Tag Archives: CSR

Save the Wild UP December Gala Keynote Address

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This is the text I prepared for my remarks at the Save The Wild UP December Gala. My talk deals with the ethics of Lake Superior mining, connecting it with climate change, the loss of the wild and the dawn of the Anthropocene. It’s also a reflection on human ingenuity and human responsibility. The half-hour keynote makes for a long blog post, but I hope readers will find something here worth sharing and discussing.  

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When you invited me to speak tonight, I tried almost immediately to come up with names of people who might be better suited to the task. In this crowd, I ought to be listening and trying to catch up.

I’m an outsider, and a latecomer to boot. Some of you were here when Kennecott and Rio Tinto first staked their claim to the Yellow Dog Plains. I didn’t fully appreciate the extent of the new mining activity in this area and all around Lake Superior until about 2012. That was right after Ken Ross and I had finished making 1913 Massacre, our documentary about the Italian Hall disaster.

I was so caught up in the story our film tells that I was under the impression that copper mining — sulfide mining — was a thing of the past in the Upper Peninsula.

Very near the end of 1913 Massacre, there’s an interview with an Army veteran who’s sitting at the counter of the Evergreen Diner, drinking a coffee and smoking a cigarette. He says that after the copper mines closed in 1968, attempts to re-open them failed because people were “bitching about the environment and all that shit and the water and the runoff.” The camera, meanwhile, is exploring the industrial damage left behind by the mining operation.

This is the one moment in the film where we had to bleep out some bad language before Minnesota Public Television would air 1913 Massacre on Labor Day in 2013. The only time anyone in our film curses is when the subject turns to protecting the water and the environment.

That these two things — a destroyed, toxic landscape and a hostility toward people who care about the environment — exist side by side; that people can watch a mining company leave a place in ruins, poison its waters, damage it to the point that it’s now a Superfund site, with high levels of stomach cancer and fish that can’t be eaten, and direct their anger and curses at people trying to prevent it from happening again: our film presents all that as part of what we’ve come to call “mining’s toxic legacy.”

The Army veteran went on to say — this part didn’t make it into the film — that people who bitch about the environment are “people from out of town.” He wasn’t complaining about environmental regulation or about big government; he was complaining instead about out-of-towners, strangers who make it tough for regular guys to make a living.

Strangers can be people from faraway, or just people from whom you feel estranged: people who don’t share your ways or speak your language; and it would be possible to talk at some length about the way the mining operations in the Keweenaw estranged people from each other and from the place they live.

Everywhere it goes, it seems, mining divides and displaces people. It’s never just about extracting ore from the ground. Mining is development and the power to direct it.

When strangers come to town or when people feel estranged, we need translators, guides and mediators. This is one reason why it’s so important to have a local, grassroots organization dedicated to the shared interests people have in the nature and culture of the Upper Peninsula.

You might look like the underdog right now. But I think you’ll agree that there’s a pressing need for a more responsible, inclusive and respectful conversation about development in this place. Save the Wild UP is in a great position to lead it.

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Back home in Brooklyn, I have a fig tree. I planted it last spring. I just finished wrapping it for the winter. I love the work the fig tree involves — the care it involves — because it connects me to the memory of my grandfather and the fig tree he kept. My tree connects me to my family tree (my roots), to history, and in my imagination the tree belongs as much to history as it does to nature. The life of my tree depends almost entirely on my care. I sometimes wonder if there is anything wild about it.

There is a wild fig. The ancient Greeks even had a special word for it: φήληξ. They seem to have derived its name from another word (φῆλος) meaning “deceitful,” because the wild fig seemed ripe when it was not really so. The ancient world knew that wildness is tricky. It can deceive and elude us, or challenge our powers of discernment.

Nature, we claim, is our dominion, as if it (naturally, somehow) belonged to history, the world of human activity. Our economy organizes nature to produce natural resources. But the wild represents a living world apart from history and another order of value altogether.

We can’t assimilate the wild into an engineered and technical environment: it will cease to be wild the instant we try. The wild begins where engineering and ingenuity stop, at the limits of human authority and command. So “wild” is sometimes used to mean beyond the reach of authority, out of control.

But what’s wild is not alien. Sometimes the wild calls out to us, usually to ward us off. The wild is almost always in flight from us, leaving tracks and traces for us to read. It always responds to us, as wild rice and stoneflies respond to the slightest change in water quality, offering guidance if we are attentive and humble enough to take it.

The wild marks the limits of our powers, our ingenuity and ambition, and before it we ought to go gently.

We have not.

The headlines tell us that our carbon-intensive civilization, which brought us so many material advantages, is now hastening its own demise. We are entering an entirely new era of human life on earth. Some scientists and philosophers talk about the end of the Holocene and the beginning of the Anthropocene — the dawn of a new geological epoch of our making.

The story beneath the headlines is a record of loss. A map of the terrestrial biosphere shows that today only a quarter remains “wild” — that is, “without human settlements or substantial land use” — and even less is in a semi-natural state. Data from the Mauna Loa Observatory tell us that this year was the last time “anyone now alive on planet Earth will ever see” CO2 concentrations lower than 400 parts per million. Those levels started rising in the 1700s with the industrial revolution, spiked dramatically in the postwar period and have climbed steadily higher. Since 1970, the populations of vertebrate animals have dropped by 52 percent. The same report by the World Wildlife Fund tells us that freshwater animal species have declined by 76 percent since 1970.

That precipitous drop in freshwater species should set off alarm bells, especially here, on the shores of one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world. Since the 1970s, Lake Superior surface-water temperatures have risen and ice cover has dramatically reduced. Walleye can now live in more areas of the lake than ever before. There’s an earlier onset of summer stratification. By mid-century, according to the National Wildlife Federation, Lake Superior may be mostly ice-free in a typical winter.

Now I know it’s the holiday season and these aren’t exactly tidings of comfort and joy, but they are tidings all the same. And what they announce is this: we are responsible. We’re responsible for all this destruction of the wild — of the whole web of life — and for the changes sweeping over us. Denial will not let us off the hook.

