I've been to Butte, MT and stood in the shadow of that smelter smokestack.
The legacy of mining in Butte is...complicated.
Clearly the city wouldn't be what it is without its mining past. The richest hill on Earth made this city - at one time, not now - the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco.
But that same mining industry poisoned the land all around that hill, pumping the products of the smelter as high and far as possible from that giant smokestack.
I've posted about the EPA-lead cleanup from the mining industry before, and apparently Anaconda, MT is happy with how the cleanup is going, but it sounds like some of the folks in Butte aren't so happy.
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