Klucas, Gillian

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Klucas, Gillian

PERSONAL: Female. Education: University of Michigan, M.A., 1996.

ADDRESSES: Home—Portland, OR. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Island Press, 1718 Connecticut Ave. NW, Ste. 300, Washington, DC 20009-1148.

CAREER: Writer and journalist.

WRITINGS:

Leadville: The Struggle to Revive an American Town, Island Press (Washington, DC), 2004.

(Author of text) William Henry Jackson, Colorado 1870–2000 II: Historical Landscape Photography, Westfield Publishers/Colorado Historical Society (Englewood, CO), 2005.

Contributor to periodicals, including High Country News, On Earth, and Preservation.

SIDELIGHTS: Gillian Klucas is a magazine writer whose works have appeared in such environmentally aware publications as On Earth and Preservation. She expands on this interest in resource conservation and environmental reporting with her first book, Leadville: The Struggle to Revive an American Town, the story of the environmental poisoning and eventual reinvention of a Rocky Mountain mining town. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Leadville thrived as a successful Colorado mining town. An abundance of natural resources, including silver, gold, manganese, copper, zinc, and lead, kept Leadville alive and well even when other mining towns were suffering. The famed Guggenheim family fortune originated there, as did the May Department Store chain. For years, Leadville was a cultural and economic success, tied strongly together by family, individual pride, and the shared bonding experiences of a community intimately familiar with the dangers of mining.

Underlying this success, however, were the poisonous realities of mining, smelting, and processing. Forests were leveled to provide wood fuel for furnaces; smoke containing arsenic, lead, and other toxins billowed constantly into the sky. Environmental waste and sludge from smelting operations flowed into rivers and water supplies, and the mines themselves frequently disgorged floods of toxic, metal-contaminated water. After a particularly copious deluge in 1983, a downstream rancher finally had enough and alerted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA was quick to declare Leadville a Superfund site and one of the most polluted areas in America. The Centers for Disease Control issued dire health warnings. Even as residents fumed under what they viewed as government interference, the culprits—the mining companies—packed up and left. Lawsuits proliferated; Leadville came to despise the EPA; a stifling government bureaucracy failed to help; and the mining companies refused to accept responsibility. Eventually, the morass of environmental science, bureaucratic denseness, politics, and expensive litigation cleared, leaving a revitalized, refreshed Leadville that managed to retain its heritage as a mining town even as residents reinvented themselves in areas outside of mining.

Klucas became so involved in the story of Leadville that she moved there and lived in the town for a time. "Klucas covers this tale of history and modern challenges from all angles: those of industry, the community, and the environment," noted a reviewer in Science News. "Klucas accomplishes the almost impossible task of making thickets of environmental science, politics and litigation come alive," even as she offers a critique of a bad Superfund law and offers other approaches to environmental cleanup, commented a Publishers Weekly contributor. "Klucas has assembled a complex, rich history spanning the town's beginnings, decades of contentious debate, and Leadville's incredible turnabout," concluded Rebecca Maksel in Booklist.