Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape

A memoir-meets-exposé that examines our fraught relationship with the West and our attempts to clean up a toxic environmental legacy
 
 
In 2002, Texas journalist Brad Tyer strapped a canoe on his truck and moved to Montana, a state that has long exerted a mythic pull on America’s imagination as an unspoiled landscape. The son of an engineer who reclaimed wastewater, Tyer was looking for a pristine river to call his own. What he found instead was a century’s worth of industri…