Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics

By Stuart Kirsch

Corporations are among the most powerful institutions of our time, but they are also responsible for a wide range of harmful social and environmental impacts. Consequently, political movements and nongovernmental organizations increasingly contest the risks that corporations pose to people and nature. Mining Capitalism examines the strategies through which corporations manage their relationships with these critics and adversaries. By focusing on the conflict over the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea, Stuart Kirsch tells the story of a slow-moving environmental disaster and the international network of indigenous peoples, advocacy groups, and lawyers that sought to protect local rivers and rain forests. Along the way, he analyzes how corporations promote their interests by manipulating science and invoking the discourses of sustainability and social responsibility. Based on two decades of anthropological research, this book is comparative in scope, showing readers how similar dynamics operate in other industries around the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Jun 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9780520957596

Stuart Kirsch

Stuart Kirsch is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Reverse Anthropology: Indigenous Analysis of Social and Environmental Relations in New Guinea (2006).

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Mining Capitalism

Mining Capitalism

The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics

Stuart Kirsch

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University of California Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kirsch, Stuart.

    Mining capitalism : the relationship between corporations and their critics / Stuart Kirsch.

        pages    cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28170-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-28171-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95759-6 (e-book)

    1. Mineral industries—Environmental aspects—Papua New Guinea.    2. Mineral industries—Political aspects—Papua New Guinea.    Copper mines and mining—Papua New Guinea—Ok Tedi Region.    4. Gold mines and mining—Papua New Guinea—Ok Tedi Region.    5. Ok Tedi Mining.    I. Title.

HD9506.P262K57    2014

    338.209953—dc23

2013040294

Manufactured in the United States of America

23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To Rex Dagi and Alex Maun, ne angotmi bot-korokman, in recognition of their sacrifices and achievements.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Colliding Ecologies

2. The Politics of Space

3. Down by Law

4. Corporate Science

5. Industry Strikes Back

6. New Politics of Time

Conclusion

Epilogue

Appendix: Timeline

Notes

References

Index

Illustrations

MAPS

1. The Fly River from the Star Mountains to the Gulf of Papua, Papua New Guinea.

2. Major mining projects in West Papua (Indonesia), Papua New Guinea, and the Solomon Islands.

3. Key referenda on mining and development in Latin America.

FIGURES

1. The Ok Tedi mine, 2004.

2. Water from the Ok Mart River enters the polluted Ok Tedi River, 1987.

3. Children playing in tailings deposit along the lower Ok Tedi River, 2008.

4. Ok Tedi Mining Ltd. public relations poster, ca. 1988.

5. Ghost forest on the lower Ok Tedi River, 1996.

6. Yonggom activist Rex Dagi, 1996.

7. Yonggom activist Alex Maun, 1995.

8. It’s Chirac . . . Sydney Morning Herald editorial cartoon, 1995.

9. Signing the 1996 settlement agreement in Kiunga.

10. Progress and tradition at the Ok Tedi mine.

11. Leaving our environment the same way we found it. BHP advertisement, 1997.

12. There’s no question our business has an impact. BHP Environment and Community Report, 1999.

13. Western Province summit meeting. Kiunga, 2005.

14. Referendum on the proposed Rio Blanco mine. Ayabaca, Peru, 2007.

15. Referendum on development. Santa Cruz del Quiché, Guatemala, 2010.

Acknowledgments

The movement of this project across scholarly and activist communities has increased the number of people and organizations to which I am indebted. A fellowship in Urgent Anthropology from the Royal Anthropological Institute and Goldsmiths College, University of London, provided me with the opportunity to conduct timely research and frame this project in anthropological terms. The University of Michigan generously supported my research through the Center for International Business Education; the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts; the Department of Anthropology; the Office of the Vice President for Research; and the Rackham Graduate School. The Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University provided a stimulating environment in which to think through, discuss, and begin writing about these issues. An ESRC-SSRC fellowship supported my participation in a collaborative research project at Manchester University on Territory, Conflicts, and Development in the Andes, which provided me with a valuable comparative perspective on resource politics. A fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and a Michigan Humanities Award enabled me to complete the manuscript.