Responsibility is not just about being held accountable for the damage you’ve done; it’s also about taking steps to limit damage, repair the broken world, reclaim it and make things better. We have that responsibility to ourselves and to future generations.

“Loss belongs to history,” writes the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, “while politics and life are about what is still to be done.” But, he’s careful to remind us, loss still has a strong claim on the way we live now and on our future plans. The loss of the wild gives us a new responsibility that should inform our politics and our lives at every turn, direct the investments we make and the activities we sanction, and give rise to new conversations about what to do.

Saving the wild is now bound up, inextricably, with saving the human world — for ourselves and for future generations. We can appreciate in a new way Thoreau’s famous statement: “in wildness is the preservation of the world.”

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Knowing all this, why don’t we act? Why haven’t we acted?

One answer to this question has to do with the word “we,” and our underdeveloped capacity for coordinated, collective action.

Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, suggested another good answer in a speech he gave back in September to a group of insurance industry executives. Not exactly a bunch of tree huggers, but actuaries, people interested in accounting for risks and costs.

Carney talked about the future in terms of horizons, near versus long term. When we focus only on the near term, we don’t account for the true cost of our activities. That’s why for Carney, climate change is a “tragedy of the horizon,” or the tragic consequence of our inability to see and plan and take steps beyond the near term. Since “the catastrophic effects of climate change will be felt beyond our immediate horizons” — beyond the business cycle and the quarterly earnings reports, beyond the political cycle and the current election — we have deferred the cost of fixing the problem to future generations.

We’ve organized things — markets, politics, institutions — so that near-term interests win out over longer-term well-being and more sustainable arrangements.

Nowadays, if you look out at the Lake Superior horizon, you might see all the way to China. An unsustainable scheme of Chinese urbanization and economic growth fueled much of the new mining activity around the lake, and especially the exploration and exploitation of copper-rich deposits. Over the last decade or so, copper was used not just to build and wire new Chinese cities, many of which today stand empty; it was used mainly for collateral on loans. As much as 80 percent of the copper China imported was used to back loans. Today, as China unravels and the price of copper plunges, commodities investors are expressing remorse. Nickel’s down, too. The rush for Lake Superior minerals now seems to have been reckless — part of a larger market failure, with unforeseen risks and costs current and future generations are likely to incur.

Or look at the Polymet project in Minnesota. It’s an exaggerated case of not accounting for the long-term costs of mining. Currently, the Polymet Environmental Impact Statement says that water treatment will go on “indefinitely” at a cost of 3-6 million dollars a year. There is no way, so far as I know, to multiply 3 or 6 million dollars by a factor of indefinitely; and even the company’s most concrete prediction is 500 years of water treatment. Just to put that in perspective, the state of Minnesota has only been around since 1858: 157 years.

How is it possible that a proposal like this can be taken seriously? They promise jobs, a fix to a near-term problem; but there’s something else at work here as well: technology or, rather, misplaced faith in technology and human ingenuity. We make technology a proxy for human responsibility.

But technological advances that create efficiencies or solve problems for mining companies can carry hidden social and environmental costs: for example, a study done after the Mount Polley spill last year concludes that “new technologies, deployed in the absence of robust regulation” have fostered a “disturbing trend of more severe tailings failures.” Recent events in Brazil underline the point.

Great machinery, even full automation, will never amount to responsible stewardship. New technologies can have unintended consequences, distancing us from each other and from our responsibilities. Things corrode, repairs are made or not, entities dissolve, contracts are broken, obligations are forgotten, empires decline and fall, even within definite time horizons.

The industrial development that mining brings distorts horizons in another way. One theme of Tom Power’s research on the economics of the Lake Superior region and on what he calls wilderness economics is that “protecting the quality of the living environment…lays the base for future, diversified economic development.” Over-reliance on mining — and mining that damages or threatens the living environment — hinders economic diversification and makes the economy less resilient. It also requires us to discount the value of water and land it puts at risk, a value that is only going to increase over the long term, as freshwater becomes ever more scarce and as carbon capture afforded by peatlands and forests becomes more critical.

To allow that calculation for the nonce is not to concede that the market value of these wild places is their true value. The living world, creation and generation, is more than a bundle of ecosystem services, a tap and a sink for human activity. That way of thinking won’t save the wild; it is bound to open the door to the very forces that have already destroyed so much of it.

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Let’s not lose sight of the larger point: if you take the long view, looking forward into the future and out across the horizon, protecting the land and water in this region actually looks like a more attractive investment than extracting all the ore from the ground.

That makes the capture of government by mining and extractive industry — from Marquette County to the state and federal levels — all the more troubling and deplorable. It directs investment and development down these risky and unsustainable paths, where short-term interests of multinational corporate actors are paramount and enjoy the full protection of law. The coercive power of the state, which ought to place constraints on corporate actors, is used mainly to benefit them. When things go south, society ends up bearing the cost.

This grassroots effort challenges that whole topsy-turvy arrangement. We have to continue to challenge it, at every opportunity, in every forum, recognizing that the results we’re looking for probably aren’t going to come on a quarterly basis or anytime soon. We have to lengthen our horizons.

At the same time, we have to re-open the conversation about how we are going to organize ourselves in this place, so that what remains of the wild UP can flourish and the people living here can thrive.

It’s imperative, too, that Save the Wild UP stay connected with other groups around the lake facing similar challenges. To take just one example: Kathleen’s recent Op Ed in the Star Tribune about Governor Dayton’s visit to the Eagle Mine. That made a difference to people in Minnesota: it was widely shared and talked about. People connected with it.

I have to believe that there’s power even in these little connections — and in conversation, cooperation and community. There is power where we come together, when we are no longer strangers and no longer estranged from each other. There would be power in an international congress where people from all around Lake Superior gathered to talk about responsible development. This isn’t the power the mining companies and the state can wield; it’s another kind of power, coordinated, collective, non-coercive, one we as a society have not done enough to realize.

We’re going to need that power to meet this current set of challenges.

