATURE, AND OUR GLOBAL ECONOMY

COPPER is a miraculous and contradictory metal, essential to nearly every human enterprise. For most of recorded history, this remarkably pliable and sturdy substance has proven invaluable: not only did the ancient Romans build their empire on mining copper but Christopher Columbus protected his ships from rot by lining their hulls with it. Today, the metal can be found in every house, car, airplane, cell phone, computer, and home appliance the world over, including in all the new, so-called green technologies.

Yet the history of copper extraction and our present relationship with the metal are fraught with profound difficulties. Copper mining causes irrevocable damage to the Earth, releasing arsenic, cyanide, sulfuric acid, and other deadly pollutants into the air and water. And the mines themselves have significant effects on the economies and wellbeing of the communities where they are located.

With Red Summer and Fools Rush In, Bill Carter has earned a reputation as an on-the-ground journalist adept at connecting the local elements of a story to its largest consequences. Carter does this again—and brilliantly—in Boom, Bust, Boom, exploring in an entertaining and fact-rich narrative the very human dimension of copper extraction and the colossal implications the industry has for every one of us.

Starting in his own backyard in the old mining town of Bisbee, Arizona—where he discovers that the dirt in his garden contains double the acceptable level of arsenic—Bill Carter follows the story of copper to the controversial Grasberg copper mine in Indonesia; to the “ring” at the London Metal Exchange, where a select group of traders buy and sell enormous amounts of the metal; and to an Alaskan salmon run threatened by mining. Boom, Bust, Boom is a highly readable account—part social history, part mining-town exploration, and part environmental investigation.

Page by page, Carter blends the personal and the international in a narrative that helps us understand the paradoxical relationship we have with a substance whose necessity to civilization costs the environment and the people who mine it dearly. The result is a work of first-rate journalism that fascinates on every level.

About this title

About the Author:

Bill Carter is the author of Red Summer: The Danger, Madness, and Exaltation of Salmon Fishing in a Remote Alaskan Village and Fools Rush In: A True Story of Love, War, and Redemption. He has written for Rolling Stone, Outside, Men’s Journal, and other publications.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

1

Tainted Vegetables

I like my town with a little drop of poison.

—Tom Waits

Every spring I plant a garden, a small but noble pursuit. Small in the sense that there are many more important items on the daily calendars of our lives, but noble because each step of self-sustainability has a lovely feeling of beating the ever-invasive food industry at its own game.

In my line of work, I travel a lot, sometimes to places where food is measured by cups of rice a week, and water is delivered to homes by ten-year-olds who have walked five miles through desolation to get to a well. Planting a garden is a way of keeping the harsh realities of the world at bay. It seems a sane practice in a world hell-bent on destroying itself.

When home, I try to talk to the plants every day. I grew up on a farm, so speaking to budding pomegranates seems natural to me, sometimes more so than speaking to my neighbor. Peaches and apricots are good listeners, too. I go to them for comfort. I trust the plants. And the seeds, although invisible, give great solace as they incubate in the ground.

This particular spring carries special meaning for me. My wife is pregnant with our second daughter and our two-year-old is eager to take on the chores of watering and helping her dad with the daily garden duties. My plan is to create a large vegetable garden in a backyard area we have never used. It is situated between two tall trees, perfect for morning and afternoon sun but shaded during midday.

After two full weekends of digging, raking, and trips to the hardware store, I complete a drip irrigation system. My daughter and I spend a Sunday morning planting squash, tomatoes, lettuce, spring onions, jalapeños, green peppers, and several herbs, including basil, thyme, and chives. Each morning, for weeks thereafter, I wake with the sun to see how much the garden has grown overnight. In the beginning the progress is slow, but soon the vegetables burst through the thin layer of dirt and begin to morph into yellow, red, and green.

After six weeks of daily attention, I collect my first batch of spring lettuce. I coddle each leaf as I wash it in the sink. Finally I prepare a salad for dinner. My wife won’t eat the lettuce or any other item from the garden. She’s not a food snob, but she is careful what she eats because of the baby that grows inside her. I argue that the food is as organic as we can find. She replies that she doesn’t trust the dirt.

She has a point. We live in Bisbee, Arizona, a small hamlet couched in the Mule Mountains, a mile above sea level. Bisbee is a dormant mining town, located eight miles from the Mexican border as the crow flies. The copper mine closed down more than thirty years ago, but the effects of its existence remain. Mine shafts pockmark the hillsides and sulfuric acid runoff stains the cliffs a burnt orange. Giant headframes dot the horizon, reminders of the elevators the size of houses that used to carry men a thousand feet below the surface. And then there is the open pit, a large crater on the edge of town where all the water from our torrential monsoon rains pours off the mountains into this mile-long giant bathtub.

My wife and I met in Bisbee, not long after we both moved here in 2000, mostly to get away from anything resembling suburbia. As I’ve passed through the decades, I realize I have a few steadfast requirements for what I call quality of life. Most important is not driving in traffic. At all. I need to walk out my front door to a good hiking trail. I also like the ability to barter, if money is short, for any vital necessity. In Bisbee, I have always been able to trade one of my books for a meal, a poker buy-in, or a bottle of wine, or all three. Money is required here, but bartering is accepted.

