With a 2012 copyright, Bill Carter’s “Boom, Bust, Boom, A  Story about Copper, the Metal that Runs the World,” is a timely read before PolyMet’s slated Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS). Carter’s book is a composite personal story combined with monumental research.  

Although based within the setting of Bisbee, Arizona, the story can easily be transposed to northern Minnesota. And Carter’s story doesn’t stay in Arizona--it takes us to Mexico, Alaska, China, and beyond.
The pages of “Boom, Bust, Boom” cover geology, history, and economics while Carter and his wife debate leaving their chosen town of Bisbee due to concerns about the reopening of the mine. During the course of the decision making, Carter interviews workers and mining company executives. He ponders how mining officials can use indigenous peoples as collateral damage while defacing huge expanses of pristine environments.

He sheds light on the 1872 Mining Law that allows companies to make billions of dollars for executives and shareholders at the expense of the American public. He notes that all copper mines pollute and the legacy of mining pollution continues in watersheds throughout our country, and world. He explains how mining companies can easily control politics by winning over one or two key political or city leaders and letting them control those underneath, by donating money toward community projects,  and by carefully crafting language to present the mining process in positive ways.

Carter also wonders “at what point the damage caused by extracting minerals will alter how we justify the many conveniences of our modern way.”  He also mentions that the mining industry itself drives demand for mining more metals in order to produce mining facilities and equipment. While presenting these concerns,  the scope of Carter’s narrative doesn’t delve into the issues.  And while he states that the needs of China and India will continue to drive the demand for more metals, he doesn’t question how countries with such huge populations plan to put everyone in their own vehicle, modeling after the transportation policies advanced by our country since the days of Henry Ford.

So a weakness in “Boom, Bust, Boom” is the assumption that demand will continue to drive  the mining of copper. This assumption does not take into account new  technologies and efficiencies that could bypass much of this need, including energy sources that would get us off the grid, a change in transportation policies, and a change in public attitudes that would take us away from social reliance on cell phones and computers to social reliance on our own communities and food supply. Nor does this assumption question military policy and the military’s use of metals, all of which fly under the cover of secrecy.  And of escalating concern is the impact that climate change may have upon economic expansion.

But those are topics for another book. Bill Carter and his wife decide to move with their two young  daughters to a town without  mining. Our job as residents of northeast Minnesota is to become informed so that we can articulate both the science and the morality of saying no to copper-nickel mining in Superior National Forest and the Lake Superior watershed.