Now you may have noticed that I keep using the word “we,” and I’m conscious that by including myself here I might be overstepping and intruding. But maybe that’s why I keep coming back to the UP: deep down, I know this is not a faraway or a strange place but a familiar place, where I have a stake in things — where we all have a stake.

The “wild UP” that we are organized to save is not just wilderness, waterfalls, wolves and warblers. It is the stage of humanity’s tragic predicament. It marks a boundary that we cross at our great peril. It can be a vital source of economic and social renewal.

Ultimately, saving the wild UP is about realizing the power and political authority we all have, everyone in this room, people across the UP and around the lake, to govern ourselves and make decisions about the future we want. What do we see on the horizon? What do we want for our children, grandchildren, our great-grandchildren and so on down the line? What do future generations require of us? What do we owe them?

That’s a conversation we need to keep having. And that’s why this organization deserves all the support we can give it, because Save the Wild UP connects us and shows us that we can be both powerful and responsible at the same time.

Thanks for listening so patiently, and thanks again for inviting me to the Gala.

delivered 5 December 2015

The Boom Starts With A Rush

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Overturned Eagle Mine TruckThe news that an ore truck overturned last week on its way from Eagle Mine to Humboldt Mill brought me back to a conversation some friends and I had in the lobby of the Landmark Inn this past October. Earlier that day we’d been touring the Yellow Dog Plains on the smooth wide roads that the Marquette County Road Commission cut through the wilderness for the mining company, keeping count of the big trucks we saw. All the trucks were outfitted with double loads — two side-dump trailers worth of ore — and the ore was covered with black tarps, neatly tied down.

The ties caught my attention. I wondered how long it would be before human nature set in, and workers started getting lackadaisical about how they tied down the tarps, or stopped bothering to secure and check each tie.

I was not even thinking of anything so scientific as studies by Ludovic Moulin, which find that over sixty percent of industrial accidents can be attributed to “organizational and human factors.” I had in mind something closer to the line about the field of the slothful in Proverbs: “yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep,” and disaster can ensue. Eventually, someone in the course of the day was going to shrug and say to himself, “good enough,” slacken his attention, or hurry off to a break, I thought, and things could go downhill from there. A loosely tied load might spill on the highway or on the roadside, even if the driver was taking every precaution on his route. Repeat that small human error enough times, and you have a trail of sulfide ore from the mine to the mill, running through the Yellow Dog Plains and right through the center of Marquette.

Turns out I’d failed to fully grasp the reality of the situation. I didn’t imagine at the time that the tarps used to tie down the ore on the Eagle Mine trucks would rip in the case of an accident. In this case, the tarp of the second trailer was “torn open,” according to Save the Wild UP; Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve has a photograph of the torn cover here. I was also unaware that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality allowed these soft-cover tarps only after Eagle Mine had requested a special amendment to its permit. Hard covers would take longer to remove; with soft covers, the trucks could be more easily unloaded. Time is money.

Special amendments and exceptions seem to be the rule when it comes to Eagle. For instance, though Lundin Mining CEO Paul Conibear has repeatedly boasted to investors about the great transportation infrastructure already in place at Eagle when Lundin bought the property from Rio Tinto, the truth is that the current haul route for Eagle Mine was never part of the plan. It was a last minute concoction — an “upgrade” of roads hastily authorized by the Marquette County Road Commission. No surprise, then, that a full environmental assessment of the haul route — as required by Part 632 of the Michigan Nonferrous Metallic Mining Law — has never been made.

Last week’s accident might be yet another sign that Eagle Mine was not actually ready for prime time when Lundin announced, at the end of November, that Eagle had entered commercial production ahead of schedule. But consider things from the company’s point of view. Lundin had acquired the Candelaria copper mine from Freeport only a month earlier for $1.8 billion — taking on huge debt — and by the end of November copper prices were declining precipitously. That made it all the more urgent to start delivering nickel at Eagle. After all, analysts expect “Lundin to introduce a dividend in 2015 once its Eagle mine is ramped up.”  Pressure is mounting. The Lake Superior mining boom appears to have gotten underway in a slightly panicked rush.

Does Eagle Mine Have Social License to Operate?

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Lundin Mining CEO Paul Conibear hit all the right notes when he announced last week that Eagle Mine is now in production. Completed ahead of schedule and on budget, the new nickel and copper mine on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula marks “a tremendous achievement”:

The Eagle Mine is a significant new, high-quality, low-cost mine, that has been constructed to the highest of safety, environmental and social responsibility standards.

Our team has done an exemplary job in bringing the mine into production, and we look forward to the operation becoming a significant cash flow generator for the Company and a significant contributor to the local and regional economy. We would like to thank all employees and contractors for their dedication and excellent work in addition to all local stakeholders for their ongoing support.

Analysts and investors seemed pleased as well, and happy to take Conibear at his word. The company’s share price, which had been trending downward, ticked up the day after the announcement. Lundin Mining is “hitting the ground running,” declared one enthusiast, who goes by the pseudonym The Investment Doctor and published his report right on the heels of the company’s press release; “and it’s rare to see a large scale project being completed ahead of schedule. The production is starting just in time to benefit from a strong nickel price.”

Those inclined to follow the Doctor’s advice may wish to consider that his analysis focuses solely on nickel production, and makes no mention of what’s happened to copper prices lately: they’ve plummeted (though, to be fair, they now seem to be rebounding slightly).

In any case, the whole picture may be a little more complicated than the mining company and its boosters would have us believe. Eagle will count as “a significant contributor to the local and regional economy” only if you overlook the effect the mining operation is bound to have on tourism (which currently makes up around 20 percent of the Marquette area’s economy) and the many other detrimental and distorting effects mining will have on the economic life of the Upper Peninsula. Economist Thomas M. Power has run these down. For one thing, he observes, mining operations can hinder entrepreneurship and innovation, and drive away creative professionals and knowledge workers. They prefer not to live around a mine, or on the haul route from mine to mill; nowadays even the miners would rather commute. It remains unclear, too, how the region will benefit in the long term, after the accessible ore runs out and Eagle shuts down.

