Rethinking Extraction
Perhaps, as some people claim, it is possible to take metals or oil out of the ground without widespread environmental and human rights abuses, but I sure haven’t seen it. The scale of investment and hard work it will take to turn those industries around is huge. And, in the case of the toxic heavy metals—like lead and mercury—or oil, getting it out of the ground is only the first problem. Use of these resources adds to a whole second generation of problems. Many heavy metals are neurotoxins, carcinogens, and reproductive toxins (which diminish your ability to have healthy children and your children’s ability to have healthy children).
While some extractive industries can be improved—the Golden Rules and Kimberley Process are examples of potential steps in that direction—attempting to fix others just won’t work. It is impossible to safely and sustainably extract resources that are, by definition, environmental and health problems themselves.
In the case of the toxic metals, like lead and mercury, we should leave them in the ground and redesign our industrial processes and products to eliminate their use. Both lead and mercury have been eliminated from the many common uses of just a generation ago. Remember leaded paint and gasoline? Mercury thermometers?
I am not saying it is going to be easy. It’s a big job to redesign everything from consumer products, to sustainable energy systems, to cultural norms around diamond rings set in gold as the ultimate expression of love. But with the stakes so high—our very planet plus all our fellow planet-mates depending on us—we can do it.
Imbalanced Benefits
Maybe you noticed a common thread in the stories of Madagascar’s periwinkle, Sierra Leone’s diamonds, the Congo’s coltan, Nigeria’s oil, and Appalachia’s coal. In all of these places there’s an abundance of valuable natural resources, but somehow the local people get the short end of the deal, environmentally and economically. In fact, many places with valuable, nonrenewable resources like forests, metals, and minerals wind up as impoverished noncontenders in the global economy, with their citizens often left hungry and sick. This paradox is known as the resource curse.
Coal
Coal doesn’t make my list of rocks because it’s used less often as a direct ingredient in consumer goods. Like water and oil, however, it powers the machines that make our Stuff, so it deserves mention.
Coal is used to generate a lot of electricity (40 percent of the world’s and approximately 49 percent of the United States’132), even though it’s hard to imagine a dirtier source. Back in the early days when coal was abundant and easier to reach, people didn’t necessarily know how bad it was. You’d think they’d have realized the mining of it wasn’t a great idea based on the fact that they had to send those poor little canaries in to make sure the air wasn’t poisonous! Or when mine roofs kept collapsing, fires and explosions occurred relentlessly, and black lung disease shrank the life expectancies of miners. But no.
And now we know so much more. Creating and running a coal mine destroys vegetation, soil, and groundwater; displaces and destroys wildlife and habitat; degrades air quality with ash and dust; and permanently scars the landscape, especially in the case of mountaintop removal mining. Mines produce tons of waste like ash and sludge that contains mercury, uranium, arsenic, and other heavy metals. The December 2008 tragedy in which a billion gallons of toxic sludge burst out of a holding pond into the rivers, towns, and land of Roane County, Tennessee, is just the latest in a litany of disasters associated with coal mines.133
Meanwhile, burning coal constitutes the largest human-generated contribution to atmospheric carbon dioxide and is a major source of methane; both gases are proven causes of climate change and global warming. In his book Big Coal, Jeff Goodell notes that “between 1975 and 2001, the annual releases of toxic metals from coal plants nearly doubled, from about 350 tons to 700 tons... Toxic emissions from coal-fired power plants account for over 40 percent of all air toxins reported to the EPA.”134 And there are many more ecological impacts of burning coal that I don’t have room to cover in a short section devoted to its extraction.
Of all the impacts from coal mining, blowing the tops off mountains, the method prevalent in Appalachia, takes the prize for most vile. Coal mining companies started this practice when there were no more veins of coal near the surface and using tunnels and shafts became prohibitively expensive. The crazy thing is that even deep in those mountains there’s not that much coal—there’s just enough profit in it for the mining companies to do it, and only because they don’t have to pay anything for the ecological damage and havoc they’re wreaking.
Plus, there’s actually much more accessible coal in states like Montana and Wyoming.135 So why are we even mining for it in Appalachia? The mining companies there—and the local residents who’ve bought into the story—claim that the region will collapse without those mining jobs. But the truth is otherwise. For example, despite 13 billion tons of coal being pulled out of West Virginia in the past 150 years, West Virginians have the lowest median household income in the country, with the literacy rate in the southern coalfield region about that of Kabul, Afghanistan.136
I wanted to investigate any links between my own lightbulbs and blowing the tops off of mountains in Appalachia, so I went to the www.ilovemountains.org website, which allows anyone in the United States to type in a zip code and see which mountains were destroyed for your power. My search showed two power plants serving my area that purchase coal from companies blowing up mountains in Appalachia. Also on that site, I visited the powerful National Memorial for the Mountains, which identifies more than 470 destroyed mountains.137 The combined horror of mountaintop removal and massive climate disruption inspired me to put solar panels on my own house, so I can rest assured that no more mountains are destroyed to power my home.
