Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [281]
In particular, the question remains why I observed indifference to environmental problems in the Salawati oil field of the Indonesian oil company Pertamina in 1986, but clean practices in Chevron’s Kutubu field when I began visiting there in 1998. There are several differences between Pertamina’s situation as a national oil company in Indonesia in 1986, and Chevron’s situation as an international company operating in Papua New Guinea in 1998, that may account for the differing outcomes. The Indonesian public, government, and judiciary are less interested in, and expect less from, the behavior of oil companies than do their European and American counterparts encompassing Chevron’s major customers. Pertamina’s Indonesian employees have had less exposure to environmental concerns than have Chevron’s American and Australian employees. Papua New Guinea is a democracy whose citizens enjoy the freedom to obstruct proposed development projects, but Indonesia in 1986 was a military dictatorship whose citizens enjoyed no such freedom. Beyond that, the Indonesian government was dominated by people from its most populous island (Java), looked on its New Guinea province as a source of income and a place to resettle Java’s surplus population, and was less concerned with the opinions of New Guineans than is the government of Papua New Guinea, which owns the eastern half of the same island. Pertamina did not face rising environmental standards from the Indonesian government, such as those that international oil companies face. Pertamina is largely a national oil company within Indonesia, competing for fewer overseas contracts than do the big international companies, so that Pertamina does not derive an international competitive advantage from clean environmental policies. Pertamina has not had CEOs who send out monthly newsletters stressing the environment as the highest priority. Finally, my visit to Pertamina’s Salawati oil field was in 1986; I don’t know whether Pertamina policies have changed since then.
Let’s now turn from the oil and gas industry to the hardrock mining industry. (That term refers to mines that excavate ores from which to extract metals, as opposed to mines that excavate coal.) The industry is currently the leading toxic polluter in the U.S., responsible for nearly half of reported industrial pollution. Of western U.S. rivers, nearly half have sections of their headwaters polluted by mining. In most of the U.S. the hardrock mining industry is now declining towards extinction, largely because of its own misdeeds. Environmental groups have for the most part not taken the trouble to learn essential facts about the hardrock mining industry, and declined to participate in an initially promising international initiative that the industry commenced in 1998 to change its behavior.
These and other features of the hardrock mining industry’s current status are initially puzzling, because the industry seems superficially so like the oil and gas industry that we just discussed, and also like the coal industry. Don’t all three industries involve extracting non-renewable resources from the ground? Yes, they do, but they have nevertheless unfolded differently, for three reasons: different economics and technology, different attitudes within the industry itself, and different attitudes of the public and government towards the industry.
The environmental problems caused by hardrock mining are of several types. One involves disturbance of land surface by