Among Montana mines with a historical legacy of environmental damage, the ones that have come furthest towards paying their cleanup costs are the former properties of Anaconda Copper Mining Company around and downstream of Butte. The reason is simple: Anaconda was bought by the big oil company ARCO, which in turn was bought by the even bigger British oil company BP (British Petroleum). The result illustrates more clearly than could anything else the differing approaches to environmental messes in the hardrock mining industry and in the oil industry: same mining properties, different owners. When they discovered the mess that they had inherited, ARCO and then BP eventually decided that their own interests would be better served by trying to get the problems behind them than by denying all responsibility. That is not to say that ARCO and BP have shown any enthusiasm for spending the hundreds of millions of dollars to which they were obligated. They have tried the usual resistive strategies, such as denying the reality of toxic effects, funding local citizens’ support groups to state their case, proposing cheaper solutions than those proposed by the government, and so on. But at least they have spent large sums of money, they are evidently resigned to spending more, they are much too large to declare bankruptcy over just their Montana mines, and they are interested in bringing matters to a resolution rather than delaying indefinitely.
The other somewhat bright spot in the Montana mining picture is two platinum and palladium mines owned by Stillwater Mining Company, which entered into good-neighbor agreements with local environmental groups (the sole such agreements reached by any mining company in the U.S.), gave money to those groups, allows the groups free access to their mining area, actually requested the environmental organization Trout Unlimited (to the latter’s astonishment) to monitor effects of their mines on local trout populations in the Boulder River, and reached long-term agreements with the surrounding communities regarding labor, electricity, schools, and city services—in return for environmentalists and local citizens’ not opposing Stillwater. It seems obvious that this peace treaty between Stillwater, environmentalists, and the community benefits everybody concerned. How can we explain the surprising fact that, among Montana mining companies, only Stillwater reached this conclusion?
Several factors contributed. Stillwater owns a uniquely valuable deposit: the sole primary deposit of platinum and palladium (much used in the automobile and chemical industries) outside of South Africa. The deposit is so deep that it is expected to last for at least a century and probably much longer; that encourages a long-term perspective rather than the usual rape-and-run attitude. The mine is underground, hence it presents fewer problems of surface impact than an open-pit mine. Its ores are relatively low in sulfide, and most of that sulfide is extracted with the product, so that problems of acid sulfide drainage are minimized and environmental impact mitigation is less expensive than at Montana copper and gold mines. In 1999 the company brought in a new CEO, Bill Nettles, who came from the auto industry (the biggest user of the mine’s products) rather than from a traditional mining background, did not inherit the usual mining attitudes, recognized the mining industry’s awful public relations problems, and was interested in finding fresh long-term solutions. Finally, at the time that Stillwater officers reached some of the above-mentioned agreements in the year 2000, they were afraid that the U.S. presidential election would be won by the pro-environment candidate Al Gore, that the Montana gubernatorial election would be won by an anti-business candidate, and that good-neighbor agreements offered Stillwater its best chance to buy itself a stable future. In other words, Stillwater’s executives pursued their own perception of their company’s best interests by negotiating good-neighbor agreements, whereas most other large American mining companies have pursued their own differing vision of their company’s interests by denying responsibility, hiring lobbyists to oppose governmental regulation, and in the last resort filing bankruptcy.
In 1998 top executives of some of the world’s largest international mining companies nevertheless became concerned that their industry around the world was “losing its social license to operate,” as the expression goes. They formed an initiative termed the Mining Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) project, launched a series of studies on sustainable mining, enlisted a well-known environmentalist (the president of the National Wildlife Federation) as director of the initiative, and attempted without success to involve the broader environmental community, which refused because of its historical disgust with mining companies. In the year 2002 the study arrived at a series of recommendations, but then most of the mining companies involved unfortunately declined to implement the recommendations.
The exception is the British mining giant Rio Tinto, which decided to move ahead on some of the recommendations on its own, under pressure from its strongly supportive CEO and from British stockholders, and burned by the memory of having owned Bougainville’s Panguna Copper Mine, whose environmental messes had proved so disastrously expensive to the company. Just as Chevron Oil Company found in negotiating with the Norwegian government, Rio Tinto foresaw business advantages to being seen as an industry leader in social responsibility. Its borax mine in California’s Death Valley is now perhaps the most cleanly operated mine in the U.S. One payoff that Rio Tinto has already reaped is that when Tiffany & Co., eager to fend off the risk of environmental protestors marching in front of its jewelry stores with posters about the cyanide releases and dead fish caused by gold mining, decided to stress environmental considerations in selecting a mining company to which to award a contract as gold supplier, Tiffany chose Rio Tinto because of the latter’s increasingly clean reputation. Tiffany’s further motives included some of the exact same considerations that I already mentioned as having motivated ChevronTexaco: establishing a good reputation for their brand name, maintaining a motivated and high-caliber workforce, and the philosophy of company executives.
