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TODAY Thursday 2 October 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: The Copper Queen

In the southeast corner of Arizona, twenty-five miles from the Mexican border, a handsome, anachronistic city climbs up the sides of the Mule Mountains. Its principal civic and commercial buildings are large, even grandiloquent, structures built of brick and limestone in the years between 1900 and 1930. Its houses are small wooden bungalows with metal roofs, terraced into the flanks of hills so as to give an appearance that combines the best of Appalachia and Tuscany. The city now has 7,000 inhabitants. Eighty years ago, there were 28,000, and it was the second largest city in Arizona.

Welcome to Bisbee, "The Queen of the Copper Camps."

Unlike the legendary gold and silver settlements in the American West, copper towns required patience and infrastructure. Gold and silver are priced by the ounce. Copper is priced in pounds and tons, and so demands vast output and reliable heavy transport, preferably rail. Gold and silver deposits tend to be smaller, purer and more play-outable than copper's sprawling seams, which generally are mixed up with rocks of no market value. Eighty percent of that which is mined in the search for copper must be discarded. Smelters are required, and places to dump the mountains of copper's unwanted companions.

Consequently, American gold and silver boomtowns tended to be ramshackle affairs, built by and for nomadic individualists. Those towns rarely lasted more than a decade or so. But for copper mining to be profitable, it demanded long payback periods and enormous capital investments beyond the resources of any individual. There was no mom-and-pop copper mining in the American West.

For the corporations with the skill, money, and luck to find, mine, and ship large quantities of copper, the financial rewards were fabulous. In Bisbee's heyday, America was going electric, and the electricity was transmitted over copper wire. New labor saving devices, in factories and homes, usually included some key components made of copper.

Until the 1920s, that rising demand was supplied mostly by men's muscles, with a little help from dynamite. Charges were set off in the face of a seam, and then the debris was reduced by "double-jacking": one miner holds a long chisel, another miner hits it with a steel hammer. So in addition to the necessary investments in exploration, smelting, and transport, successful copper companies had to maintain large workforces for long periods. They needed to build cities. Some were attractive, like Bisbee, and some weren't, like Butte.

Double-jacking was replaced by mechanized drills and then shaft mining was replaced by open pits. Labor requirements plummeted, and the copper towns lost population. Overseas competitors -- in Latin America, Russia, and Africa -- kept prices down. Fiber optics and other non-metal wires displaced copper for electrical transmission. In Bisbee, the Lavender Pit Mine closed in 1974, and its nearby smelter was finally shut down in 1987.

Today Bisbee has become a haven to the subculture generally referred to as "aging hippies." It is interesting to see a whole town of almost-senior citizens dressed in clothes typical of a Northern California college campus in 1972. Whatever its faults, this subculture doesn't tear down old buildings. Bisbee is in good hands, architecturally speaking. Unsurprisingly, Bisbee is also a center for environmentalists and environmental agitation on national and global issues.

But now a new spin: copper is hot again. IBM has just announced that a new copper-wired computer chip takes a great leap forward in PC power. New technologies promise cheaper ways of separating copper from other ores. And, in Bisbee, there are rumors that the Phelps Dodge corporation -- which has held on to almost all its local lands -- will start up operations once again. Thus far, people don't have much experience with industrial towns going post-industrial and then going industrial again, and Bisbeeans are understandably worried. Like their counterparts in New England who have re-occupied the old buildings of the early Industrial Revolution, they had lived without thought to the possibility that the dark satanic mills might one day belch again for real. Probably -- almost certainly -- the trend by which non-Americans assume a greater share of the disagreeable tasks of extraction and pollution needed to stoke the fires of American consumers will continue and enlarge itself. It is a trend that allows the most ardently green among us to occupy the best of the industrial age without incurring its worst. The reversal of that trend might be equitable and wise, but it would disturb many domestic tranquilities and would certainly lose us some wonderful tourist traps.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE:

Our 61 High Fives experts are turning in updated Website recommendations in droves. Visit our very own Door to the Environmental Web where new and recently updated High Fives are indicated by our spiffy "new!" graphic.

 

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