Closer to home, in the Cabinet Mountains of Montana, on a piece of land so beautiful it was among the original parcels designated a wilderness areas, the Federal government is in the process of giving Sterling Mining Company, a seven year old mining company, the same giveaway. The Rock Creek Mine is supposed to yield 100 million ounces of silver and a billion pounds of copper. At today’s prices of $2.60 a pound for copper and $14.00 an ounce for silver, the mine would be worth about $4 billion. The owner of the mining claims, Frank Duval, paid $23 million for the right to the claims in 1999. The total gain that Sterling Mining Company stands to make from the ground beneath the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area is currently unknown.

This story of government shunting public resources to private pockets is nothing new, and because of the particular regulations governing hard rock mining (as opposed to oil, gas, or coal), is perfectly legal. In fact, the minerals beneath a piece of land are rarely purchased along with the title; it is perfectly conceivable that the land that you live on has a mining claim staked to it, and it would be legal for a company to build a tunnel beneath your house to extract the metals beneath it.

In the case of the Rock Creek Mine, the plan is a little more complex than simply opening the ground and pulling the metals out. First the company plans to blow huge tunnels beneath the mountains leaving columns of rock to support the tunnels. Then the interior of the mine would be removed and after processing filled into nearby valleys. The mine is proposing to dump on the order of 100 million tons of crushed rock into the valleys on border between Idaho and Montana over its operating lifetime.

The environmental problems with removing the interior of a mountain are significant, but they are trivial compared to the possibility that the wastewater from the processing of the minerals might flow into the Rock Creek, the Clark Fork River and Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho. The mine is proposing to dump three million gallons of wastewater daily in the Clark Fork River, which is in the midst of its own billion dollar cleanup after the copper mining earlier in the century.

I just returned from Lake Pend Oreille near Sandpoint: the land prices here have doubled since the late 1990s according to the New York Times. If the prices for a lot on a rutted dirt road without lake access are any indication, land prices will continue to be a significant driver of North Idaho’s economy.

But the tourist economy doesn’t work well without the fish and the clear water and the trees that bring retirees from Seattle and Connecticut. The point here is not to vilify the mine in particular nor to complain about the 1872 Mining Law. The point is that in this case, there is a clear choice to be made between a 25 year commitment to building a mine or an indefinite investment in the future of a community.

Now, it’s hard to argue that building lake-front property is environmentally benign, and the roads that lead to the castles on the waterfront have clearly caused significant damage to intact habitat—they may have even contributed to increased acidity in the lakes and streams.

However, the fact remains that North Idaho and Montana are two places in the world where you can still see a grizzly bear and where wolves run free, and even if they can no longer access the waterfront, the focus of the leisure community is the natural amenities that the landscape offers. It’s a fundamentally different paradigm with which to approach economic development.