Tag Archives: indigenous

Laudato Si’ on Mining

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The views of mining we find in the new papal encyclical Laudato Si’ clearly reflect the Latin American experience — centuries of plunder and absconded wealth, industrial development and economic underdevelopment, violence and ruin, degradation of the land and destruction of communities where mining is done. But in its careful attention to issues of water, water access, and the condition of the world’s poor, the encyclical raises serious questions about mining and the ethics of mining everywhere in the world.

Laudato Si’ explicitly addresses mining in three places, raising the very same issues that I’ve been writing about here, in connection with the new mining around Lake Superior. So I thought I would set out these passages for consideration now, with the intention of returning to them after I have had a chance to read the encyclical more carefully.

The first explicit mention of mining in Laudato Si’ comes at 29, which deals with the “serious problem” of “the quality of water available to the poor.”

Underground water sources in many places are threatened by the pollution produced in certain mining, farming and industrial activities, especially in countries lacking adequate regulation or controls. It is not only a question of industrial waste. Detergents and chemical products, commonly used in many places of the world, continue to pour into our rivers, lakes and seas.

At 51, one of the most powerful passages in the entire encyclical looks at the role of mining in creating an “ecological debt” of the global north to the global south, where raw materials are taken from the land for markets that serve the wealthy, industrialized north:

Inequity affects not only individuals but entire countries; it compels us to consider an ethics of international relations. A true “ecological debt” exists, particularly between the global north and south, connected to commercial imbalances with effects on the environment, and the disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time. The export of raw materials to satisfy markets in the industrialized north has caused harm locally, as for example in mercury pollution in gold mining or sulphur dioxide pollution in copper mining.

Quoting a 2009 Christmas Message from the Bishops of Patagonia-Comahue Region of Argentina, Laudato Si’ goes on to explain that the industrialized world has incurred this debt because mining and other companies

operate in less developed countries in ways they could never do at home, in the countries in which they raise their capital: “We note that often the businesses which operate this way are multinationals. They do here what they would never do in developed countries or the so-called first world. Generally, after ceasing their activity and withdrawing, they leave behind great human and environmental liabilities such as unemployment, abandoned towns, the depletion of natural reserves, deforestation, the impoverishment of agriculture and local stock breeding, open pits, riven hills, polluted rivers and a handful of social works which are no longer sustainable.”

Finally, at 146, the encyclical addresses the way mining projects degrade and destroy land that indigenous communities regard as “sacred space,” often displacing them and threatening their very survival:

it is essential to show special care for indigenous communities and their cultural traditions. They are not merely one minority among others, but should be the principal dialogue partners, especially when large projects affecting their land are proposed. For them, land is not a commodity but rather a gift from God and from their ancestors who rest there, a sacred space with which they need to interact if they are to maintain their identity and values. When they remain on their land, they themselves care for it best. Nevertheless, in various parts of the world, pressure is being put on them to abandon their homelands to make room for agricultural or mining projects which are undertaken without regard for the degradation of nature and culture.

A Reply to Dan Blondeau

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When I sat down to reply to a comment from Dan Blondeau of Eagle Mine on my Mining Renaissance post, I found that I’d written what is, essentially, a new post. So I’m running my reply here instead of in the comments thread.

Here is Dan’s comment:

Louis and others commenting here – is there any way you would support mining anywhere? I highly doubt it. Large, long-life deposits are few and far between now. Smaller projects such as Eagle, Polymet and so on are becoming the typical scale of mining. Instead of just bashing the industry and focusing on events that happened decades ago, perhaps you could take a more positive and collaborative approach to your concerns. Thank you

Here’s my reply:

I take it that by “events that happened decades ago,” you are referring to the story told in my film 1913 Massacre. That story from what you correctly characterize as a bygone era of mining first drew me to the Upper Peninsula, and it would be dishonest or disingenuous to say that it doesn’t still color my thinking. But since completing that project I’ve tried to stay focused on what’s happening in the area now.

