Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [274]
Those examples of courageous leaders and courageous peoples give me hope. They make me believe that this book on a seemingly pessimistic subject is really an optimistic book. By reflecting deeply on causes of past failures, we too, like President Kennedy in 1961 and 1962, may be able to mend our ways and increase our chances for future success (Plate 32).
CHAPTER 15
Big Businesses and the Environment: Different Conditions, Different Outcomes
Resource extraction ■ Two oil fields ■ Oil company motives ■ Hardrock mining operations ■ Mining company motives ■ Differences among mining companies ■ The logging industry ■ Forest Stewardship Council ■ The seafood industry ■ Businesses and the public ■
All modern societies depend on extracting natural resources, both non-renewable resources (like oil and metals) and renewable ones (like wood and fish). We get most of our energy from oil, gas, and coal. Virtually all of our tools, containers, machines, vehicles, and buildings are made of metal, wood, or petrochemical-derived plastics and other synthetics. We write and print on wood-derived paper. Our principal wild sources of food are fish and other seafoods. The economies of dozens of countries depend heavily on extractive industries: for instance, of the three countries where I’ve done most of my fieldwork, the main props of the economy are logging followed by mining in Indonesia, logging and fishing in the Solomon Islands, and oil, gas, mining, and (increasingly) logging in Papua New Guinea. Thus, our societies are committed to extracting those resources: the only questions involve where, in what amounts, and by what means we choose to do so.
Because a resource extraction project usually requires large capital inputs up front, most of the extraction is done by big businesses. Familiar controversies exist between environmentalists and big businesses, which tend to view each other as enemies. Environmentalists blame businesses for harming people by damaging the environment, and routinely putting the business’s financial interests above the public good. Yes, those accusations are often true. Conversely, businesses blame environmentalists for routinely being ignorant of and uninterested in business realities, ignoring the desires of local people and host governments for jobs and development, placing the welfare of birds above that of people, and failing to praise businesses when they do practice good environmental policies. Yes, those accusations too are often true.
In this chapter I shall argue that the interests of big businesses, environmentalists, and society as a whole coincide more often than you might guess from all the mutual blaming. In many other cases, however, there really is a conflict of interest: what makes money for a business, at least in the short run, may be harmful for society as a whole. Under those circumstances, the behavior of businesses becomes a large-scale example of rational behavior on the part of one group (a business in this case) translating into disastrous decision-making by a society, as discussed in the preceding chapter. This chapter will use examples from four extractive industries, of which I have firsthand experience, to explore some of the reasons why different companies perceive it as being in their interests to adopt different policies, either harming or sparing the environment. My motivation is the practical one of identifying what changes would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead. The industries that I shall discuss are oil, hardrock mining and coal, logging, and marine fishing.
My experience of the oil industry in the New Guinea region has involved two