This work has benefitted significantly from discussion with colleagues and graduate students at the University of Michigan and elsewhere, especially Anthony Bebbington, Denise Humphreys Bebbington, Mark Busse, Tony Crook, Michael Dove, Steven Feld, Kim and Mike Fortun, Bob Foster, Katherine Fultz, Lawrence Hammar, the late Olivia Harris, Federico Helfgott, Matt Hull, David Hyndman, Bruce Knauft, Fabiana Li, Jimmy McWilliams, Lynn Morgan, Steve Nugent, Dinah Rajak, Elisha Renne, Doug Rogers, Jessica Smith Rolston, Suzana Sawyer, Jim Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Marilyn Strathern, Jim Trostle, Jimmy Weiner, Marina Welker, Michael Wood, and Anna Zalik. My collaboration with Peter Benson on the anthropology of the corporation has been especially rewarding. Many of the arguments presented in this book have been honed through debates with my regular sparring partners on mining issues in Melanesia, Glenn Banks, John Burton, and Colin Filer, although neither they nor anyone else is responsible for the views expressed here.

During the campaign against the Ok Tedi mine, I came to rely on Brian Brunton, Simon Divecha, Geoff Evans, Igor O’Neill, Helen Rosenbaum, Lee Tan, and later Techa Beaumont and Matilda Koma for information and insight. At Slater & Gordon, Nick Styant-Browne, John Gordon, Peter Gordon, Ikenna Nowokolo, and later Ben Hardwick provided an invaluable backstage view of the legal proceedings without imposing any restrictions on my work. Lewis Gordon, David Hunter, Lawrence Kalinoe, Jacob Kopas, and David Szablowski fielded legal queries. David Nelson has generously shared his knowledge about the environmental impacts of mining for many years. I have also benefitted from long-running exchanges with Peter Adler, Robert Bryce, Joji Cariño, Luis Manuel Claps, Bong Corpuz, Catherine Coumans, Al Gedicks, the late Robert Goodland, Jamie Kneen, Fergus MacKay, Roger Moody, Gavin Mudd, Geoff Nettleton, Vicky Tauli-Corpuz, Ximena Warnaars, Viviane Weitzner, Andy Whitmore, and David Wissink. Kathy Creely, Jennifer Nason Davis, and Vikki John helped me track down important references. Sandhya Murali and Steve Hurvitz assembled a wealth of financial data. Bonnie Campbell, Katherine Fultz, Ken MacDonald, and Nina Glick Schiller generously allowed me to make reference to their unpublished work. Discussions with the members of the Mines and Communities network have influenced this work more than I can acknowledge. I am also indebted to the Association of Indigenous Village Leaders in Suriname, the Forest People’s Programme, Indigenous Peoples Links, the Middlesex University School of Law, the Mineral Policy Institute, the North-South Institute, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Tebtebba Foundation for including me in their research projects and workshops.

Some of the examples from chapters 2 and 3 initially appeared in Indigenous Movements and the Risks of Counterglobalization, published in American Ethnologist in 2007. Some of the material in chapter 5 was originally published in a short essay called Sustainable Mining, which appeared in a special issue on corporate oxymorons in Dialectical Anthropology in 2010 and in the chapter Mining Industry Responses to Criticism in Edward F. Fischer, ed., Cash on the Table: Markets, Values, Moral Economies (SAR Press 2013).

This work has also benefitted from discussion at the University of Auckland, Bowdoin College, Columbia University, the University of Heidelberg, the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University, the University of Michigan, the University of Munich, the Universidad del Rosario, the School for Advanced Research, the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Yale University. I am particularly grateful to Heinz Klug for encouraging me to write in a more hopeful vein. Matt Hull and his seminar on corporations; Kedron Thomas, Peter Benson, and their reading group at the University of Washington in St. Louis; and the students in my seminars on engaged and environmental anthropology provided insightful comments on the manuscript. Jeri Sawall applied her keen editorial eye to the first draft. Zeynep Gürsel, Dominique Nabokov, and Randal Stegmeyer provided valuable advice and assistance regarding the images for the book; Ben Pease produced the three elegant maps. I also wish to thank my colleagues at the University of California Press: Reed Malcolm, who supported the project from the outset and guided it through the review process, and Wendy Dherin, Jennifer Eastman, Stacy Eisenstark, and Rose Vekony, who oversaw its transformation into a book. The comments from the three anonymous reviewers were exceptionally helpful in guiding the final revisions.

