The headwaters of Bart Mihailovich’s life offer a compelling narrative and some insight into his thinking as he takes the oars of the Spokane Riverkeeper program.
New Spokane Riverkeeper Bart Mihailovich
A signal point of reference for Bart Mihailovich, the new Spokane Riverkeeper, is something called the Berkeley Pit. The pit is a now defunct copper mine, but it remains a gaping wound in Mihailovich’s home town of Butte, Montana. It is a mile long, a half mile wide, and filled to a depth of 900 feet with water as acidic as lemon juice. It is so notorious that it’s become a tourist attraction, where people pay a couple bucks for the chance to step out on a viewing platform alongside this big, toxic gouge in the earth.
It doesn’t stop there. Heavy metals (including arsenic, cadmium, and lead) from mine tailing wastes in and around Butte make their way in run-off that flows into Silver Bow Creek, a tributary to the Clark Fork River.
“My dad tells stories of being a kid where he’d put rocks from the creek in his pockets and when he would empty out his pockets the inside of his pants would be horribly stained,” says Mihailovich. “Who knows what was running through that creek?”
Mihailovich’s father is now an environmental engineer. One of his projects has been the environmental restoration of Silver Bow Creek.
The astounding environmental destruction caused by mining operations in and around Butte is, of course, juxtaposed by the nearby natural wonders of what is otherwise Big Sky country, what writer William Kittredge dubbed, “The Last Best Place.”
And these are the places that are also imbued in Mihailovich’s childhood memories, as the oldest of three sons growing up in a family that was as devoted to the outdoors as the family members were to each other.
“I grew up with these ideas of family, and togetherness, and closeness, all associated with nature and being outdoors and enjoying one’s place,” Mihailovich says.
And so, by his own admission, Bart Mihailovich is still trying to get his head around these contrasting realities and how they’ve affected him, and his passions as a now 27-year-old man, newly married, and taking on what is obviously one of the more high stakes environmental advocacy jobs in the region.
“I now realize how bad something could get,” he says about the Berkeley Pit and the damage done to Silver Bow Creek. “And I look at Butte as that example, of how bad a place could get with really poor judgment and no oversight and people really only looking after economic benefit.”
Even though he relocated to Spokane nine years ago when he enrolled at Eastern Washington University, he still can’t get away from Butte and what it means.
“I’m kind of playing catch up,” he explains. “It was just reality then [when he was a child]. I’m more interested in it now, more interested in Butte’s story than I ever was growing up. I want to understand how it got to that place, because it’s important to understand.”
You have to think, with Mihailovich, that this sort of curiosity is part of what made him such an intriguing candidate for the Riverkeeper position. Apart from his charismatic and outgoing personality, he’s best known for his writing about the Spokane River and other environmental causes and challenges. The Down to Earth blog he has shared for the past three years with his long-time friend Paul Dillon is something of a living resumé about how readily he can absorb information and give it meaning.
But there’s something else going on here, too. It is one challenge to wade into the world of NPDES permits and TMDLs, and EISs, and just understand what’s at issue in each of these processes. It’s another thing to actually want to see the bigger picture–about the actual relationship between process and actual environmental protection–and bring it to life. And that’s where he is.
“I’m curious about the regulatory process, about it is being abused and how we got to the point where it is common-place for the regulatory process to not do what it is intended to do.”
Good questions. I don’t think I’m alone in being both intrigued and excited about how the young man from Butte will take to this job in search of the answers. He starts Monday.
–Tim Connor
The Berkeley Pit from above. (Wikipedia photo).
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