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By Root 2093 0

large and hunted for their meat, hunted for their spectacular plumage, or else confined to the interior of undisturbed forests and absent from modified secondary habitats. They include tree kangaroos (New Guinea’s largest native mammals); cassowaries, hornbills, and large pigeons (New Guinea’s largest birds); birds of paradise, and Pesquet’s Parrot and other colorful parrots (valued for their beautiful plumage); and hundreds of species of the forest interior. When I began bird-watching in the Kutubu area, I anticipated that my main goal would be to determine how much less numerous these species were inside the area of Chevron’s oil fields, facilities, and pipeline than outside it.

Instead, I discovered to my astonishment that these species are much more numerous inside the Chevron area than anywhere else that I have visited on the island of New Guinea except for a few remote uninhabited areas. The only place that I have seen tree kangaroos in the wild in Papua New Guinea, in my 40 years there, is within a few miles of Chevron camps; elsewhere, they are the first mammal to become shot out by hunters, and those few surviving learn to be active only at night, but I saw them active during the day in the Kutubu area. Pesquet’s Parrot, the New Guinea Harpy Eagle, birds of paradise, hornbills, and large pigeons are common in the immediate vicinity of the oil camps, and I have seen Pesquet’s Parrots perching on the camp communications towers. That’s because there is an absolute prohibition against Chevron employees and contractors hunting any animal or fishing by any means in the project area, and because the forest is intact. The birds and animals sense that and become tame. In effect, the Kutubu oil field functions as by far the largest and most rigorously controlled national park in Papua New Guinea.

For months, I was greatly puzzled by these conditions in the Kutubu oil field. After all, Chevron is neither a non-profit environmental organization, nor a National Park Service. Instead, it is a for-profit oil company, owned by its shareholders. If Chevron were to spend money on environmental policies that ultimately decreased its profits from its oil operations, its shareholders would and should sue it. The company evidently decided that those policies would ultimately help it make more money from its oil operations. How do they help?

Chevron company publications refer to concern for the environment itself as a motivating factor. That is undoubtedly true. However, in conversations over the last six years with dozens of lower-level as well as senior Chevron employees, employees of other oil companies, and people outside the oil industry, I have come to realize that many other factors as well have contributed to these environmental policies.

One such factor is the importance of avoiding very expensive environmental disasters. When I asked a Chevron safety representative who happened to be a bird-watcher what had prompted these policies, his short answer was: “Exxon Valdez, Piper Alpha, and Bhopal.” He was referring to the huge oil spill from the running aground off Alaska of Exxon’s oil tanker the Exxon Valdez in 1989, the 1988 fire on Occidental Petroleum’s Piper Alpha oil platform in the North Sea that killed 167 people (Plate 33), and the 1984 escape of chemicals at Union Carbide’s Bhopal chemical plant in India that killed 4,000 people and injured 200,000 (Plate 34). These were three of the most notorious, best-publicized, and most expensive industrial accidents of recent times. Each of them cost the company responsible billions of dollars, and the Bhopal accident ultimately cost Union Carbide its existence as an independent company. My informant could also have mentioned the blowout and catastrophic oil spill at Union Oil’s Platform A in the Santa Barbara Channel off Los Angeles in 1969, serving already then as a wake-up call for the oil industry. Chevron and some of the other large international oil companies thereby realized that, by spending each year an extra few million dollars on a project, or even a few tens of