Were it not for the courage of the local activists who sought to bring ecological reason to the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers, this book would have a very different story to tell. The book is dedicated to Rex Dagi and Alex Maun, whose heroic exploits figure prominently here, although I would be remiss if I failed to express my admiration and gratitude to Dair Gabara, Gabia Gagarimabu, Robin Moken, Moses Oti, Barnabus Uwako, the members of ENECO, and the many other people who have fought so hard to protect their rivers and forests; it has been a great privilege to work with them and write about their extraordinary and inspiring efforts.

Finally, for never losing faith in this project or the larger struggle for justice, I offer my enduring gratitude to Janet Richards.

Introduction

The corporation is one of the most powerful institutions of our time. Corporations organize much of the world’s labor and capital, shape the material form of the modern world, and are a prime mover of globalization. But corporations are also responsible for a wide range of harmful effects, including the use of technologies with deleterious consequences for human health and the production of environmental hazards that threaten the planet. The situation is exacerbated by neoliberal economic policies that view the market as the most efficient means of solving these problems and assert that effective management of these issues by the corporation can substitute for regulation.¹ These policies have led the state to transfer many of its regulatory responsibilities to corporations and markets. Yet the failure of market-based policies and corporations to address these concerns—or, in many cases, to even acknowledge their existence—reproduces the status quo. This allows corporations to continue externalizing the costs of production onto society and the environment, despite making widely publicized claims about the social benefits of their activities, their commitment to abide by existing laws and regulations, their willingness to cooperate with the state, and their responsibility as corporate citizens. The risks associated with production are normalized and naturalized as the inevitable consequence of modernity rather than contingent relations between states, corporations, and the environment that can be reorganized and improved.

However, the risks posed by corporations to people and the environment are increasingly contested by social movements and nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Critics of the corporation document existing problems, challenge harmful practices, inform the public, enroll supporters, seek to influence electoral politics, harness the power of the law, and even resort to violence. They address problems ranging from regional issues like mountaintop removal by coal miners in Appalachia to global environmental concerns like the contribution of carbon-based fuels to greenhouse gases and climate change. They target specific companies for past events, such as Dow Chemical for the Bhopal gas tragedy (Fortun 2001), or entire industries for the risks they pose to future generations, such as uranium mining and nuclear power (Hecht 1998, 2012). They invoke the discourses of responsibility, sustainability, and transparency in their critique of corporate practices. The remarkable proliferation of NGOs since the 1980s includes organizations that express diverse political ideologies. For example, organizations focused on environmental issues range from radical groups like Earth First to more moderate and populist NGOs like Greenpeace, as well as to NGOs that routinely partner with corporations to achieve their objectives, such as Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy. Some opposition movements organize on the basis of ethnicity or identity, such as Penan protests against logging in Sarawak (Brosius 1999), while in other cases, unexpected alliances have formed between groups that were previously antagonistic, such as the coalition of Native Americans and sport fishers that collaborated in blocking the development of a proposed zinc and copper sulfide mine in northern Wisconsin (Gedicks and Grossman 2005; Grossman 2005).

Many of these campaigns operate through transnational action networks that make international resources available to new categories of actors (Keck and Sikkink 1998). The resulting forms of mobilization have been described as enacting a politics of scale (Escobar 2001a, 166). They are also known as counterglobalization movements because of their innovative use of the architecture of globalization in challenging transnational corporations. Although the participants in these campaigns may be relatively few and far between, their cumulative influence can be significant. By harnessing new communication technologies ranging from the Internet and cell phones to satellite imaging, they are able to track and report on corporate activity in approximately real time, wherever it occurs. New social media extend their outreach. They stage protests and ask questions at annual shareholder meetings. They also exert pressure on the international financial institutions and multilateral organizations that facilitate the global flow of capital, turning these institutions into de facto regulatory bodies. These networks replicate the geographic distribution of capital by putting pressure on the corporation wherever it operates.