So one has the feeling that the tepid term “contributor” in Conibear’s statement about the broad economic benefits of the new mining operation was chosen with care: it positions the mining company as a social benefactor, but it reserves any talk of wealth generation for the “flow” of cash into the company coffers. Some will trickle down: the contribution Eagle makes to the economy will be “significant”; but even saying that leaves wiggle room to back away from stronger and more specific language about job creation that was used to promote the project in the first place. The main object here is to reassure Lundin’s creditors.

To bring the bigger picture into focus, we also have to take into account the social costs and environmental risks associated with this new mining operation. When Conibear says that Eagle Mine was built to “the highest of…standards,” I guess he’s talking about mining industry standards. At least some environmental and community groups have different and even higher standards, and they are not satisfied with DEQ enforcement to date or with the Community Environmental Monitoring Program established by Rio Tinto and the non-profit Superior Watershed Partnership (for which Lundin Mining will pay $300,000 annually). For local stakeholders like the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, who opted out of the Superior Watershed Partnership deal, the new mine falls short on many important counts. Together with the National Wildlife Federation, the Huron Mountain Club and the Yellow Dog Watershed Preserve, the KBIC sued, only to lose in the Michigan Court of Appeals in August of this year; but that loss hardly means the concerns that motivated the twelve-year legal challenge to the mine were without merit.

The stark fact remains that like Rio Tinto before them, Lundin Mining cannot point to a single example of copper and nickel mining in the United States or Canada that did not pollute surrounding waters or groundwater. Questions raised by Jack Parker about the geological stress field of the Yellow Dog Plains — and the risk of “sudden collapse” he alleges was covered up by regulatory collusion — continue to be “studiously ignored.” Haul road construction has been mired in controversy: it took corporate wrangling of the County Road Commission and exercise of eminent domain to push through the the current route; and that road work has already violated the Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Act.

The point is not to multiply examples or revisit all the controversies that still surround Eagle Mine. Now that the mine is in operation, some of these issues may even be “moot,” as a writer in Crains suggested after the decision by the Court of Appeals in August. But taken together, they raise the question whether Lundin Mining has done enough (since purchasing the Eagle operation from from Rio Tinto) to earn the trust, let alone gain the support, of local stakeholders who were not already in the mining camp or the mining company’s pocket. So far, Lundin has demonstrated that it can bulldoze ahead and get stuff done. Its claim to social license remains unsettled.

Is This A Serious Conversation?

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Is this a serious conversation? Is he discussing this question in earnest and giving you second-personal authority, or is he simply going to decide what to believe and do it unilaterally? If the latter, then not only will there be nothing reciprocal about his choice, but also there will be nothing genuinely reciprocal about the conversation; it will not be serious. He will have no particular need to determine what you are going to do, say, by listening carefully, because his choice will be unilateral. If he is an egoistic non-cooperator, he will not cooperate whatever you say or do. He has nothing at stake in the conversation and need give you no authority in it, either to answer the theoretical question of what (to believe) you will do, or to answer the practical question of what to do himself. No genuine co-deliberation, either theoretical or practical, will occur.

I found my way back to this discussion of the Prisoner’s Dilemma in Darwall’s Second Person Standpoint after reading this morning that a group of leading NGOs had walked out of the Warsaw climate talks. “Talks like these amount to nothing if countries refuse to come to them and negotiate in good faith or worse, try to drag the process backwards,” said the World Wildlife Fund’s Sam Smith. There are complaints that corporate sponsors compromised and undermined the talks from the get-go. But the conversation about what to do — and who should do what — was already at an impasse. There were a few fine speeches, but the time for fine speeches has long ago passed.

Some people — Suzanne Goldberg calls them “experts familiar… with the politics of climate change” in The Guardian today — seem to think that new research by Richard Heede will help “break the deadlock.” This seems like the sort of thing only experts and journalists who interview them can believe: that a piece of research is what’s needed to make an unserious conversation serious.

As The Guardian headline has it, Heede has identified ninety companies that have “caused two-thirds of man-made global warming emissions” since the start of the industrial era. His list includes state-run companies and coal producers from around the world as well as big oil companies from the developed world. The idea, or at least the hope, is that Heede’s comprehensive, historical accounting of fossil-fuel producers will change the dynamics of the conversation, which has tended to pit developed against emerging economies, rich countries against poor, and so on.

It’s hard for me to imagine that Heede’s findings will really bring about anything like what Darwall calls “genuine co-deliberation” or translate to new cooperation. These talks are a game of dodge ball.

Al Gore is quoted here as saying that Heede’s list places “a clear obligation” on companies “historically responsible for polluting our atmosphere.” But what exactly does that obligation entail? “To be part of the solution,” says Gore. And how are these companies to be held to that obligation? Gore does not say; but without binding agreements and a whole new set of rules I am not sure we will get anything but the usual greenwashing rhetoric, more corporate funded climate denial and more inaction.

And even if we somehow do manage to hold fossil-fuel producing companies historically responsible, or (as Michael Mann suggests) fingerprint the sources of future emissions, we will need to hold ourselves and all fossil-fuel consumers responsible as well. That’s where the conversation gets really serious — when we start talking about historical responsibility as shared responsibility. Are we ready to start enumerating the obligations we all have on this score and figuring out how we are going to meet them? It seems very few people in Warsaw or anywhere this week really want to have that conversation.

Labor Day, 2013: Will Big Mining Do Better This Time Around?

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On Labor Day, I’ll be in New York City, so I won’t be able to see the television broadcast premiere of 1913 Massacre on Twin Cities Public Television. How many will tune in? How will the broadcast cut of the film look and play on TV? Above all, I wonder, what connections will the Labor Day TV audience draw between 1913 and 2013? My comments here run this holiday weekend on MinnPost.

