The challenge

East of Spokane, WA, the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River winds through Idaho's Silver Valley, which was once the world's most productive silver mining region. Today this is a land of beauty and environmental devastation, designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a 21-mile superfund site, the second largest in the nation. Though the E.P.A. targeted the site for cleanup in the early 1980's, the damage has grown worse over time. As Barbara Miller explains, "One year, during a flood, the waters spread over a million pounds of mining pollution - arsenic, cadmium, mercury, zinc and lead - downstream to an area covering over 1500 square miles." The pollution now reaches east into bordering Montana and as far west as Spokane, and may, through the Columbia River basin, eventually reach the Pacific.

The cumulative effect of decades of neglect: In 1974, the Centers for Disease Control began an annual screening of the region’s children and found theirs to be the highest level of lead poisoning of any population of children in the nation. For the residents, economic suffering compounds the effects of environmental damage. In 1981, the Bunker Hill mine and smelter closed its doors, putting more than 2000 men and women out of work. In spite of efforts by the state to retrain and relocate workers, the only viable replacement for these lost jobs has been cleanup work at the Superfund site. In August 2001, unemployment for Shoshone county was 13 percent.


Seeds of commitment

Miller’s values were forged during her childhood. With her parents and 11 brothers and sisters, she moved west from a North Dakota farm in 1956. On the way to California, the family stopped in Kellogg, Idaho, where Miller’s father took a job in the mines. The family decided to stay. Later, Miller’s father became a union organizer of mine workers. Raised in this devoutly religious family, she learned “the idea of good stewardship, of looking out for each other.” After moving away from the region as a young woman, attending college, then returning, she saw the pollution of the Silver Valley with fresh eyes. “When you live here, you may see the devastation of the hillsides, denuded and destroyed, but you don’t grasp the severity. The same is true of the health of the people. When I came home, and did some research, I understood.”


Accomplishments

With 20 activists from churches, unions, social service agencies and other groups in the valley, Barbara Miller helped found the Silver Valley People’s Action Coalition in 1986. Working with this core group, she helped convince the E.P.A. to finally begin cleaning up the Superfund site. In 1995, when the cleanup stalled, the Coalition once again sought assistance from the E.P.A. With the intervention of E.P.A. ombudsman Bob Martin, it helped expose the neglected cleanup – which continues today at what the Coalition considers an inadequate pace. In 1996, Miller received an E.P.A. Technical Assistance Grant, which provided funding for community groups to hire technical expertise at Superfund sites. Through the leadership of Miller and the Coalition, the E.P.A. intervention has brought hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in wages and indirect spending to the depressed Silver Valley economy. The priority has been on hiring the locally unemployed to fill the cleanup positions.

The Silver Valley People’s Action Coalition also created a blueprint for a community lead health project, established a local chapter of Habitat for Humanity and last year organized a three-state regional First Annual Health Awareness Conference, attracting health officials, environmental justice organizations, government agencies, citizens groups and the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe. Miller is currently working to convince the E.P.A. to address 12 areas of the Superfund region that the technical advisors have identified as still toxic – especially the removal of lead contamination from the interiors of homes. Her highest priority today is the establishment of the Community Lead Health Project in Silver Valley, to provide a place where lead-poisoned children, former workers and residents will, for the first time in a century, have easily obtainable diagnosis and treatment for lead poisoning.

Rather than viewing pollution from a single focus, Barbara Miller considers stewardship of land and water to be part of a larger stewardship that includes the physical, mental and economic health of people and the community.

“Ultimately, if we and the E.P.A. do our jobs right, there will be a decent quality of life here – what much of the rest of the country already experiences. That in itself will build our economy.”


How she leads

Northern Idaho is a rural and isolated region with few professional services, major medical facilities or universities. The coalition has made good use of the Internet, using e-mail to contact and inform key activists, who in turn send information on to members of phone trees. Miller is determined to spread leadership beyond her and the original Coalition members. She has managed to create links with outside government agencies, health officials, tribal leaders, environmental groups and universities in Idaho and other states. And these widening supports, combined with the ongoing efforts of local citizens, have begun to convince the Silver Valley community to set aside its mistrust of the E.P.A. and begin to acknowledge the severe health and economic problems that accompany a poisoned natural environment.


The future

Needed, as Barbara Miller sees it: more extensive residential cleanup, lead-free housing, better testing for lead in children, quality health care for those suffering illnesses related to lead and other heavy metals and more and safer jobs. Miller is determined to continue the fight to clean up the contamination of her region and to open the Community Lead Health Project. She also hopes to organize another regional health summit and continue to build bridges to other organizations. She believes that a quality Superfund cleanup along with good diagnosis and health care for people who have been harmed by mine contamination will save generations of people from illness and premature death and will begin to heal the culture and the ecosystem. Some of Miller’s supporters compare this to a real-life David and Goliath story. But she says, “We have board members and other citizens who became involved in 1986, and they’re still involved. Together, we’re convinced this can be done, and will be done,” she says. “We are all David.”


More about Barbara Miller

“During the past year, because of the contamination, side products of lead, arsenic, and other toxic metals, E.P.A. extended the [Silver Valley] site to now be the largest superfund site in the country, roughly 1500 square miles. Lead is the primary contaminant affecting the community. Their medical facilities are no better than what I’ve seen in third world countries….The need for medical care is of an emergency nature in my professional opinion. It is a highly medically underserved area, loaded with the most toxic pollutants – arsenic, lead.”
– Dr. John Rosen, Professor of Pediatrics, Head of Division of Environmental Sciences, The Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York

“People are afraid of ... speaking up in support of cleanup. I wouldn't underestimate the lengths to which the political forces would go up there."
– Michele Nanni, Get The Lead Out coordinator with The Lands Council in Spokane, quoted in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, Nov. 5, 2000