Unfortunately, we don’t have time for every household to install solar panels and, even if we did, that doesn’t address the massive coal used to fuel industrial uses. The extraction and burning of coal is so devastating that there’s really only one solution: keep the coal in the hole. Leave it there. There’s a growing global consensus that the climate simply can’t sustain coal-fired power plants.
Some economists and social scientists say the resource curse is caused when a country or region blessed with valuable resources relies too much on them, with its best people drawn to extraction-related work, so that other economic sectors just can’t compete. Meanwhile the prices for those native resources can fluctuate wildly based on the whims of the global economy, creating grave instability. Other observers point to the role of conflict minerals in sustaining political, and thus economic, chaos. American University professor Deborah Bräutigam suggests that governments in natural-resource-based economies don’t rely on taxes from citizens, which means that the contract between government and its citizens is weak; citizens can’t hold their leaders accountable. If ordinary folks complain about government in those situations, leaders can always use the money from the resources to fund a military presence that silences the grumbles.138 The practice of externalizing costs—which allows multinational companies to trash the environments in which they drill, mine, and extract, without financial consequences—compounds the local devastation.
The unfortunate fact is that a resource curse experienced by a single country is just one facet of a complex global situation riddled with unfairness and lack of equality. The benefits and costs of international extraction are not equitably distributed and, as we’ll see in the coming chapters, involve a messy web of often greedy and corrupt players, including multinational industries, national governments, and international development banks. As for the many millions of people who live and work on the land from which those resources are taken—they’re pretty much left out of the equation.
In particular, indigenous communities bear disproportionate impacts from extractive industries. Around the world, many indigenous communities are located in resource-rich areas that are targeted for logging, mining, oi
l and gas drilling, and other kinds of extraction. Indigenous peoples’ livelihoods and cultures often depend on access to land and natural resources, which they’ve respected and protected in sustainable relationships for hundreds if not thousands of years. Yet indigenous communities are often discriminated against and shut out of decision making about projects that affect their resources and their communities.
I’m happy to report that indigenous communities are gaining ground in securing their rights to participate in environmental planning processes, even though it still irks me that this is something for which they need to fight. On September 13, 2007, after more than twenty years of advocacy and negotiations, the United Nations adopted a Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which is a huge step toward protecting the environmental, economic, and other rights of these individuals and communities. The declaration was adopted by an overwhelming majority of 143 votes in favor, with only 4 votes—from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States—against it.139
While the official international political recognition helps, there’s still a long way to go. As the International Working Group for Indigenous Affairs explains, “Translating this political recognition into concrete advances locally, nationally, regionally and internationally remains a big challenge for indigenous peoples.”140 Indigenous communities continue to be targeted for destructive extractive projects around the world, often with little or no opportunity to engage meaningfully in the decision-making processes.
In our increasingly globalized economy, more and more extraction projects are run by multinational companies and financed by international financial institutions like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund (for more on these institutions see chapter 3 on distribution), whose decision-making centers are far from the impacted communities. Having distant and often unresponsive decision makers running these projects makes it even harder for local communities to have a substantial voice in project planning. Too often, the most heavily impacted communities have the least say in the projects and gain the least from the downstream benefits of the resource use.
Many organizations around the world are working to influence these financial backers—both public and private—to get them to adhere to higher environmental, social, and human rights standards. To a limited extent, advocacy and activist groups have been able to force some public and private lenders to adopt policies that protect or promote environmental and social issues.
For example, the World Bank Group, one of the biggest financial backers of extractive, infrastructure, and policy projects around the world, loaning an average of $20 to $25 billion to developing country governments annually—including more than $1 billion specifically for extractive industries141—did not even have mandatory environmental review procedures until 1987.142 It adopted the inadequate review process it now uses after lengthy, heated campaigns by coalitions of environmental, human rights, and other nonprofit organizations in countries that both lend to and borrow from the World Bank. In June 2003, the World Bank endorsed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a voluntary program promoting greater transparency and civil society participation in extractive industries in resource-rich countries.143 Even with these policies in place, the World Bank continues both to fund devastating extractive industry projects and to fail to utilize its significant leverage in developing countries to promote transparency by industries or community involvement.
