By KELLY LOUISEIZE
It has been 10 years since Patrick Moore was invited to the prospectors and developers' conference as a keynote speaker. Back then, his lecture was about trying to introduce the words biodiversity and sustainability into mining reports without scaring the industry into paralysis, or coming up against environmental roadblocks from groups like Greenpeace.
As one of the Greenpeace cofounders Moore has spent years thwarting the ideas of industrial development if it meant having to compromise environmental integrity. However, he has come to realize the world needs metal as much as it does trees, and companies and environmental groups can have harmonious relationships. The mining industry is a shining example of this, Moore says.
Mining companies are abiding by or exceeding government standards when it comes to protecting air, land and water quality in the development of new or existing mine operations. In Ontario, development cannot proceed at all without a sound land reclamation strategy as part of the environmental assessment.
“Tremendous progress has been made on issues of water management and mine reclamation,” says Patrick Moore, who has started Greenspirit, an organization providing environmental and social perspectives to companies establishing corporate sustainability.
“The mining industry has come ahead in leaps and bounds. It is now the social area that now poses the greatest challenge.”
Traditionally, mineral royalties went to the provincial and federal government with very little benefit returning to local communities where the mines exist. As a result, resentments surface when mining professionals, not trained in social discourse, come into a town to examine a massive ore resource that is unbeknownst to the local community located only kilometres away. Stakeholder fortunes are made, yet the community is still the last hand out, Moore says.
“Then you wonder why people don’t like your wonderful mine.”
Mining companies require social and psychological talents to bridge the communication between communities and companies, he says.
“That’s the challenge that the mining industry is facing today.”
Social challenges are fraught with politics and there always seems to be people who want to use mining companies as a way to make mischief or establish their political stand.
Such is the case with Newmont Gold’s present director, Richard Ness, who has been charged with leaching mercury and arsenic into the Buyat Bay in Sulowasi, Indonesia. Ness has been on trial for one-and-a half years even though it was the government that approved a designed mine tailings disposal that would sit on the sea floor. Subsequent charges of pollution brought an environmental group Walhi into the picture along with police who claimed to have found pollution in the bay. Newmont brought in Japan’s Mitamata Foundation that found mercury and arsenic were naturally occurring.
The World Health Organization and the Australian health science organization CSIRO also concluded there was no pollution found anywhere in the water, the fish or the people.
"The challenged charge was that the chemicals in the bay were causing sickness in the people.”
However, it turns out that the sickness was a result of the standard of living in a poverty stricken region.
This went to federal trial where some of Ness’ colleagues were put into jail for a month. The prosecution recommended Ness be put in jail for three years.
“The whole mining and investment communities are watching this trial with great interest now.”
“There is no pollution- there never was. What the police are saying is that the tailings contain higher levels of arsenic and mercury than the nearby natural sediments. Capping mining tailing on the floor of the sea provides an anaerobic zone where little or no oxygen exists.
“You don’t get leaching.”
The moral of the story is that it is all well and good to have social accountability, but dealing with opportunistic attitudes from people who have the ear of cabinet officials, who in turn want to play politics to extract more funds from the mining companies, brings a degree of complexity to the situation.
This is just not happening in Indonesia, but all over the world. In a video dubbed Mine Your Own Business directed by Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney, three mega mining projects in Romania, Madagascar and Chile were featured with perspectives from environmentalists who were provided enough rope to hang themselves.
A campaign was established to oppose a gold mine development in Rosia Montana, a poverty-stricken area in Romania where there is a 70 per cent unemployment rate. The argument proposed is that the new mine would destroy harmony in the traditional village. What was left out is that the average income levels within the village are one-third the national average, two-thirds of the people have no drinking water and rely on outside toilets in extreme winter conditions. Moreover, most of the poverty stricken residents are in support of mine development; it is the back-to–the land advocates who don’t live in the village that are trying to “protect” environmental rights.
“There is always competing or conflicting social interests that cannot be just dealt with as if it was logical,” Moore says.
By all accounts governments should be honest brokers in all this. But challenges arise when different interests within ministries come to odds with one another and view each other as competition.
Mining houses for the most part have become the pioneers in establishing community grass root strategies, not the government, Moore says.
“It is fair to say the government helped lead on the environmental side of things, but the political side is based on anything but logic half the time.”
“Unfortunately, the mining houses had to figure this out on their own because it is not something one can write down in legislation.”
