Beech Tree News Network

There is a lake in Butte, Montana, that holds thirty-seven billion gallons of water.  That sounds like a good thing, especially in the drought-stricken West.  There is a problem, however.  The lake holds a toxic concoction of metal-laden wastewater left over from the days of copper mining, starting back at the turn of the 20^th century.

               The Berkeley Pit, as the lake is known today, started out as deep-mining shafts.  In 1955, the mining company switched to above-ground strip mining, hence the creation of a large pit that measures over a mile across.  Pumps ran around the clock to keep the ground water away from the mining area. In 1982, the mine was considered no longer profitable, and it was closed down.  The pumps were shut off, and ground water began filling the pit.  The result was a toxic concoction of metal-laden water that created sulfuric acid, in which no living thing could survive (discovermagazine.com).

               In 1995, during a bad storm in the area, 300 Snow Geese landed on the lake.  They died from ingesting the toxic water.  The necropsies revealed that “their insides were lined with burns and festering sores from high exposure to copper, cadmium and arsenic.  That same year, a chemist studying the lake, pulled some rope from the water that was covered in green slime.  He took it to his colleagues at Montana Tech, an engineering and mining school, where it was identified as Euglena Mutabilis, a single-celled algae.  It was the discovery of a living organism, impossibly alive in the hostile environment known as Berkeley Pit (discovermagazine.com).

               At the time, a husband-and-wife team of chemists, Don and Andrea Stierle, were also working at the university.  The team has spent their lives looking for compounds that can be used in medicine.  They are the team who discovered the cancer-killing substance, Taxol, a fungus that grows on the Yew tree.  “Life is everywhere,” Andrea says, “and all kinds of bacteria and fungi are found on plants.  Often, they produce compounds that have never before been seen or exploited” (discovermagazine.com).

               The Stierles found “hundreds of compounds from microbes in the pit water, many of them with antiviral or anticancer properties.  One of the most interesting finds was a “thick, gooey, black organism.”  It was a yeast that was very good at absorbing metals from the metal-laden water in the pit.  When the couple researched the yeast, they found the only other place this water-filtering microbe had eve been found was in the digestive system of geese.  It was apparent, the death of the Snow Geese had changed the chemical compound of the toxic water.  The geese had released a microbe into the lake that would start a natural clean-up process (theatlantic.com).

               Underground water sources are still filling the Berkeley Pit, and the fear is that the water in the pit will rise to the level that will contaminate drinking water from the nearby Silver Bow Creek.  Although the microbe released by the geese is gobbling up metal-laden contaminates in the water, it isn’t happening fast enough.  A treatment plant was built in 2019, with the hopes of discharging treated water into the creek by 2023, the estimated time frame that scientists believe the waters in the pit will rise high enough to contaminate the area’s drinking water (montanarightnow.com).

               Sometimes, I think we forget that our medicines, as well as solutions to many of the man-made problems we face, come directly from nature.  Penicillin comes from mold, Aspirin from the bark of the willow tree, Taxol from the Pacific Yew tree, and the anticoagulant, Agrastat, from the venom of a viper from Africa (scientificamerican.com).  In 2016, scientists in Japan, discovered a bacteria which “had the ability to decompose, or eat plastic” (forbes.com).  Do you realize what that would mean for plastic recycling?

               Often, when I’m outside walking around, I apologize to God for what we’ve done to His creation.  I’m sure it grieves Him, but He continues to point us in the direction of a solution, a fix that comes from the very creation we seem bent on destroying.  I think about those Snow Geese, their lifeless bodies floating on a sea of sulfuric acid, leaving behind the yeast that would help clean up the mess created by mankind.  Renewal usually does involve sacrifice, and sadly, it’s usually nature who does the giving.

               (A special thanks to Michael Merren, who pointed me in the direction of this