Corporations have thus been forced to adapt to pressure from their critics. They regularly employ a variety of corporate social technologies intended to manage their relationships with the public (Rogers 2012). They seek to assuage concerns by promoting uncertainty and doubt. They manage the politics of time by manipulating scientific research, concealing or delaying recognition of significant problems. They co-opt the discourse of their critics by promoting themselves as responsible, sustainable, and transparent. They also seek to enhance their reputations by forging strategic partnerships with NGOs, fostering division among their critics. These strategies help corporations withstand critique and weather crises. Their ability to neutralize criticism often leaves the public resigned to the harms they produce.

This book examines the relationship between corporations and their critics. I argue that the underlying dilemmas associated with capitalist modes of production can never be completely resolved; they can only be renegotiated in new forms. Given the efficacy of corporate social technologies in co-opting and adapting the strategies and discourses of their critics, social movements and NGOs must continually develop new approaches to these problems. Consequently, the dialectical relationship between corporations and their critics has become a permanent structural feature of neoliberal capitalism. Ethnographic attention to these interactions can help to answer the following questions: Why do efforts to reform corporate practices often fall short of their goals? How do corporations counteract the discourse and strategies of their critics? Which political strategies are more effective in curtailing the human and environmental costs of production? These questions have both analytical significance in terms of understanding one of the fundamental dynamics of contemporary capitalism and political implications for countering the politics of resignation, in which the perpetuation of the status quo appears inevitable (Benson and Kirsch 2010a).

I seek to answer these questions by examining the dialectical relationship between the mining industry and its indigenous and NGO critics. Mining moves more earth than any other human endeavor. Mining companies routinely externalize a significant proportion of the costs of production onto society and the environment. For example, mining companies rarely pay the full costs of the water they use, including the opportunity costs for other users, such as farmers. They regularly fail to assess their responsibilities in time frames commensurate with the longevity of their environmental impacts. Thus, in the United States alone, more than 156 abandoned hard rock mining sites have been targeted for federal cleanup, an intervention that will cost the U.S. government an estimated $15 billion, more than ten times the annual Superfund budget for all environmental disasters (Office of the Inspector General 2004, i). Requiring payment for the externalized costs of production would not only erode the profitability of the mining industry, but it would also mean that many mining projects are no longer economically viable.

The mining industry is defended on both economic grounds, in terms of the creation of wealth and employment, and on technological grounds, in terms of the widespread need for and use of metals. Mining is also presented as a mode of development that can help alleviate poverty, even though dependence on natural-resource extraction is inversely correlated with economic growth in a relationship economists call the resource curse (Auty 1993; Sachs and Warner 1995; Ross 1999). Since the late 1990s, however, the industry has promoted the view that mining contributes to sustainable development through the creation of economic opportunities that extend beyond the life of the project, although the definition of sustainability employed in these claims completely elides the concept’s original reference to the environment.

Previous anthropological research on the mining industry addressed questions about labor, capitalism, and modernity (Ferguson 1999; June Nash 1973; Powdermaker 1962; Taussig 1980). Ethnographers of Latin America introduced readers to Tío, the devil spirit to whom Bolivian miners made offerings of coca and alcohol in return for his help in finding a rich vein of ore (June Nash 1973; Taussig 1980, 143). Michael Taussig (1980, xi) describes the devil as a stunningly apt symbol of alienation that condenses political and economic history. With its reflective eyes and gaping mouth, the devil of the tin mine became an iconic image for a generation of ethnographers seeking to combine symbolic anthropology with the study of political economy, especially scholars studying resistance to capitalism. The resulting struggles over lands and livelihoods rocked Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, including the CIA-supported coup d’état in Chile in 1973, after the country nationalized ownership of its copper mines, including substantial holdings by the U.S. companies Kennecott and Anaconda (Finn 1998). The new Chilean economy became an incubator for the experiments in economic policy that gave rise to neoliberalism (Harvey 2005).

