Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [290]
Among Montana mines with a historical legacy of environmental damage, the ones that have come furthest towards paying their cleanup costs are the former properties of Anaconda Copper Mining Company around and downstream of Butte. The reason is simple: Anaconda was bought by the big oil company ARCO, which in turn was bought by the even bigger British oil company BP (British Petroleum). The result illustrates more clearly than could anything else the differing approaches to environmental messes in the hardrock mining industry and in the oil industry: same mining properties, different owners. When they discovered the mess that they had inherited, ARCO and then BP eventually decided that their own interests would be better served by trying to get the problems behind them than by denying all responsibility. That is not to say that ARCO and BP have shown any enthusiasm for spending the hundreds of millions of dollars to which they were obligated. They have tried the usual resistive strategies, such as denying the reality of toxic effects, funding local citizens’ support groups to state their case, proposing cheaper solutions than those proposed by the government, and so on. But at least they have spent large sums of money, they are evidently resigned to spending more, they are much too large to declare bankruptcy over just their Montana mines, and they are interested in bringing matters to a resolution rather than delaying indefinitely.
The other somewhat bright spot in the Montana mining picture is two platinum and palladium mines owned by Stillwater Mining Company, which entered into good-neighbor agreements with local environmental groups (the sole such agreements reached by any mining company in the U.S.), gave money to those groups, allows the groups free access to their mining area, actually requested the environmental organization Trout Unlimited (to the latter’s astonishment) to monitor effects of their mines on local trout populations in the Boulder River, and reached long-term agreements with the surrounding communities regarding labor, electricity, schools, and city services—in return for environmentalists and local citizens’ not opposing Stillwater. It seems obvious that this peace treaty between Stillwater, environmentalists, and the community benefits everybody concerned. How can we explain the surprising fact that, among Montana mining companies, only Stillwater reached this conclusion?
Several factors contributed. Stillwater owns a uniquely valuable deposit: the sole primary deposit of platinum and palladium (much used in the automobile and chemical industries) outside of South Africa. The deposit is so deep that it is expected to last for at least a century and probably much longer; that encourages a long-term perspective rather than the usual rape-and-run attitude. The mine is underground, hence it presents fewer problems of surface impact than an open-pit mine. Its ores are relatively low in sulfide, and most of that sulfide is extracted with the product, so that problems of acid sulfide drainage are minimized and environmental impact mitigation is less expensive than at Montana copper and gold mines. In 1999 the company brought in a new CEO, Bill Nettles, who came from the auto industry (the biggest user of the mine’s products) rather than from a traditional mining background, did not inherit the usual mining attitudes, recognized the mining industry’s awful public relations problems, and was interested in finding fresh long-term solutions. Finally, at the time that Stillwater officers reached