Appealing to these huge financial institutions to change their ways is a slow process and has so far proved inadequate in both pace and scale. Many groups have abandoned efforts to reform them, believing that the structures and programs of the World Bank, along with its sibling organization the International Monetary Fund (IMF), are too deeply flawed. Instead, these groups focus their efforts on restricting the reach and influence of these institutions. “The record of the IMF and the World Bank is one of unmitigated failure. Their... failed megaprojects have disqualified them from any future role in development. It is time to shrink these institutions,” explains Njoki Njoroge Njehu, a Kenyan activist who has focused on the World Bank and IMF for more than a decade.144
After witnessing many devastating World Bank projects in Asia and Africa with my own eyes, and getting inadequate responses from World Bank officials each time I marched up to their Washington, D.C., offices with my latest data and concerns, I have to agree that the best approach is restricting these institutions’ reach. Through an international campaign called the World Bank Bonds Boycott (WBBB), many individuals are ensuring that their pension funds, labor unions, churches, municipalities, and universities do not buy World Bank bonds. By withdrawing financing for its bonds, the WBBB exerts pressure on the Bank to, among other goals, stop environmentally destructive projects in oil, gas, mining, and dams.145
It’s clear that the risks and negative impacts of extractive projects are not shared equitably. The same holds true for the benefits—the profits and the actual resources. Some people are using way more than their share while others are using far too little. Jared Diamond, author of Collapse, notes that “the average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.”146 The United States consumes the highest percent; with only 5 percent of the world’s population, it accounts for about 30 percent of all resources consumed. Overall, the 25 percent of the world’s population in industrialized countries consume about 75 percent of global resources.147
In fact, all of us on the planet collectively are consuming more resources than the planet produces each year; we’re consuming about 1.4 planets’ worth of bio-capacity resources annually.148 It seems impossible: we’re consuming an amount equivalent to more than the total resources produced by the planet each year. In fact, it’s only possible because the planet’s been around a little longer than we have and has had time to accumulate extra. Now the extra is running out. It’s as though a household saved income for years before ramping up its spending. It could spend more than it earned for some time, eating away at the savings, but eventually there’s nothing left. That’s what is happening with the planet.
And if all countries used resources at the rate that the United States does, we would need about 5 planets to sustain us.149 That’s clearly a problem, since we only have one. Two European-based organizations, BioRegional and World Wildlife Fund, have launched the One Planet Living program to reduce overall resource use, sustain ecological and community health, and ensure that the resources used are shared equitably. In order to achieve these goals, One Planet Living promotes a vastly reduced materials economy alongside new cultural norms that are proportionate to the resources we have.150
The equity piece means it’s not as simple as saying that everyone should cut their resource use—because that would be grossly unfair. Some parts of the world, like the United States and Europe, need to consume fewer resources, while other countries need to increase their consumption in order to meet even their basic needs. We’ve got to meet somewhere in the middle. And the total amount of extraction needs to stay within the planet’s ecological limits.
Transforming Extraction
In order to turn things around, we need to extract less and ensure that the extraction processes we do use support environmental, community, and worker well-being. We need to utilize what we extract more efficiently, more wisely, and more reverently. And we need a much more equal distribution of both the harms and the benefits generated by resource extraction.
While advancing sustainability standards (like the Forest Stewardship Council) and integrating worker and community voices into the planning process for extractive projects (as in community forestry initiatives) can help lessen the impact of specific projects, if we’re going to seriously address the crisis of global resource depletion as well as the public health and environmental consequences of extraction, we need deeper c
hanges.
We need to radically reduce the overall demand for the materials being extracted. We need to increase the efficiency or productivity of resources used and ramp up reuse and recycling programs. Finally, we need to seek out alternative ways to meet our needs, which, for many, means less focus on a constant flow of new Stuff.
There is another way. There are three places we can change the system so it uses fewer natural resources: at the front end, the back end, and in our hearts and minds.
1. At the Front End
At the design stage we must redesign our production systems to use fewer resources in the first place, thereby decreasing the need for more extraction.
From a materials and energy viewpoint, our current economy and industrial models are vastly inefficient. We could use less and waste less, starting right now. In the United States the materials used by industry amounts to more than twenty times each person’s weight per day—more than 1 million pounds per American per year.151
A growing number of scientists, activists, economists, government officials, and businesspeople are calling for a massive increase in our resource productivity—in other words, to get way more out of each pound of material or unit of energy consumed.
A German think tank called the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy convened a group of designers, economists, development experts, and materials geeks and launched the Factor 10 Club. In 1994 they issued a declaration calling for an increase in resource productivity by a factor of ten within fifty years, which they believe “is technically feasible if we mobilise our know-how to generate new products, services, as well as new methods of manufacturing.”152
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