The subsequent spread of neoliberal economic policies facilitated the investment of mining capital around the world, unearthing new ore bodies to supply the expanding global economy. In the wake of the collapse of a socialist alternative to capitalism in 1989, the World Bank came to view its investment in natural-resource extraction as the ‘spear point’ of open trade policies and neo-liberal economic reform that would encourage recalcitrant states to lift restrictions on foreign investment (Danielson 2006, 17). Pressure from the World Bank led to reform of the mining codes in dozens of countries (Moody 1996, 46), dismantling regulatory regimes that provided at least nominal protection of labor, the environment, and the persons and peoples displaced and dispossessed by mining projects. These developments led to the expansion of investments in mineral exploration in Latin America by a factor of six, by four in the Pacific, and by two in Africa (Reed 2002, 205).

New technologies of mining have also transformed labor politics since the publication of the classic anthropological works on mining in the 1970s. The underground tin mines of Bolivia employed a large, unskilled labor force that worked under hazardous conditions. Labor was easily replaced if workers went on strike or were injured or killed in mining accidents. In contrast, the new open-cut mines are capital intensive. They employ relatively few workers, and their ability to organize has been weakened by new regimes of temporary and subcontracted labor (Smith and Helfgott 2010). Although labor conflict in the mining industry has not disappeared, its political significance has been greatly diminished (Szablowski 2007, 41–42; Helfgott 2013).² As James Ferguson (1999) notes with regard to Zambia’s copper industry, the promise of modernity continues to elude mine workers on the margins of the global economy.

The new generation of open-cut mines also produces fifty times the waste rock of underground mining (Ripley et al. 1978, 36). These projects turn mountains into craters in a matter of years. Many of these mines are gigantic, completely out of proportion to human scale, which contributes to the hubris of mining engineers who assume they can master the forces of nature. Although these mines leave behind vast holes in the earth up to several kilometers in diameter, it is usually the handling of tailings, waste rock, and overburden that results in lasting environmental problems. The impacts of these projects increase exponentially when these materials are discharged directly into rivers or the sea.

Many of these new mines are located in places where indigenous peoples retain control over lands and territories not previously seen to have economic value. Communities dependent on natural resources for subsistence are especially vulnerable to the environmental impacts of mining. Their values may also be incompatible with industrialized modes of resource extraction. Writing about the response of the people living in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, to the environmental impact of the Panguna copper and gold mine, which was the catalyst for a landowner rebellion that led to a decade-long civil war, Jill Nash (1993, 17–18) observes that the destruction of the landscape has enormous power—it is a cataclysmic event—in a subsistence society like Bougainville. . . . The land is not only for material benefit, which compensation payments reduce it to; it encodes their history and identity and is a major source of security. In extreme cases, the environmental impacts from large-scale mining projects can be so pervasive that people come to question their fundamental assumptions about the natural world (Kirsch 2006).

As a result, mining projects have become the target of unprecedented conflict on almost every continent. Protests against mining address a range of interrelated concerns, including claims to political autonomy and the rights to lands and territories, environmental impacts, the politics of livelihood, and cultural survival. The participants in these struggles circulate petitions, stage demonstrations, and set up roadblocks. They collaborate with international NGOs and church groups. They file legal cases in domestic courts concerning pollution and compensation, and they engage lawyers to bring suit against transnational mining companies in the countries in which the companies are incorporated. They have also instigated rebellions and civil wars. Referenda against mining are debated and passed in cities and pueblos across Latin America, demonstrating that the proposed projects lack a social license to operate, and leading outraged state officials to criticize voters for taking democracy into their own hands. In contrast, politicians who question why their predecessors signed agreements that effectively gave away their nation’s patrimony, allowing mining companies to reap windfall profits, are accused of resource nationalism by the mining industry when they seek to rectify the imbalance.