At the same time, the unresolved past and the present are not so easily kept apart. For example, the conversation after our screening of 1913 Massacre at the DeVos Art Museum last October went almost directly and without any prompting to the new mining up around Big Bay and across the Peninsula. I believe the film resonates with people in the UP (and in other parts of the country) not just because the immigrant experience it documents is the quintessential American experience, but also because the basic questions it raises are still very much alive today.

That aside, I am not sure why you read me as “bashing the industry” here. My post focused on sloppy and hopelessly compromised journalism. I don’t think of mining as something I would “support” or not support.  It would never occur to me to put it that way, and I’m not for or against mining per se. In some of my posts, especially those on Shefa Siegel’s work, I try to acknowledge mining’s crucial role in what Orwell calls “the metabolism of civilization”; and I’m trying to understand how bigger changes in the commodities markets and the global economic picture are driving the new mining around Lake Superior. But I also think it’s important to appreciate the real risks and the potential cost of copper and nickel mining operations in the Lake Superior watershed, and to question whether it really will create lasting prosperity for the UP or the Lake Superior region. Those are (for me) the big issues the new mining raises, and I think they are issues that any honest conversation about mining (or the development that mining brings) needs to take into account.

As I tried to suggest in my post, Kocazek just ignores them, and I wondered why she didn’t try to take them on – especially since she writes for a publication dedicated to water issues. And not just any publication: Circle of Blue, which was founded by J. Carl Ganter (who served as vice-chairman of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Water Security) and which has ties to – it is a “non-profit affiliate” of – the prestigious Pacific Institute.

As for taking “a more positive and collaborative approach,” I am all for it, or at least I am all for genuine collaboration. I don’t really know what a “positive…approach” would entail in this case apart from boosterism. As I say, I don’t consider myself a mining booster or a mining basher, but an observer, still (and no doubt always) an outsider, despite my many trips to the UP, exploring a place and trying my best to document what’s happening there. I’m open to having my views challenged and being shown where I am wrong or where there’s a better way to talk about or do things. (And for that reason I appreciate you taking the time to comment here.) I don’t think there can be any collaboration unless each party is willing and able to listen and – this is important – ready to yield to the other. In other words, listening goes beyond making concessions to the other in conversation: it means doing things differently in response to the other’s demands. (This is a theme I’ve been exploring in my posts on The Power of Asking, and one that I come up against over and over again when I write about mining issues.)

Am I often critical of what mining companies are doing in the UP and around Lake Superior? Sure, and I am troubled, as well, by the almost hubristic level of confidence the mining industry places in technology and engineering, even in the face of disasters like the Bingham Canyon collapse; its worrisome record on environmental and human rights issues nearly everywhere in the world mining is done; and the power and distorting influence it exerts on politicians and public debate – in the UP and elsewhere.

I still think there’s plenty of opportunity for collaboration and dialogue. If I did not, I would just call it quits; but giving up on dialogue is tantamount to giving up on people. In the area of human rights, for instance, I believe there’s still opportunity for collaboration around the Ruggie principles (despite the doubts I’ve expressed about them) and – in the Lake Superior region – around the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Rights. Both frameworks (as well as the work done by the Lake Superior Binational Forum on Responsible Mining in the Lake Superior Basin) are decent places to start enumerating in a serious way the responsibilities and obligations that mining companies have in a region where human rights concerns and freshwater issues are intertwined.

In fact, I think genuine and ongoing collaboration on these efforts is essential, because I don’t think the mining industry can do it alone, or is the appropriate party to set the agenda here.

In Michigan, Mining Makes An Asset of A Community

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John Kivela just can’t stop thanking people, it appears. Last week, at a ceremony held under a tent at Humboldt Mill to mark the transfer of ownership of the Eagle Mine from Rio Tinto to Lundin Mining, State Representative Kivela was effusive in his praise of officials from the two multinational mining companies and, above all, grateful. According to a report in the Mining Journal, Kivela gave a shoutout to outgoing Rio Tinto Eagle Mine President Adam Burley (who will be moving to Rio Tinto’s offices in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is now North American HQ for one of the biggest mine disasters in recent history — the slide at Bingham Canyon); and then, it seemed, Kivela was unable to hold back any longer. He spoke from the heart:

Adam and the folks from Rio, thank you for your commitment to the community. Thanks for providing opportunities for Michiganders to employ themselves. Thanks for running a safe, clean, environmentally sound operation. That means a lot to the folks here. To our good friends from Canada, welcome to the community. Thank you for your investment. Thank you for taking a chance in Michigan and in the United States in this operation and I wish you all the best.