The remaining instructive example involves U.S.-based DuPont Company, the world’s leading buyer of titanium metal and titanium compounds used in paints, jet engines, high-speed planes and space vehicles, and for other purposes. Much titanium is extracted from Australian beach sands rich in rutile, a mineral that consists of almost pure titanium dioxide. DuPont is a manufacturing company, not a mining company, and so it buys the rutile from Australian mining companies. However, DuPont puts its name on all its products, including its titanium-based house paints, and it does not want all its products to get a bad reputation just because its titanium suppliers arouse consumer wrath through dirty practices. Hence DuPont, in collaboration with public interest groups, has worked out buyers’ agreements and suppliers’ codes of responsibility that it enforces on all of its Australian titanium suppliers.
These two examples involving Tiffany and DuPont illustrate an important point. Individual consumers collectively hold some clout over oil companies and (to a lesser extent) coal mining companies, because the public buys fuel directly from the oil companies and buys electricity from the energy generating companies that buy coal. Hence consumers know whom to embarrass or boycott in the event of an oil spill or coal mine accident. However, individual consumers are eight steps removed from the hardrock mining companies that extract minerals, making a direct boycott of a dirty mining company virtually impossible. In the case of copper, not even an indirect boycott of copper-containing products would be feasible, because most consumers don’t know which of their purchases are the ones containing small amounts of copper. But consumers do have leverage over Tiffany, DuPont, and other retailers that buy metals and that have the technical ability to distinguish clean from dirty mines. We shall see that consumer leverage over retail buyers has already begun to be an effective means for consumers to influence the timber and seafood industries. Environmental groups are just beginning to apply this same tactic to the hardrock mining industry, by confronting metal buyers rather than confronting metal miners themselves.
At least in the short run, environmental safeguards, cleanup, and restoration incur co
sts for mining companies adopting them, regardless of whether government regulations or public attitudes ensure that the safeguards save the companies money in the long run. Who should pay for those costs? When the cleanup is of messes that mining companies made legally in the past because of weak government regulation, the public has no choice except to pay the costs itself through government tax revenues, even though it galls us to pay for messes made by companies whose directors voted themselves bonuses just before declaring bankruptcy. Instead, the practical question is: who should pay for the environmental costs of mining being carried out now or to be carried out in the future?
The reality is that the mining industry is on the average so unprofitable that consumers could not point to excessive company profits from which costs should be met. The reason why we want mining companies to clean up is that we, the public, are the ones who suffer from mining-related messes: unusable mined land surfaces, unsafe drinking water, and polluted air. Even the cleanest methods for mining coal and copper create messes. If we want coal and copper, we have to recognize the environmental costs of extracting them as a legitimate necessary cost of hardrock mining, as legitimate as the costs of the bulldozer that digs the pit or the smelter that smelts the ore. The environmental costs should be factored into metals prices and passed on to consumers, just as oil and coal companies already do. Only the long and opaque supply chain from mineral mines to the public, and the historically bad behavior of most mining companies, has obscured this simple conclusion to date.
The remaining two resource extraction industries that I shall discuss are the logging industry and the fishing industry. They differ from the oil industry, and from the hardrock mining and coal industries, in two basic ways. First, trees and fish are renewable resources that reproduce themselves. Hence if you harvest them at a rate no higher than the rate at which they reproduce, your harvest can be sustained indefinitely. In contrast, oil, metals, and coal are not renewable; they don’t reproduce, sprout, or have sex to produce baby oil droplets or coal nuggets. Even if you pump or mine them slowly, that doesn’t let them reproduce and maintain the field’s oil, metal, or coal reserves at constant levels. (Strictly speaking, oil and coal do become formed over long geological times of millions of years, but that is much too slow to balance our pumping or extraction rates.) Second, in the logging and fishing industries the things that you are removing—the trees and the fish—are valuable parts of the environment. Hence any logging or fishing, almost by definition, may cause environmental damage. However, oil, metals, and coal play little or no role in ecosystems. If you can find some way of extracting them without damaging the rest of the ecosystem, then you have not removed anything ecologically valuable, although their subsequent use or burning may still cause damage. I shall first discuss forestry, and then (more briefly) fisheries.
For humans, forests represent much value that becomes jeopardized by cutting them down. Most obviously, they are our principal source of timber products, among which are firewood, office paper, newspaper, paper for books, toilet paper, construction timber, plywood, and wood for furniture. For Third World people, who constitute a substantial fraction of the world’s population, they are also the principal source of non-timber products such as natural rope and roofing materials, birds and mammals hunted for food, fruits and nuts and other edible plant parts, and plant-derived medicines. For First World people, forests offer popular recreational sites. They function as the world’s major air filter removing carbon monoxide and other air pollutants, and forests and their soils are a major sink for carbon, with the result that deforestation is an important driving force behind global warming by decreasing that carbon sink. Water transpiration from trees returns water to the atmosphere, so that deforestation tends to cause diminished rainfall and increased desertification. Trees retain water in the soil and keep it moist. They protect the land surface against landslides, erosion, and sediment runoff into streams. Some forests, notably some tropical rainforests, hold the major portion of an ecosystem’s nutrients, so that logging and carting the logs away tends to leave the cleared land infertile. Finally, forests provide the habitat for most other living things on the land: for instance, tropical forests cover 6% of the world’s land surface but hold between 50% and 80% of the world’s terrestrial species of plants and animals.
