#berkleypit

[retireearlyandtravel]

At first glance this picture is full of beauty. The deep blues skies with towering mountains in the background. In the foreground you see what look like rust and sandstone cliffs with a turquoise lake below. In actuality this place is anything but beautiful. It is a horrible reminder of what we as humans have done to our planet. This is the Berkeley pit, in Butte Montana. The Bentley Pit is a former open pit copper mine. The pit is one mile long by half a mile wide and approximately 1,780 feet deep. The Berkeley Pit was once a thriving copper mine appropriately dubbed “The Richest Hill in the World.” Butte was one of the richest communities in the country due to the amount of silver, gold, copper, and other metals extracted from the rock. Open-pit mining came to be in the 1950s when the demand for copper became great. Instead of mining below-ground, open-pit mining is mountain top removal, ultimately allowing underground and rainwater to collect in the pit. When the mining stopped at the Berley Pit, more water collect in the pit, forming a human-made lake. Unfortunately, the water leaches out the metals and minerals in the surrounding rock. Now, the water is as acidic as lemon juice, creating a toxic brew of heavy metal, poisons including arsenic, lead, and zinc. In 1995 a flock of geese landed in the lake but never took off again. A total of 342 geese died in that toxic brew that day. The pit now operates sound devices to scare waterfowl from the lake and has a guard posted to watch over it. At the present time, the water from the pit is being removed, treated, and is being discharged into a nearby creek. #montanamoment #visitmontana #visitmt #berkleypit #butte #buttemontana #turquoisewater #toxic #humanmade #retireearlyandtravel #travelwithus #travelnow #travelmoreoften #environmentaldisaster #geology #openpit #mining #miningtown #uglybeauty #saveourplanet #savetheearth #savetheplanet #savetheenvironment #savethebirds #needtoknow #repairing #lovetheworld #buttetrolley #loveourplanet #coppermine (at Berkeley Pit) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5sTiTLgVOJ/?igshid=13v0grhuj9qv2

[livingfree207]

The most successful copper mine in the USA. #berkleypit #copper #mine #montana #buttemontana #traveling #travelers #ontheroad #roadtrip #nomads #digitalnomads #wanderlust (at Berkeley Pit)

[2mnstrm]

Don’t ask about Montana.

It’s difficult to describe the Montana epiphany: it’s a realization somewhere near the remote intellectual crossroads of complex international banking and 19th century American land management policy.

It has nothing to do with popular conceptualizations of “How the west was won,” and everything to do with a zeitgeist of American exceptionalism and corruption that persists today.

It’s a bit like sitting in a Victorian parlor with Chinese, Montenegrin, West African, and Scottish roughnecks, while a monocle-clad robber baron plays Nicki Minaj for the group off of his iPad.

Montana is a vast historical brew of exploitation, corporatism, and outright racial genocide – it contains the largest superfund contamination site on planet earth– the Berkley Pit– along with a plethora of land based nuclear weapons systems, and a state population that totals less that Seattle’s eastside suburbia.

It is an unforgettable physical space that has been mysteriously redacted from the popular American consciousness– buried in the myth, and snow, and the obscurity of the “boom” years– rather than examined for what understanding it may offer us in our contemporary enslavement to American plutocracy.

Don’t ask about Montana– just go.