It was just folks gathered under that tent at Humboldt Mill — “folks” from Rio Tinto, “folks here,” who live in close proximity to the Eagle Mine operation, all just folks who belong to the same “community” — and how gracious of Kivela to extend a warm welcome on behalf of that community to these new arrivals, strangers to the Upper Peninsula but already “good friends,” no, “our” good friends, from Canada! Kivela must have generated enough warm friendly feeling under that tent at the Humboldt Mill — a brownfield site from the last round of mining — that everyone could forget, just for that one sweet moment, that most of what Kivela was saying was just obsequious, ingratiating nonsense.

The ceremony was held at the mill, not at the mine, and for obvious reasons: the Eagle mine is built on ground sacred to the Ojibwe people and construction of the mine is proceeding apace without their full, prior and informed consent (as required by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People). Many in the community are glad to see Rio Tinto go but are not ready to welcome Lundin, and Lundin has done very little to reassure them that things are going to be different at Eagle. There are folks within the community Kivela represents who don’t share Kivela’s confidence that Rio Tinto has run “a safe, clean, environmentally sound operation.” Charges of corruption and incompetence hang over the entire permitting and environmental impact statement process around Eagle Mine. And, according to a recent report, the investment made first by Rio Tinto and now, Lundin Mining is likely to have a distorting effect on the economy of the Upper Peninsula, and will not contribute to the area’s long-term prosperity.

As for Rio Tinto’s commitment: it lasted only as long as Eagle strategically suited the global mining giant. Eagle rapidly went from being a “commitment” to a “non-core asset”; and that’s where Lundin came in: they saw a valuable asset where Rio Tinto no longer did. “Adding a mine like this to our asset base is really formative for our future,” said Lundin President and CEO Paul Conibear at the ceremony. “We’ve been looking very actively for two years now to rejuvenate our asset base to bring on a high-quality new base metals mine.” Conibear could be Canada’s answer to Ponce de Leon, with all his talk about searching far and wide for sources of rejuvenation. Eagle Mine may not be the Fountain of Youth, but its mineral riches will be “formative for the future” of Lundin’s “asset base.”

That is why Lundin has made its investment: it really has very little to do with Michigan, or the community, or friends or folks at all. The Eagle Mine is an asset. The land and the water and the trees, the minerals in the earth, the friends and communities around the mine, all the things that people in the Upper Peninsula know and love, have already been set down on a balance sheet alongside Lundin’s other assets. (It’s interesting, by the way, that on this occasion, as on others, Conibear talked about Lundin’s mines in “Portugal, Sweden and Spain” and neglected to mention the company’s substantial share in the controversial Tenke Fungurume Mine, where Conibear served as Chief Operating Officer, then President and Director before he helped bring about the merger of Tenke and Lundin Mining.)

The community of friends gathered under the tent at Humboldt Mill doesn’t even appear to have entered into Conibear’s thoughts, or at least he does not mention them in his remarks as reported by the local press. Instead, Lundin’s CEO told a story of courage in the face of doubt, and of making tough choices: he acquired Eagle Mine “when metals prices are at a 5 year low” and when shareholders were asking whether this is the “right time.” These are the things that are most on Conibear’s mind: metal prices and market timing. He needs to placate skeptical shareholders, or prove them shortsighted. He seems confident that he will, and eventually they will thank him for adding this sulfide mining operation on the shores of Lake Superior to Lundin’s asset base.

People living around the mine, and all around Lake Superior, may not share their gratitude.