Conflicts between mining companies and communities are generally classified as examples of new social movements, because they focus less on the concerns of labor and class and more on other aspects of identity and rights, including civil rights, environmentalism, and indigenous rights (Melucci 1980; Touraine 1985). Although the newness of these movements has been challenged (Calhoun 1993; Tucker 1991), there are clear differences between these forms of mobilization and the political activism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when June Nash conducted her fieldwork among Bolivian tin miners. The earlier movements responded to accumulation by exploitation through union membership, labor action, and the nationalization of resources, while the new movements oppose the practice of accumulation by dispossession through which resources and rights are appropriated and privatized (Harvey 2003).

The escalation of mining conflicts coincided with the emergence of environmentalism as an international political movement during the 1980s and 1990s. Many of the new social movements are engaged in what Joan Martinez-Alier (2003) calls the environmentalism of the poor, which recognizes that marginal communities are especially vulnerable to environmental degradation and therefore more likely to engage in political action to protect their access to resources. This view challenges the post-materialist hypothesis that identifies environmentalism as a value that arises only after individuals have already fulfilled their basic needs (Inglehart 1977, 1990). It also differs from environmentalism focused on the protection of wilderness in the form of national parks and conservation areas that separate people from nature (Cronon 1996).

Another important focus of mining conflicts has been the distribution of economic benefits (Filer 1997a; Arellano-Yanguas 2012). People living in rural areas often expect mining companies to provide them with access to higher standards of living, better education and health care, and new economic opportunities. Yet mining companies rarely fulfill such expectations and often fail to keep the promises they do make. Communities affected by mining often find themselves caught betwixt and between old and new lives when environmental damage compromises subsistence production and the limited economic benefits they receive do not allow them to achieve their aspirations for modernity (Kirsch 2006).

Many of the actors in the new social movements against mining identify as indigenous. As Arturo Escobar (2001b, 184) suggests, indigeneity is one of the ways in which peoples’ sense of belonging and attachment to place continue to be important sources of cultural production and mobilized to various ends. Rather than an autonomous social formation, indigeneity is a relationship between peoples with histories of conflict and differential access to power (de la Cadena and Starn 2007). Despite acquiring legitimacy through their relationships to place, the politics of indigeneity operates in part by connecting the participants to politics beyond the state, providing new resources to solve conflicts stalemated at local or national levels (Niezen 2003). The international legal status of indigenous peoples has developed through a series of multilateral conferences and agreements (Anaya 2004; Barsh 1994), although the definition of indigeneity remains unsettled in many national contexts (T. M. Li 2000). Some states do not recognize the existence of indigenous peoples within their boundaries. In other countries, people disagree among themselves about whether they wish to be identified as indigenous.

Indigenous politics has long been shaped by interactions with extractive industry (Gedicks 1993, 2001; Sawyer and Gomez 2012). This remains true today, as mining interests continue to influence the politics of recognition. For example, the prime minister of Peru recently declared that the Quechua and Aymara peoples of the Andes were not considered indigenous for the purpose of laws about consultation in relation to natural-resource extraction (Reuters 2013). Mining also influences relationships between indigenous peoples and NGOs. In conflicts over mining, indigenous peoples have found strong allies in environmental and human rights groups, but conservation organizations are increasingly likely to partner with the mining industry rather than indigenous communities (Chapin 2004). It may not be an exaggeration to claim, as I have heard from parties on both sides of these conflicts, that mining companies and indigenous peoples regard each other as their greatest threat.

Sustained critical attention from NGOs and increasingly effective strategies of resistance by indigenous peoples during the 1990s took the mining industry by surprise. The remote location of most mining projects has long afforded them relative freedom from oversight or interference, allowing the industry to maintain a low profile. This can be contrasted with branding in the petroleum industry, in which consumers engage directly with corporations at the pump.³ The comparative obscurity of the mining industry is compounded by the fact that most metals are sold to other companies rather than consumers. The resulting anonymity of metals—it is impossible, for example, to trace the source of the copper wire in my computer or the gold in my wedding ring—means that the mining industry is largely immune to consumer politics.⁴ Thus, until recently, the mining industry lacked the kind of public relations machinery commonly employed by industries with longer histories of engagement with their critics. But with the global rise of indigenous, environmental, and NGO politics, the mining industry faced unprecedented challenges to its legitimacy and the threat of external regulation, forcing it to develop new strategies for engaging with its critics.