In Bisbee, no two houses are quite alike. In fact, they are spectacularly different, reflecting the individual owners who built them, most more than a hundred years ago. Several streets are so narrow that driving down them requires bending the mirror inward to avoid clipping it off. Gas lines run exposed up stairways, occasionally doubling as railings. Each homeowner must adapt to the nuances of his or her home, and no manual exists to help with repairs. Local plumbers and electricians have to throw their training out the window because no job in town resembles that of a modern-day house.

Bisbee is no ordinary mining town. In its heyday it was one of the largest copper towns in the United States. Phelps Dodge, then the owners of the mine and once the political and economic alpha force of Arizona that owned almost every large copper mine in the state, took more than $8 billion in copper from this place. You don’t take that much from the earth without leaving a scar or two.

In 2007, Freeport-McMoRan bought the Bisbee mining operation and everything else Phelps Dodge had owned in Arizona and throughout the world for $25 billion—including mines in Africa and Chile. Freeport now owns a majority of the land to the north and south of Bisbee. They own the dormant mine. They own the twenty-seven hundred miles of mining tunnels that run beneath the town. They own some parcels of the mountains, sections of the outlying desert, and many buildings in town. Even though they don’t own most of the homes, at times it feels like the only things they don’t own or control are the people and the sky.

Originally based in New Orleans, Freeport began as a sulfur-mining company in 1912. In 1981 it merged with McMoRan Oil & Gas Company, the latter part of the name being a combination of the surnames of the three men who started the company: W. K. McWilliams, James Moffett, and B. M. Rankin.

Freeport-McMoRan employs 29,700 people in several countries and in 2012 ranked 135th on the Fortune 500. It has an estimated 102 billion pounds of copper, 40 million ounces of gold, and 2.5 billion pounds of molybdenum—a mineral used to strengthen steel—in reserve. The company expects to produce more than 4 billion pounds of copper per year for the next several years, making it the largest publicly traded copper-mining company in the world, second in size only to Codelco, the national copper company of Chile.

The company has always lured a collection of powerful families and individuals into its ranks, including the Whitneys—of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Rockefellers have served on the board of Freeport for several decades. Augustus Long, the director of Texaco from 1950 to 1977, was also a prominent board member along with Robert Lovett, son of R. S. Lovett, president of Union Pacific Railroad and commonly known as a “Cold War architect.” Henry Kissinger has long been a board member and today holds the title director emeritus.

Currently, James Moffett is the acting chairman of the board, president, and chief executive officer of Freeport-McMoRan, whose headquarters has relocated from New Orleans to Phoenix, a result of buying Phelps Dodge. In 2010, Moffett’s yearly compensation package was $47 million, including his base salary and various exercised stock options, making him the highest-paid person in Arizona, with second place going to Richard Adkerson, the cochairman of the company, who has earned $180 million since 2006, at an average of $33 million a year.

In 1988, while still based in New Orleans, Freeport gained national attention for dumping toxic water into the Mississippi. That year, Citizen Action, a national Washington-based environmental watchdog group, named Freeport the sixth-largest producer of toxic waste in the United States and the number-one water polluter. More recently, in 2008, the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst listed Freeport as the country’s twenty-second-worst air polluter, with a grand total of four million pounds of toxic air released in one year.

As part of the transaction with Phelps Dodge, Freeport assumed an obligation to reclaim all the polluted soil in the Bisbee neighborhoods. By 2008, Freeport began a program it calls “soil reclamation,” which means they are testing every household in Bisbee to check for contaminants in their yards. If the company finds toxins above the allowed level, it removes all the contaminated dirt from the yard and replaces it with new dirt. Then the company wipes its hands and moves on to the next house.

I applied for Freeport to check our soil, which they did, but that had been months ago. A team of geologists, chemists, and environmental engineers walked the perimeter of our house, probing the soil to a depth of two feet. No one would answer any questions I had, other than to say the results would be ready in several weeks. Over the past few months it has been hard not to notice these teams of professionals driving in new gray jeeps with the word SHAW sprawled across the door. Shaw, I find out, is also a Fortune 500 company with ties to the industrial, chemical, and petrol industries and based in Baton Rouge. Among other services, it offers environmental remediation. The company prides itself on cleaning up highly toxic sites, including areas polluted by the manufacture of biological weapons. Months passed, so I assumed our soil was fine. Meanwhile, spring waits for no one, and I want to grow food. I want to teach my daughter it is possible to eat from our backyard and not Safeway.

The first night I eat a salad from our yard, my wife eats something else. As much as my daughter likes gardening, she doesn’t like salads, or anything remotely resembling a vegetable. She opts for macaroni and cheese. The salad tastes delicious, but knowing it came from the backyard, our backyard, makes it even more scrumptious. I do this daily, sometimes twice daily, for two weeks, each time feeling great pride in my efforts as a gardener.

One night I have a nagging headache, which intensifies the following night. My stomach feels nauseous. I tell myself the headaches and nausea are a result of ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 1439136580
• ISBN 13: 9781439136584
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304