Given all these values of forests, loggers have developed many ways of minimizing the potentially negative environmental impacts of logging. These ways include removing individuals of valuable tree species selectively and leaving the rest of the forest, rather than clear-cutting an entire forest; logging at a sustainable rate, so that the rate of tree regrowth equals the rate of tree removal; cutting small rather than large patches of forest, so that the cut area remains surrounded by trees producing seeds to start regrowth of the logged area; individually replanting trees; and removing individual big trees by helicopter if the trees are sufficiently valuable (as is true in many dipterocarp and araucaria forests), instead of removing trees by trucks and access roads that damage the rest of the forest. Depending on the circumstances, these environmental safeguards may end up either losing money or gaining money for the logging company. I shall now illustrate these opposite outcomes by two examples: the recent experiences of my friend Aloysius, and the operations of the Forest Stewardship Council.
Aloysius is not his real name but one that I have made up for him, for reasons that will become obvious. He is a citizen of one of the Asian/Pacific countries where I have done fieldwork. When I met him six years ago, he quickly struck me as the most extroverted, curious, happy, humorous, confident, independent, and smart person in his office. He courageously and single-handedly faced down and pacified a group of mutinying workers. He repeatedly ran (yes, literally ran) up and down a steep mountain trail at night, to coordinate work at two campsites. Having heard that I had written a book on human sexuality, within 15 minutes of meeting me he broke out into a laugh and said that it was now time for me to tell him what I knew about sex rather than about birds.
We saw each other while jointly involved in several subsequent projects, and then two years passed before I returned to his country. When I saw Aloysius next, it was obvious that something had changed. He was now speaking nervously, and his eyes darted around as if he were afraid of something. That surprised me, because the venue for our conversation was an auditorium in the national capital where I was giving a public lecture in the presence of government ministers, and I could detect absolutely no signs of danger. After we had reminisced about the mutiny, mountain camps, and sex, I asked how he had been, and out came the story:
Aloysius now had a new job, working for a non-governmental organization concerned with tropical deforestation. In the tropics of Southeast Asia and the Pacific islands, large-scale logging is carried out mainly by international logging companies whose subsidiaries are in many countries but whose home offices are mainly in Malaysia, and also in Taiwan and South Korea. They operate by leasing logging rights on land still owned by local people, exporting unfinished logs, and not replanting. Much or most of the value of a log is added on by cutting up and processing it after it has been felled: that is, the finished timber sells for far more than the log from which it was cut. Hence exporting unfinished logs deprives local people and the national government of most of the potential value of their resource. The companies frequently obtain the required government logging permit by bribing government officials, and then proceeding to build roads and cut logs beyond the boundaries of the area actually leased. Alternatively, the companies merely send in a logging ship, quickly negotiate permission with local people, carry out the logging, and dispense with a government permit. For example, about 70% of all wood cut in Indonesia comes from illegal operations that cost the Indonesian government nearly a billion dollars a year in lost taxes, royalties, and lease payments. Local permission is obtained by wooing village leaders who may or may not have the power to sign away logging rights, and by taking those leaders to the national capi
tal or else overseas to Hong Kong, where they are plied with luxury hotel accommodations, food, drink, and prostitutes until they sign. This sounds like an expensive way to do business, until one realizes that a single big rainforest tree is worth thousands of dollars. Acquiescence of the ordinary village population is bought by paying them an amount of cash that seems to them enormous but that they will actually spend on food and other consumables within a year. In addition, the company also obtains local acquiescence by making promises that will not be carried out, such as a promise to replant the forest and build hospitals. In some well-publicized cases in Indonesian Borneo, the Solomon Islands, and elsewhere, when loggers have arrived at a forest with a permit from the central government and started logging, local people who realized that this would be a bad deal for them attempted to stop the logging by blocking roads or burning sawmills, whereupon the logging company enlisted the police or army to enforce their rights. I had heard that logging companies also intimidate opponents by threatening to kill them.
Aloysius was such an opponent. The loggers did threaten to kill him, but he persisted because he was confident that he could take care of himself. They then threatened to kill his wife and children, who he knew could not take care of themselves, and whom he would not be in a position to protect whenever he was away at work. To save their lives, he moved them overseas to another country and became more vigilant about possible murder attempts on himself. That explained his new nervousness and the loss of his former happy, confident manner.
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