MINING CAPITALISM

My interest in these questions stems from more than two decades of ethnographic research and participation in the indigenous political movement that challenged the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea (Kirsch 2002, 2006). Since the mid-1980s, the mine has discharged more than two billion metric tons of tailings, waste rock, and overburden into the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers, causing massive environmental degradation downstream. In the first half of this book, I examine how an alliance of indigenous peoples, environmental activists, and lawyers mounted an international campaign that sought to stop the Ok Tedi mine from polluting the local river system. In chapter 1, Colliding Ecologies, I examine the reaction of the people living downstream from the mine to its social and environmental consequences. Pollution from the mine has caused extensive deforestation, making it impossible for the people living on the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers to feed their families using traditional subsistence practices. Although the state continues to follow the development paradigm that encourages less-developed countries to improve their economic standing through natural-resource extraction, the environmental devastation downstream from the Ok Tedi mine illustrates the microeconomic version of the resource curse, in which mining immiserates these communities instead of benefiting them economically.

Chapter 2, The Politics of Space, addresses the ways that a group of charismatic leaders from the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers collaborated with international NGOs in their campaign against the Ok Tedi mine. They faced a steep learning curve. Their initial protests and petitions were largely ignored by the mining company and the government. It was only by taking their campaign global that they were able to challenge Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd. (BHP), the majority shareholder and managing partner of the mine. They followed the movement of copper ore from Papua New Guinea to smelters in Europe and Asia. They attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and met with environmental NGOs in New York and Washington, DC. They presented their case at the International Water Tribunal in Amsterdam and discussed German investments in the Ok Tedi mine with members of the Parliament in Bonn. They testified at public hearings held to assess BHP’s bid to acquire a billion dollar diamond concession in Canada’s Northwest Territories, and information they provided about the environmental problems caused by the Ok Tedi mine helped to deter BHP’s copper prospect in the Caribbean. Through their encounters with other peoples facing similar threats, they first began to see themselves as indigenous. This identity has proven to be a productive way to frame the issues in their campaign and forge political alliances, even though the state of Papua New Guinea denies that its citizens are indigenous. For a time, they also became heroes of Australia’s green community and celebrities on the environmental NGO circuit. The chapter discusses both the strengths and compromises of these alliances, which in this case operated less like the horizontal mode of democratic power-sharing associated with network politics than a form of distributed action in which the participants were not always aware of each other’s activities. Although the international support they received helped to legitimize their claims, they were unable to stop the mining company from polluting their river and destroying their forests.

The impasse prompted the leaders of the campaign to file a lawsuit against BHP in Melbourne, where the company is based. Their legal action is the subject of chapter 3. The 1994 litigation represented thirty thousand people living downstream from the mine against one of Australia’s largest corporations. The case was notable in that it sought to hold a transnational corporation accountable in its home country for its operations overseas, establishing an important precedent subsequently taken up in other legal claims against the mining industry. The case was settled out of court in 1996 for an estimated $500 million in compensation and commitments to stop discharging tailings, the finely ground material that remains after the valuable ore is extracted, into local rivers. The plaintiffs were forced to return to court in 2000, however, after BHP failed to implement the tailings containment stipulated by the earlier agreement. The second lawsuit was settled in 2004, after public pressure forced BHP to transfer its 52 percent share in the Ok Tedi mine to a development trust, which may eventually cost the company three billion dollars in lost revenue. The title of chapter 3, Down by Law, refers to both the success of their first lawsuit, which initially appeared to be a victory over BHP, and the outcome of the second case, which ultimately failed to protect the environment. The shortcoming of their campaign suggests an important limitation of the politics of space: the many years that it took to mobilize their campaign and put pressure on the mining company, during which pollution from the mine continued unabated. The chapter also weighs the pros and cons of international tort claims, which can provide legitimacy to opposition movements, establish important legal precedents, and advance the cause of indigenous peoples against the mining industry, but may also fall short on grounds that have little to do with the merits of the case or the rights that have been violated. The top-down management of the litigation process that replaced the horizontal networks of the original campaign also restricted participation and reduced political commitment to the legal proceedings, weakening them in the process.

