How a little piece of Miyazaki’s magical, curative forest of the future was recreated in a copper pit in Butte Montanta.

Hayao Miyazaki has always been one of my favorite Japanese artists. His skepticism towards the foibles of mankind is leavened by his humanism, and, ultimately, his optimism that the world, and we humans and the world we live it, will survive in spite of ourselves. I was reminded of this and of my favorite Miyazaki movie, Kaze no Tani no Nausicaa (Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind), when I heard an incredible radio report on NPR recently about a true miracle that occurred at a massive, water-filled copper pit in Butte, Montana.

In Miyazaki’s film, Nausica, you may recall, a nuclear holocaust destroys most of the planet. The film takes place a thousand years later, when a beautiful forest has grown up that produces terribly poisonous plants and insects. The few humans who remain on earth mistake the poisonous forest for the enemy and try to destroy it. Just in time, the young heroine learns that the poisonous forest is really nature’s way of filtering out toxic substances to create ground water that is pure enough to sustain life, including the people on the planet.

Well, in the radio show, which was produced by radio lab, we are introduced to a huge lake that has been cut into an old copper mine. When the mine closed many years ago, we learn, the mining company dynamited it rather than bother to clean it up. Rain mixed with the old remains of the mine creating a soup of sulfuric acid that kept eating into the mountain, sucking ever more toxic metals into the lake and making it ever larger. One day a flock of geese landed in the soup and were found dead the next day.

Much later, a team of chemists comes across a startling discovery: a living substance that seems to be doing what the poisonous forest was doing in Miyazaki’s film. If you’ve seen Miyazaki’s film, you must listen to this marvelously produced radio program. If you haven’t seen the film, you should watch it then listen to the radio program. You will be bowled over by Miyazaki’s imagination and this miracle in Butte, Montana. I don’t want to tell you what the chemists learned because it would ruin the ending of the radio show. What I can tell you is that it has to do with geese and with the self-healing powers of nature. You should listen to the program, It’s radio at its best.

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