Many people Ken and I met in mining towns around Lake Superior while filming 1913 Massacre urged us to see the positive contributions the mining companies had made to the region. Some insisted that the Woody Guthrie song that had introduced me to the story of the Italian Hall disaster and brought me to Calumet and the Upper Peninsula in the first place had gotten it all wrong. The greedy bosses, company thugs and violent social strife that Woody sang about in “1913 Massacre” did not fit the story they knew. “We all got along just fine,” they protested.

When the mines were running, the towns thrived. The big department stores downtown were open. The churches (and the bars) were packed to capacity. Everybody worked hard and the work was sometimes dangerous, but on Saturday nights, the streets were jammed and the atmosphere festive. The company put a roof over your head then sold you the house at terms you could manage. The copper bosses built libraries, sidewalks and schools, gave land grants for churches, and even furnished luxuries like bathhouses and public swimming pools. The men who ran the mines weren’t just robber barons from Boston; they were public benefactors.

But there were limits to their benevolence. The mining captains regarded the immigrant workers – Finns, Slavs, Italians — as charges placed in their paternal care. They knew what was best for these new arrivals. They discouraged organizing. Faced with strikes on the Iron Range in 1907 or on the Keweenaw in 1913, they adamantly refused to negotiate, brought in scabs to do the work and Waddell and Pinkerton men to deal (often brutally) with the strikers. Even after the tragic events of 1913, Calumet and Hecla Mining Company would not recognize the union for decades.

The Keweenaw miners were on strike again in 1968 when C & H made a calculated business decision to pull out. No more jobs, pensions cut short; the good times were over. They left the waters poisoned and the landscape littered with industrial wreckage and toxic mine tailings.

The companies driving the new mining boom around Lake Superior these days promise to do better. They are dedicated to corporate social responsibility. They practice “sustainable” mining, tout their environmental stewardship and declare their respect for human rights. They have community outreach programs and promise to make substantial, long-term investments in the economic development of the regions where they come to mine. They work closely – some would say too closely – with regulators to create environmental impact statements and plan for responsible closure of their mines. They are eager to gain social license.

For the most part, these big multinationals operate with the support of organized labor and politicians who want to create jobs — and what politician doesn’t want to do that? But the high-paying, highly-technical mining jobs are unlikely to go to local residents; and the new mining is likely to have detrimental effects on local economies, as the economist Thomas M. Power has shown in studies of Michigan and Minnesota. Mining may provide some short-term jobs, but it can also drive away creative professionals and knowledge workers, destroy entrepreneurial culture, diminish quality of life and damage long-term economic vitality.

So promises of good times and plentiful jobs need to be treated with circumspection. Polymet has repeatedly scaled back its job predictions for its huge, open-pit sulfide mining project near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, and the company’s own figures suggest that only 90 of the promised 360 jobs – just 25% — will go to local communities. Local is, moreover, a relative term. Mine workers today tend not to live in mining towns; they will commute an hour or more to work. And hiring will always be subject to swings in metals prices, which are now dependent on two new factors: continued Chinese growth (and urbanization) and the entry of big financial firms into metals warehousing and trading.

There are limits to big mining’s benevolence as well. The last time I flew into Marquette airport, a glossy Rio Tinto poster advertised the company’s commitment to “build, operate and close Eagle Mine responsibly.” Nobody had bothered to take the sign down after Rio Tinto had done an about-face and sold Eagle, a few months earlier, to Vancouver-based Lundin Mining for dimes on the dollar. Rio Tinto’s commitments lasted only until it was time to flip their property. Overnight, Eagle Mine had become a “non-core asset” and the surrounding community none of Rio Tinto’s responsibility.

In Wisconsin, Gogebic Taconite has drawn the line between company and community much more starkly, with help from a paramilitary firm called Bulletproof Securities. Black-masked guards, dressed in camouflage and armed with semi-automatic weapons, protect the mining company’s property from trespassers and environmental protesters. Imagine what they might do in the event of a strike.

gogebicguard

Bulletproof Securities patrols Gogebic Taconite’s property in northern Wisconsin.

The CEO and the Social Compact: Conibear Comes to Michigan

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I’ve been puzzling over the few public comments Lundin Mining CEO Paul Conibear has made regarding the announcement that his company plans to acquire the Kennecott Eagle Mine from Rio Tinto. Industry analysts studying these same tea leaves at the end of last week seem to have judged the Eagle sale to be auspicious. But I am looking for other signs — evidence of Lundin’s disposition toward the communities around the Eagle Mine and some indication of how Lundin plans to approach and address the social and environmental challenges of the Eagle Mine project.

There are suggestions in Conibear’s resume of some interest in local and global development issues and an appreciation for the environmental and social facets of large scale mining projects. An engineer by training, Conibear made his way as an operations man, parlaying his experience in Latin America, Europe and, above all, at the Tenke Fungurume mine in the African Congo into a leadership position — first at Tenke Mining, where he served as CEO before its merger with Lundin, and then, when Phil Wright resigned in 2011, as CEO of Lundin Mining. During his time in Africa, according to his official corporate biography, Conibear was “active in advancing the group’s corporate social responsibility initiatives”; and he “is one of founding directors of the Lundin for Africa Foundation, a charitable entity established to support sustainable development across Africa”. Here, then, is a CEO with CSR credentials.

It’s too early to tell whether this will matter when it comes to Lundin’s work in the UP. Reports that the company will uphold Rio Tinto’s commitments to the communities around Eagle Mine — and keep the current Kennecott team in place — are still short on specifics. That will probably be the case at least until the transfer of the mining permit is complete and Lundin has had a chance to figure out firsthand what’s working at Eagle and what isn’t. Conibear’s affiliation with Lundin for Africa, and that organization’s focus on social enterprise, may not translate to efforts on the ground in Michigan, for all sorts of reasons; he himself has said nothing so far about how the company will continue, depart from, or improve upon what Rio Tinto has already done. In a press release Lundin issued last week, the CEO is quoted as saying only that the acquisition of the mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula

fits ideally within Lundin Mining’s asset base and is the result of the disciplined approach we have been focused on for some time to acquire high quality, advanced stage assets in low risk, mining oriented jurisdictions. The Eagle Mine represents a very unique opportunity to acquire a high-grade project which is under construction and expected to begin generating significant levels of metal production and cash flow prior to the end of next year. Northern Michigan has an outstanding iron ore, gold and base metals mining history and consequently excellent regional power, road and rail infrastructure, with extensive mining expertise within local communities to support and staff Eagle Mine.

