Montana’s current governor, Republican Judy Martz, as well as four Republican gubernatorial candidates favor a return of cyanide leach mining. (One, Ken Miller, flippantly told an audience, “You had some cyanide for lunch” because there were almonds on their chicken.) I object to cyanide on ethical, economic, and ecological grounds.

This process violates the most basic lesson responsible parents teach their children: if you make a mess, clean it up. Many mining companies use their political influence to escape this admonition. This is true worldwide.

Public choice economics explains the problem. Benefits from mining are current and concentrated. Social, economic, and environmental costs are distant, long lasting, and diffuse. Aiming for short-term economic advantage, mining outfits like Pegasus Gold trample both the property rights of those harmed and environmental quality.

But new forces are shaping the West. No longer does the region’s future lie in resource extraction. An increasingly mobile workforce is drawn here for the environmental amenities: clean air, clean streams, and open space. What Montana needs is more capital -- physical and human -- not more mining.

Traditional mining operations aren’t responsive to the importance of environmental quality in the new West. This is, in large part, due to the weak and outdated regulatory framework for which they lobbied and bribed. The old regulations haven’t followed mining’s change from picks and shovels to cyanide.

In some cases cyanide leaching may be as damaging, and is surely more insidious, than the old-time hydraulic mining techniques that physically reshaped entire rivers in the 1800s. Why? Because cyanide often (always?) leaks and contaminates groundwater. For example, in 1983 19,000,000 gallons of cyanide solution leaked from the Golden Sunlight mine near Whitehall. Somewhat over 135,000,000 gallons have escaped into Montana’s waters in the past 20 years. In 1998 Montana voters passed Initiative 137 to stop this harmful technology.

These spillovers (or leaks) harm wildlife, human health, and the property rights of neighbors. The EPA estimates 40 percent of the headwaters of all western watersheds are polluted by mining wastes.

The Republican gubernatorial candidates seem to oppose the Bush administration’s position. In 2001, Bush upheld several objectively defined legal hurdles, added by Clinton, to the mining of gold, copper, lead, and zinc on public lands. Interior Secretary Gale Norton said: “We have required that companies that operate on federal lands post performance bonds to cover the costs of reclaiming land and also to provide an incentive for companies to protect environmental resources. In addition, we retained strict standards to address cyanide and to protect areas from acid mine damage....”

On balance, the rules are beneficial and were long overdue. Here’s an example, one of hundreds.

The now bankrupt multinational Pegasus Corporation operated the Zortman-Landusky mine near the Fort Belknap Indian reservation in Montana. Since commencing mining in 1979, the operation has accumulated a vast rap sheet of environmental fines. The $32 million reclamation bond it was forced to post in 1996 is grossly insufficient to do the job. Taxpayers have spent nearly $30 million to clean up or seal in contamination at the site. A failure to require companies to bear the full costs of their actions is a huge subsidy.

Some subsidies are justified by their contributions to the general welfare. Education and research are prime examples. The mining subsidies however, result in harmful distortions by neglecting or discounting future costs. Whether they are explicit or implicit, they violate reasonable standards of equity, efficiency, and environmental quality.

I believe we are well past the time when the West may be easily manipulated as a colonial economy. Average education, income, and sensitivities have increased. As a consequence, our tolerance for environmental abuse has lessened. Given their avowed stand on responsible environmentalism, Republicans should recognize this. If they fail to do so, they will continue to lose the support of the well educated and well off. They will earn this fate by neglecting ecology and equity under the law.

Montana’s future lies in improving educational opportunities for its youth and attracting entrepreneurial immigrants. Clocks don’t run backward. Looking to mining for the state’s economic salvation is a Ghost Dance that confuses fuzzy hopes with clear-eyed expectations.