Mine, all mine; the great mineral grab.

• Author: Hilliard, Tom

Once upon a time, miners fondly called Butte, Montana, "the richest hill on Earth." That was a century ago. Today, Butte residents can stroll over to the Berkeley Pit and look out on a hole a mile wide, a mile-and-a-half long, and a half-mile deep. It's filled with turquoise-tinted water more acidic than vinegar.

The legacy of hard-rock mining in Montana is not something schoolchildren have to learn from textbooks. Abandoned tunnels, pits, waste heaps, and highwalls speckle the Treasure State from one end to the other. At the heart of the mining legacy is the frontier-era statute that made it all possible: the General Mining Law of 1872.

Born of the fever to settle the American West, the Mining Law was Congress's way of creating immense subsidies and privileges for miners to encourage migration to mineral-rich states and territories. More than a century later, the West long since settled, miners are still getting rich off the Mining Law, while taxpayers get nothing but an endless succession of holes like the Berkeley Pit.

The Mining Law governs all mining of gold, silver, copper, and other so-called hard-rock minerals on Federally owned public lands in the West. Almost 600 million acres fall under its jurisdiction, well over one-third the land area of several Rocky Mountain states. The Mining Law allows companies to roam anywhere on public lands not already withdrawn, staking claims and exploring for minerals.

A company that strikes a rich body of ore can build a mine on the spot and extract the minerals royalty-free, without compensation to taxpayers. And, most startling of all, a company can purchase the land outright at a price of no more than $5 per acre through a practice called patenting. The Anaconda Copper Company used patenting to remove the Berkeley Pit from public oversight.

Written before environmental destruction became a public concern, the Mining Law contains no environmental standards. Existing Federal standards leave gaping holes through which mine operators adroitly jump, occasionally leading to incidents of massive water and soil contamination. Even so conservative a group as the National Taxpayers Union has turned against the Mining Law, dubbing it "the great terrain robbery."

To understand the workings of the Mining Law, Montana is well worth a close look--not because that state's dilemma is unusual, but because it is all too typical.

I guess if you threw a dart at a map of the United States and decided to put a gold mine there, it's probably the worst place possible," says Stuart Coleman, director for resource management of Yellowstone National Park. Coleman is referring not to Yellowstone (where mining is outlawed) but to a high, mountainous area two miles northeast of the park. Noranda Minerals Corporation, a Canadian company, is seeking permission to build a gold and silver mine there.

Coleman does not take a position on the proposal per se--he just finds the location unfortunate. Yellowstone sits on one side, and the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness Area, the largest Wilderness Area in the lower forty-eight states, sits on the other. The site is poised at the intersection of three river drainages. One river proceeds on into the heart of Yellowstone. Another, a Federally designated Wild and Scenic River that is home to a threatened species of trout, has been named by the...