A Time Bomb in the Earth

Selenium, a naturally occurring element, performs all manner of useful functions, not the least of which is teaching us that if a little is good, a lot isn't necessarily better. In varying quantities and applications it can make you healthy, wealthy and dead. It's great for vulcanizing rubber, tinting glass, bluing gun barrels, controling dandruff and curing eczema. Farmers add it to livestock feed because if mammals don't ingest enough, they acquire debilitating calcium deposits, contract white-muscle disease, and abort fetuses.

But there's a threshold after which selenium morphs into a poison at least five times more toxic than arsenic and that, like DDT, bioaccumulates as it ascends the food chain. Exposure to high concentrations can eliminate populations by causing reproductive failure and embryonic deformities, short-circuiting nervous systems, and blowing out kidneys and livers. Such concentrations are unnatural. They occur when rock- and earth-bound selenium is unleashed into the environment by such human disturbances as oil refining, coal-fired electrical generation, agricultural irrigation, mountain top-removal coal extraction and strip-mining of sulfide minerals--especially phosphate, used mainly to make fertilizer and phosphoric acid.

Forty percent of the nation's phosphate reserve lies hundreds of feet below the earth's surface in Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and Utah, bound up in rock formations. When phosphate ore is extracted selenium is cast to the four winds and carried away in runoff. Plants and microbes quickly assimilate it and are consumed by larger and more complex organisms which, in turn, are consumed by still larger and more complex organisms. By the time the selenium reaches fish and mammals, concentrations can be deadly. Hundreds of sheep and dozens of horses have been killed, and we can only guess at the number of birds, fish and wild animals because no one is watching or counting in this isolated and forgotten land.

Selenium pollution threatens to extirpate the Yellowstone cutthroat trout (now found in just 10 percent of its natural range) from two of its few remaining strongholds--the Blackfoot and Salt river drainages in southeast Idaho. Four permitted phosphate strip mines are belching selenium into these systems. Yet the J.R. Simplot Co., one of three current operators (the others being Nu-West, Inc., and Monsanto), wants to expand its Smoky Canyon Mine into the Caribou-Targhee National Forest. And the Bush administration's scuttling of the roadless-area protection rule has allowed Simplot to hack roads into the Deer Creek watershed for test drilling (See "A Plague on All Your Forests," April 2006). In addition to the four permitted phosphate strip mines, southeast Idaho has 17 abandoned strip mines--all Superfund sites because they, too, are belching selenium.

Simplot vows to use the best technology available, but still admits that the creeks coming out of its mine expansion will be at or just below the current selenium standard of five parts per billion. And that's only if the cleanup of its existing mine (a Superfund site) turns out to be successful.

A section of Crow Creek (a tributary of the Salt River) flows through a ranch bought nine years ago by Pete and Judy Riede when they retired from General Motors to go fishing. "The average fish is 12 to 14 inches, and I've caught them significantly over 20," says Pete. "A section of Deer Creek (a tributary of the Crow that the mine will pollute) flows through the ranch, too; its trout are generally smaller, but there are beaver ponds that produce some tremendous fish."

So pristine was Deer Creek that, in August 2003, a Forest Service survey crew determined that it should be used as the standard of excellence--"a reference area for comparison to streams impacted by various land uses." The survey team went on to recommend "that activities not be allowed which would reduce the quality of fish and amphibian habitat in the drainage." Angler, author and communications director for Trout Unlimited's Public Lands Initiative, Chris Hunt, tells me this: "These fish are truly special; they move up out of the Blackfoot Reservoir-- 22- to 24-inch cutts that, come August, will charge up from under a cutbank and nail a grasshopper pattern. It's unbelievable in small-stream settings like this. As a fisherman, I can see the writing on the wall. These streams profiled in my guidebook [A Fly Fisher's Guide to Eastern Idaho's Small Water] are eventually doomed. I know that sounds drastic, but armed with the information I have now, I don't see a very bright future for the Yellowstone cutts and the non-native trout in the Caribou Highlands."

Nor do I, given the blasé attitudes of state and federal bureaucrats. On February 21, 2006, the Fish and Wildlife Service published the following statement in The Federal Register: "[US Forest Service selenium expert Dr. Dennis] Lemly (1999) described a particularly threatening scenario in the Blackfoot River drainage of Idaho where very high selenium concentrations were first discovered. A preliminary hazard assessment indicated that waterborne selenium concentrations in the Blackfoot River and 14 of its tributaries met or exceeded toxic thresholds for fish. The selenium problem centers on surface disposal of mine spoils. Compounding this problem is the presence of historic tailings dumps, many of which are large (greater than 353 million cubic feet) and contain a tremendous reservoir of selenium that has the potential to be mobilized and introduced into aquatic habitats (Lemly 1999). Continued expansion of phosphate mining is anticipated in these watersheds, and large mineral leases are awaiting development both on and off National Forest lands (Lemly 1999, Christensen 2005)."

That disheartening assessment accompanied a long string of similar disheartening assessments (all appended with "but," "however" or "nevertheless" clauses) as part of a denial of a petition to list the Yellowstone cutthroat trout as threatened. Identifying imperiled organisms and then protecting and recovering them as required by the Endangered Species Act is something our federal government just doesn't do anymore on its own volition. The administration of George H. W. Bush listed an average of 58 species per year. The Clinton administration listed an average of 65 per year-- this despite a one-year listing moratorium sponsored by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). The George W. Bush administration has listed an average of 8 for a total of 40. Thirty-eight of these listings were in response to court action, one in response to threatened court action, and one in response to a citizens' petition.

Because selenium bioaccumulates, a one-percent increase in the water column can translate to a 1,000-percent increase in fish flesh. At elevated but sublethal levels adult trout appear perfectly healthy, but their deformed fry perish in the swim-up stage or are quickly nailed by predators. Populations can wink out before biologists have a clue that there's a problem.