I was struck by a couple of things here, but most of all by the invocation of northern Michigan “history” in the last sentence. What makes the history of the Upper Peninsula so “outstanding,” in Conibear’s view? Nothing like what drew Richard White to his classic study of the French and the Algonquins in the pays d’en haut. Not the brutal strikes and hard times Arthur Thurner wrote about in Rebels on the Range; not the complex system of social patronage that obtained between immigrant hard-rock miners and the tight-fisted, iron-willed mining captains, described by historians like Larry Lankton. Not even the attitudes toward history that impressed me most in the interviews I did in connection with 1913 Massacre — the deep and heartfelt emotion many people in the area invest in the past, and the pride they feel in what their ancestors accomplished and endured; the way that shared stories have both concealed past trauma and allowed the region to heal; a resilience that has allowed communities on the Keweenaw to weather boom and bust.

It may not seem reasonable to expect much feeling for the history of the UP in Conibear’s remarks. He’s got a mining company to run and investors and analysts to impress. But it’s worth noting that a more considered view of UP history (and a look at the environmental damage caused by the last round of mining) would not necessarily lead one to characterize a mining venture in the Upper Peninsula as “low risk.” For Conibear, UP history seems to matter to the extent it can be exploited for business advantage. The past has value in the present as a source of “infrastructure” — a reliable power grid, rail and roads — and “expertise.” Widen the lens a bit, however, and that same history becomes a source of uncertainty and obligation as well as strength.

Take roads, for instance. It’s odd that Conibear would single out roads as one of the things that attracted Lundin to northern Michigan and the Eagle Mine. A proposed $80 million project to build a haul road from the Eagle Mine to the Humboldt Mill ended in failure earlier this year, after the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality denied the permit for County Road 595. It was a big setback for Rio Tinto, which had fought for the road for five years. Defeated, the company announced that it would spend $44 million to upgrade existing roads instead, but that plan remains controversial — and now that project and the cost as well as the controversy it entails are Lundin’s to manage.

There’s another, more general observation to be made here as well. History doesn’t just throw all those things — power, roads, expertise — into the Rio Tinto deal. If history, or the experience of the past 150 years of mining, works in favor of companies operating in the UP today, it also marks a good place to start enumerating the responsibilities mining companies have to society. This is a point about the relationship of business to society that Elizabeth Warren made in the run up to last year’s presidential election, and which snowballed into a ridiculous controversy over Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” remark. It’s worth recalling Warren’s argument in this context. A skilled and educated workforce, reliable infrastructure, the protection of the law, even the free association to do business with whom and where you like, Warren said, are part of an “underlying social contract.” Companies have to honor that contract and “pay it forward” if they hope to continue to benefit from public goods; and society has a responsibility to push hard on companies until they do.

In Michigan, of course, Governor Rick Snyder and his cronies did all they could during last year’s lame duck session to weaken the compact between business and society and to relieve mining companies of the obligation to pay forward anything at all. A bill sponsored by the UP’s outgoing Republican representative Matt Hukki set out to “ease upfront costs for mines” and make the taxes on mineral extraction in Michigan “more simple, fair and efficient,” replacing property tax, corporate income tax, sales tax and use tax with a single “severance tax” of 2.75 percent on the gross value of minerals extracted — once the mine went into production. That works out very nicely for Rio Tinto, which never took Eagle into production; and it would be worth finding out whether the company is now entitled to a tax credit on property taxes paid before the passage of HBs 6007-12. That retroactive credit — the opposite of paying it forward — is one provision of Hukki’s bill.

Tax relief and regulatory easing are no doubt some of the things Conibear had in mind when he described the Upper Peninsula as a “mining-oriented jurisdiction.” It’s a piece of industry jargon that is used to talk about whether conditions are favorable or unfavorable — a way of assessing risk. Among US states, Michigan has never ranked very high in the annual survey of mining jurisdictions by the Fraser Institute [pdf]; but generally, writes Aaron Mintzes, “jurisdictions within the United States rank very well in large measure because we have stable and transparent democratic institutions, courts that enforce contracts and resolve disputes, and generous mining policies (like the 1872 Mining Law)”. This is another unappreciated provision of the social contract: strong public institutions and the rule of law reduce the risks companies take as much as if not more than mine-friendly policies.

You would think that companies, in turn, would be obliged to do everything they can to reduce the risks they pass on to society. That has rarely been the case, and it has not been the case when it comes to the Eagle Mine. Rio Tinto and now Conibear and Lundin are requiring communities around the mine and all around Lake Superior to assume an enormous risk. It goes beyond legitimate fears of environmental damage due to subsidence or acid mine drainage. When Eagle goes into production in 2014, it will signal the start of a new mining boom in the Lake Superior region. Over the next several years, one of the world’s largest mining operations will be staged around one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes. Just look at the map of mines, mineral exploration and mineral leases published by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. It is difficult even to imagine the environmental hazards and the social costs that the mining boom and the inevitable industrialization of Lake Superior will entail. I am still wondering whether Mr. Conibear appreciates that.

The Limits of Corporate Benevolence, from Mongolia to Michigan

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The phrase “human rights” is nowhere to be found in the Oyu Tolgoi Investment Agreement, a document [pdf] that will play a critical role in guiding Mongolia’s development over the next decade. The Agreement sets the terms for the $6.2 billion investment in the Oyu Tolgoi gold and copper mining project, which promises to account for no less than one-third of Mongolia’s GDP by the year 2020. Rio Tinto has a 66 percent stake in the project through its subsidiary, Turquoise Hill Resources Ltd; the Mongolian government owns the rest.

