Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (86 page)

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 Still
water 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 min
ing 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 De
velopment (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 rec
ommendations.

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 Califor
nia'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., ea
ger 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 al
ready 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 Com
pany, 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 tita
nium suppliers arouse consumer wrath through dirty practices. Hence
DuPont, in collaboration with public interest groups, has worked out buy
ers' 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 com
panies 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 min
ing companies that extract minerals, making a direct boycott of a dirty
mining company virtually impossible. In the case of copper, not even an in
direct boycott of copper-containing products would be feasible, because
most consumers don't know which of their purchases are the ones contain
ing 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 restora
tion incur costs 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 ques
tion 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, met
als, 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 warm
ing 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 sedi
ment 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 circum
stances, these environmental safeguards may end up either losing money or
gaining money for the logging company. I shall now illustrate these oppo
site outcomes by two examples: the recent experiences of my friend Aloy-
sius, 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, con
fident, 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 some
thing. 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 organiza
tion 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