A Great Commons Narrative for the Great Lakes

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A few days ago, the International Human Rights Law Clinic at UC Berkeley School of Law released its report on the Human Right to Water Bill in California. Directed at State agencies, the report discusses the obligations these agencies have to consider the human right to water, as required by California Assembly Bill 685. Specifically it outlines what the duty “to consider” entails, discusses the human right to water, and offers some guidelines for implementation of AB 685.

Not every state has California’s water problems, but all states need to recognize the human right to water and put it on the public agenda. “The human right to water,” in the words of the UN’s Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, “is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity” and (to continue with the language of General Comment No. 15) “a prerequisite for the realization of other human rights.”

And yet even where water is abundant, we find this basic right threatened and compromised when it should be respected and protected. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the UN High Commission on Human Rights expressed concern on a recent visit that in some regions of the United States, mining and extractive industries are compromising the human right to water; that concern now must extend even to the Great Lakes area, where one of the biggest mining operations in the world is about to be staged around Lake Superior, one of the largest freshwater lakes in the world.

A 2011 report issued by the Council of Canadians finds that “the human right to water is being violated in a number of communities around the Great Lakes,” especially but not exclusively in indigenous communities. The report, entitled Our Great Lakes Commons [pdf], lays out “a people’s plan” to remedy this situation and to save and protect Lake Superior and all the Great Lakes as our “common heritage.” I came to the report after reading an op-ed in the May 1 edition of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by its author, Maude Barlow, National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and Chair of the organization Food and Water Watch. In her thought-provoking piece for the Journal-Sentinel and in this passage from her 2011 report, Barlow roots the human right to water in what she terms a broad “narrative” of the Commons:

The notion of the Commons is a very old one. A Commons narrative asserts that no one owns water. Rather it is a common heritage that belongs to the Earth, other species and future generations as well as our own. Because it is a flow resource necessary for life and ecosystem health, and because there is no substitute for it, water must be regarded as a public Commons and a public good and preserved as such for all time in law and practice. Embracing the Commons helps us to restore to the centrestage a whole range of social and ecological phenomena that market economics regards as “externalities.” A language of the Commons would restore more democratic control over the Great Lakes and establish their care and stewardship the joint responsibility of citizens and their elected governments based on the notions of social equity, ecological survival and governance by the people most impacted.

The Commons approach is based on the belief that just by being members of the human family, we all have rights to certain common heritages, be they the atmosphere and oceans, freshwater and genetic diversity, or culture, language and wisdom. In most traditional societies, it was assumed that what belonged to one belonged to all. Many indigenous societies to this day cannot conceive of denying a person or a family basic access to food, air, land, water and livelihood. Many modern societies extended the same concept of universal access to the notion of a social Commons, creating education, health care and social security for all members of the community. There are many working examples of Commons in North America today that include systems of national, state and provincial parks, cooperative fishing compacts to protect local stocks from depletion, and public libraries.

A Great Lakes Basin Commons would reject the view that the primary function of the Great Lakes is to promote the interests of industry and the powerful and give them preferential access to the Lakes’ bounties. It would embrace the belief that the Great Lakes form an integrated ecosystem with resources that are to be equitably shared and carefully managed for the good of the whole community. In a Commons framework, water is a fundamental human right that must be accessible to all. Private control of water cannot address itself to the issues of conservation, justice or democracy, the underpinnings of a solution to the crisis of the Great Lakes. Only citizens and their governments acting on their behalf can operate on these principles. Under a Commons regime, all private sector activity would come under strict public oversight and government accountability, and all would have to operate within a mandate, whose goals are the restoration and preservation of the waters of the Basin and water justice for all those who live around it.

At the same time, it is not a return to the notion that the Great Lakes are indestructible due to their size, or what has come to be known as “the tragedy of the commons.” It is rooted rather in a sober and realistic assessment of the true damage that has already been unleashed on the Great Lakes as well as the knowledge that they must be managed and shared in a way that protects them now and for all time.