This book draws on long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people living on the Ok Tedi River. In my previous work, I considered whether culture continues to matter in the context of such overwhelming power disparities, showing how questions of meaning were at the heart of their political struggles (Kirsch 2006). In contrast to the a priori commitments of engaged anthropologists whose choice of fieldwork projects is driven by their political interests (e.g., Juris 2008; Speed 2008), I viewed my participation in the campaign against the mine as a logical extension of the commitment to reciprocity that underlies the practice of anthropology (Kirsch 2002, 178). By the time George Marcus (1995) was astutely commenting on the emergence of multi-sited ethnography, I was already moving between radically different fieldsites, discussing the problems caused by mining and potential interventions with villagers, state officials, employees at the mine site and executives at the corporate headquarters in Melbourne, lawyers in Australia, and NGOs on several continents. Marcus (1995, 113), however, did not anticipate that the constantly mobile, recalibrating practice of positioning . . . as well as alienations from . . . those with whom [one] interacts may stabilize over time. Although my research methods and questions varied according to the context, my relationships with the people affected by pollution became the constant in these interactions and the basis on which I gained access to the participants on both sides of a highly charged political contest (Kirsch 2002).

My participation in the Ok Tedi case also resulted in invitations to a pivotal series of international meetings about the relationship between indigenous peoples and extractive industry. I attended these workshops and conferences not only to present the results of my research or because they represented novel sites for the collection of ethnographic data, but also for the opportunity to contribute to these debates as a political actor (Ramos 1999). This presented new challenges and learning opportunities, as well as risks, including potential repercussions for violating the academic norms that separate scholarship from political engagement. However, the stakes in these conflicts for the people living along the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers, and for other people facing similar problems, far outweighed any risks to my career.

In an exceptionally thoughtful essay on these matters, Gaynor Macdonald (2002) suggests that the positions anthropologists advocate as political actors and expert witnesses in legal proceedings may be incompatible with the partial, open-ended character of postmodern ethnography. But in writing this book, I have found it impossible to adopt a neutral position, a response that is informed by decades of engaged research on mining conflicts. A degree of skepticism and perhaps even cynicism is required to analyze the mining industry’s relationship to its critics—and between corporations and their critics more generally—including how these interactions shape global capitalism. I leave to the reader to weigh the strengths of this orientation against the potential blind spots that result from having worked with the people living downstream from the Ok Tedi mine, one of the worst mining disasters in recent decades in terms of its social and environmental costs.

The first half of the book analyzes the forms of protest and legal action undertaken by critics of the mining industry, with a focus on the Ok Tedi case as both an ethnographic context for understanding these dynamics and in terms of the case’s historical significance for subsequent relationships between mining companies and their critics. The second half of the book entails a shift from writing about resistance to what Laura Nader (1972) calls studying up by focusing on the mining industry, which is the subject of chapters 4 and 5. Contemporary ethnographic research on the corporation ordinarily entails participant-observation in a variety of contexts, from the boardrooms where important decisions are made to the public protests, shareholder actions, and courtrooms where corporations face resistance, as well as in the fields, factories, markets, and homes in which production and consumption take place. However, conducting ethnographic research within the corporation poses a risk of co-optation, because the tendency of ethnographers to empathize with the subjects of their research may influence their findings or temper their critical perspectives. Thus, these two chapters suggest alternative models for studying corporations by examining how they produce and manipulate science in order to influence their critics and avoid regulation, the subject of chapter 4, and how they respond to their critics through various corporate social technologies, the focus of chapter 5. This discussion takes the dialectical relationship between corporations and their critics as its object of study rather than conducting ethnographic research within the corporation.

Chapter 4, "Corporate