Along with the serious environmental concerns cited by the United States when it abstained, in February of this year, from a World Bank investment scheme in Oyu Tolgoi, there are a host of human rights issues to address — from migrancy to land seizures, rights to the scarce water resources of the Gobi desert region, conditions in Ulaanbaatar’s Ger camps, and the survival of Mongolia’s herder communities. (The Bank Information Center provides an overview of these concerns, here and here.) The Investment Agreement briefly addresses some of these points, but it resorts, in all instances, to what I would call the language of corporate benevolence.

So the Investor agrees to abide by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (a voluntary agreement to publish payments made by the Oyu Tolgoi mine to the government); in another place (section 4.13; but cf. also section 4.6) the Investor consents to “build and maintain productive working relationships, based on principles of transparency, accountability, accuracy, trust, respect and mutual interests, with non-governmental organizations, civic groups, civil councils and other stakeholders.” Beyond this, there is not much else to guide or govern the company’s conduct vis a vis civil society and its responsibility to respect human rights.

Given the high stakes, the scale of Oyu Tolgoi and the involvement of the World Bank and IFC in the project, it is surprising the Agreement does not explicitly incorporate — or reference — the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Instead of creating binding agreements or even practical mechanisms to ensure that Oyu Tolgoi and the government of Mongolia meet their respective human rights obligations as the economy accelerates and the social terrain continues to shift, the Investment Agreement relies on the language of corporate social responsibility to smooth things over.

Part of the trouble with CSR isn’t just that it tends to replace binding agreements and articulated responsibilities with vague sentiments, the language of corporate benevolence, and promises of sustainability and shared prosperity. That’s bound to happen when social responsibility meets public relations. A bigger problem is that the commitments companies voluntarily make to contribute to economic development and social progress — and to respect human rights — will last only as long as the business requires them.

For an example of how abruptly a company can ditch stakeholder communities, what happened in Michigan yesterday with another Rio Tinto project may turn out to be more instructive than what’s happening right now in Mongolia. In the face of serious environmental and human rights challenges to its Eagle Mine project over the last several years, Rio Tinto all along touted its good corporate citizenship, promising to “leave more wood on the woodpile” and to take an active hand in the long term, “sustainable development” of the Upper Peninsula. That is just part of “The Way We Work,” as the title of a Rio Tinto CSR publication would have it — or at least it was the Way We Worked. Yesterday, the company announced that it had sold the Eagle Mine project to Toronto-based Lundin Mining for the tidy sum of $325 million cash — part of CEO Sam Walsh’s strategy to divest from “non-core” assets and protect the single-A credit rating the company currently enjoys. A community of stakeholders whose future Rio Tinto promised to make happy, bright and prosperous became, overnight, a disposable asset.

The Social Costs of the Hardware Revolution – A Postscript

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For now, this can be only a short postscript to what I had to say earlier today about the CNN Money article by John Hagel and John Seely-Brown on “the hardware revolution.” It has to do with a question that occurred to me as I read, and to which I don’t yet have anything like an adequate answer. That will take some research. But I at least want to articulate the question.

Startups and smaller companies can now play in the hardware space in part because the barriers to entry have been lowered, Hagel and Seely-Brown observe. There are a number of factors at work here. New and cheaper technologies from 3D printers to more user-friendly software put the design and manufacture of hardware within reach of smaller companies. And “a new class of factories” will produce the smaller orders that new entrants and entrepreneurs typically require:

New infrastructural elements have also helped new hardware products move from the hobbyist’s basement to the startup garage. Before, to get a contract manufacturer’s attention, you had to commit to producing high volumes (say 50,000 or more units). But a new class of factories — mostly in China and Mexico — will manufacture batches as small as 5,000 units. By filling low-volume orders, these factories have filled an important structural hole in the market: They allow entrepreneurs to launch new products for small consumer groups with little investment.

My question is whether conditions and, for that matter, sourcing practices in this new class of factories, and the more fluid hardware market they serve, are not going to be terribly difficult to monitor. We’ve seen how challenging it is even to ensure fair labor practices in large-scale manufacturing facilities in China used by major global technology brands; now, as smaller-scale manufacturing facilities proliferate and Mexico becomes a technology “quicksourcing” destination for American companies, the problem will no doubt be aggravated.

The reasons for this are probably obvious. I would frame the issue in a few ways. First, how much visibility do these smaller players actually have into their supply chains? Second, how much leverage do they actually have with their manufacturers, since they are only placing small orders, and, depending on their success, may or may not be repeat customers? Third, there’s a question about whether these small businesses — the small hardware startups placing orders and, for that matter, the manufacturing facilities taking them — have the capacity to take on the human rights challenges that seem inevitably to accompany outsourcing.

In other words, the social costs of the hardware revolution deserve some careful consideration.

What’s Wrong With Howard Schultz’s Proposal To Save America From Itself?

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A letter from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has been making the rounds, asking other CEOs to join with him and “forgo all political contributions until Congress and the President return to Washington and deliver a fiscally-disciplined, long-term debt and deficit plan to the American people.”

The idea has gained plenty of admirers: “thousands of Americans – both CEOs and everyday citizens” (as CNN puts it) have contacted Schultz to express their support. Joe Nocera dedicated his entire column in the Times last week to Schultz’s proposal, praising the boycott as “hardheaded and practical, the kind of idea you would expect from a good businessman”.

That it is. But its virtues are also its limitations. Schultz wants to tackle a very big, very difficult problem: what he calls “the lack of cooperation and irresponsibility among elected officials as they have put partisan agendas before the people’s agenda. This is not the leadership we have come to expect, nor deserve.”

We can debate that last point: the current crop of ineffectual cowards in Washington might be exactly the leadership we have come to expect and deserve. Be that as it may, I am a little suspicious of grassroots movements in which angry “everyday citizens” find themselves in cahoots with angry CEOs; and it seems odd that we are being asked to entrust “the people’s agenda” to Schultz and his gang of CEOs – who may be well-meaning, but whose agenda (it seems fair to say) may not exactly match up with the aspirations and priorities of everyday citizens, or at least those of us who don’t happen to be leading multibillion-dollar multinationals.