Impossible or Indigenous in Peru

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QuechuaHighlands

In the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the Rio Tinto shareholder meeting, I mentioned a woman who spoke on behalf of the Mongolian herders whose livelihood is threatened by the Oyu Tolgoi mining project. Her name is Sukhgerel Dugersuren, and she is the Executive Director of the Mongolian NGO Oyu Tolgoi Watch. In her remarks, Dugersuren asked the company to recognize the herders as “indigenous” people (as the IFC does). That isn’t just a gesture of recognition or respect, a way of acknowledging that the herders were there first, or that they have a centuries-old claim to the land and the scarce water sources of the Gobi; it means that before moving ahead, the Oyu Tolgoi project would require – to use the language of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (Article 32, paragraph 2) — their free, prior and informed consent.

I was reminded of Dugersuren and the case of the herders when I read yesterday morning that the Humala government in Peru now intends to exclude the Quechua people of the Peruvian highlands from “prior consultation” on mining projects.

President Ollanta Humala campaigned in 2011 on the idea of “social inclusion” and specifically on giving indigenous communities a voice in the consultation period before big mining projects begin. Prior consultation — the first law Humala signed upon taking office — codified into Peruvian law the idea of free, prior and informed consent. But only two years later, with $50 billion in mining projects over the next five years at stake, and with Canadian mining giant Newmont scaling back its investments and announcing a delay in its controversial Minas Conga project, it looks as if Humala wishes he could take it all back.

QuechuaProtestConga

Apparently Mines and Energy Minister Jorge Merino has prevailed; Deputy Minister of Culture Ivan Lanegra, who was in charge of administering the prior consultation law, is now making noises about resigning.

I haven’t yet seen anything like an official statement on the matter, but Humala and other Peruvian officials have already started offering reasons – if they can be called that — for excluding the Quechua from prior consultation. They read like a bizarre exercise in bad anthropology.

Attempting to legitimize its betrayal of the Quechua, the government resorts to revisionist history, crude caricatures and discredited ideas. So, we are told, the Quechua-speaking people of the Andes can’t be indigenous, because over the centuries, they mixed with Spanish colonizers (whose abuses the law of prior consultation was supposed to help remedy). To be indigenous would seem to require a weird exemption from history – to be at once the victim of colonial abuse in need of redress and yet to live in complete isolation or perpetual flight, and never to have had any contact with the Spanish.

The people of the Andes can’t be indigenous: they practice agriculture, we are told, which makes them not indigenous people but campesinos. “In the highlands,” said Humala, parsing the difference, “there are mostly agrarian communities … indigenous communities are mostly in the jungle.” The indigenous are not farmers, but jungle dwellers, presumably hunters and gatherers who have never cultivated the land. If they till the soil or produce, it seems, they must give up all claims to their heritage, or at least their legal status.

A third and final absurdity: the people of the Andes can’t be indigenous, because they “meet in public assembly” or, as Humala has noted elsewhere, they have “mayors” who represent them, and so they are not without a “voice.” To be indigenous is to be without representation, then — silent. It goes even deeper than that: it is to be without politics, or at least without the plaza or the public square. We are, I suppose, to imagine the indigenous living in an archaic and pre-political world, where assembly is unnecessary or the public world unknown.

You can see where all this is heading. It is virtually impossible to be indigenous, unless you live in a small foraging band of jungle dwellers without any political power, or even any idea of politics. Placing these restrictions on the law of prior consultation in Peru makes a travesty of free, prior and informed consent, which requires that states deal “in good faith with the indigenous peoples concerned through their own representative institutions”; the very existence of such institutions would appear to be grounds for exclusion from the law.

Even with a law in place and gestures of good will at the start, the “indigenous” in Peru now risk being defined out of existence, or of having their right to consent sacrificed for the sake of big mining and continued growth. That is why it was especially curious and telling, in ways that are not yet wholly apparent to me, when I read this morning that just yesterday Peruvian ambassador Gonzalo Gutierrez Reinel and the Mongolian Minister of Foreign Affairs L. Bold “met to exchange views on mutual partnerships, particular[ly] in the sectors of culture and mining”: it is not at all clear that “culture” will survive the incursion of big mining in either country.