I know that Starbucks bristles at the suggestion that multibillion-dollar companies might not always put the interests of its people, its “baristas” and “partners,” front and center. (But just a couple of weeks ago, baristas in Chile went on hunger strike because the company refused to negotiate with them over wages.) And I understand that Schultz prides himself on being a good CEO – one who has done well by doing good. He is, in fact, regularly singled out for praise by the business press as a CEO who defies the “the power-hungry stereotype,” and who will put the long-term good of his employees, his company or the environment over short-term advantage. (That’s the story Motley Fool’s Alyce Lomax told just last week in a Howard Schultz puff piece on AOL’s Daily Finance site.)

I’m not questioning Schultz’s good intentions. But the effort he’s mounted so far has a whiff of benevolent corporate paternalism about it; and the prospect of well-meaning CEOs around the country banding together on behalf of all the little people to fight political paralysis in Washington DC should — at least — give us pause. It sounds like a bloodless coup in the making, a plutocrats’ putsch.

There is something absurd here as well: aided and abetted by a pliant and misguided Supreme Court, corporate interests have already hijacked the political process; now they plan to withhold ransom payments until the ineffectual cowards we elected to represent and defend our interests – the public interest – deliver the economy back to them in sound condition, and deliver them from all “uncertainty.” Then they will create jobs. (Be sure to read Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the uncertainty canard here.)

That said, the real trouble with Schultz’s proposal is not its presumption or its absurdity or its patronizing benevolence. The real trouble here is that Schultz fails to see the big picture, the broad agenda, the scope of the problem we face right now. Like most political and corporate leaders, he sees the people’s agenda – and the country’s uncertain prospects — through the narrow lens of jobs and economic growth. And while jobs and sustainable economic growth are undeniably important, and can be made to serve the public interest, the public interest can’t be reduced merely to those things; they may sometimes even be at odds with the public interest, as they sometimes are in human rights, labor or environmental disputes.

Real prosperity can’t be measured simply in terms of economic growth or high employment figures. I fear that what we have here is a failure to imagine the American future as anything more than a sunny financial forecast, the country as anything more than a happy work camp.

On the Heroics at Home Depot

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A video making the rounds on YouTube and on progressive blogs features the American Family Association’s Buddy Smith telling the story of his run-in with Home Depot Chairman and CEO Fred Blake at the annual shareholders meeting on June 2nd.

Smith, whose organization also runs a site called BoycottTheHomeDepot.com, came to the shareholders meeting to present a petition asking Blake to “stop sponsoring gay pride parades and making direct contributions to gay activist organizations.” “A corporate company like Home Depot,” he complains, “is just not being a good citizen,” because they are “spreading the word” about a “lifestyle that is just a trap of Satan.” Good corporate citizenship, in Smith’s view, requires “standing for God’s truth” out of “love” for “our neighbors.”

How’s that for a theory of corporate social responsibility?

To Smith’s dismay, Fred Blake wasn’t having any of it. The Home Depot CEO responded “very briefly” to Smith. Blake went on, in Smith’s account, to say that he “was very proud of Home Depot’s diversity”; and the CEO “made a recommitment just to continue down the very track that they’re going.” So Blake sent Smith packing.

Whether this showed “some real backbone,” as blogger Cory Doctorow puts it, is up for debate: how much courage does it take to dismiss a crazy old coot like Smith, or double down on diversity policies for which there is a strong business case? Discrimination unnecessarily limits the labor pool and risks offending potential customers.

If the buzz on Twitter is any indication, the issue seems settled; and Blake is a champion of diversity and a model of socially responsible corporate leadership. Most people were retweeting @RightWingWatch’s tweet: “AFA brings boycott to Home Depot board meeting & CEO tells AFA to take a hike, reiterates commitment to diversity.” One poster, a Lady Gaga fan, called Blake “bad ass”; others said they now preferred Home Depot to its competitor, Lowes. @biggkhalil took up AFA’s theme of corporate citizenship: “Dear AFA, Home Depot is a great citizen. I pledge to continue shopping there. You people are pathetic.” Yet another poster thanked the company “for standing up for equality! Let’s send a Village People construction worker with a gift basket!” Others used more colorful language to denounce Smith and praise Blake.

Everybody agrees Blake made the right call; nobody seems too concerned that he made an easy call. I guess people like to see these holy-rollers get their comeuppance. But it’s worth noting that there was another item on the agenda at the Home Depot meeting that deserves more attention than Blake’s rebuff of Smith. It has to do not with Home Depot policy but Home Depot politics – specifically with the money Home Depot gives through its PAC to candidates and their refusal to give shareholders a say in how that money gets spent.

It turns out some of the company’s spending doesn’t jive with their much-celebrated commitment to diversity. As Andy Kroll reports in Mother Jones:

in 2006, the PAC donated $1,000 to Kansas Republican Sam Brownback, now the state’s governor and a supporter of a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, and gave $10,000 to help Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial campaign in Virginia. McDonnell is a staunch opponent of workplace protections for LGBT state employees.

Arguing that Blake and his executive team at Home Depot “were giving to candidates who were actively rolling back the rights of GLBT people in the states in which they did business” and that this put the company’s reputation at risk, Julie Goodridge and Northstar Management brought a resolution to give shareholders an advisory vote on corporate political spending.

I’ve written about this resolution in a previous post. It is at best a first step, but it’s a step in the right direction. Some people believe that requiring full disclosure and giving investors a say may help check corporate political spending in the wake of the Citizens United ruling.

That’s the hope. In fact, CEO Fred Blake and the Home Depot management team opposed the Northstar resolution from the very start. It gained a place on the annual meeting agenda only after an SEC ruling required the company to include it. And at the June 2nd shareholders meeting, the resolution (not surprisingly) went down in defeat.

Fred Blake has promised to announce the final tally soon. It would be a sign of real courage, or at least consistency, if he took the occasion to distance himself and his company from the bigotry of Brownback, McDonnell and their ilk.