Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (81 page)

whatever motives) strongly backed environmental safeguards on the eastern
Dominican side of Hispaniola while his counterparts on the western Hait
ian side didn't; the Tikopian chiefs who presided over the decision to exter
minate their island's destructive pigs, despite the high status of pigs in
Melanesia; and China's leaders who mandated family planning long before
overpopulation in China could reach Rwandan levels. Those admirable
leaders also include the German chancellor Konrad Adenauer and other
Western European leaders, who decided after World War II to sacrifice sepa
rate national interests and to launch Europe's integration in the European Economic Community, with a major motive being to minimize the risk of another such European war. We should admire not only those courageous
leaders, but also those courageous peoples
—the Finns, Hungarians, British,
French, Japanese, Russians, Americans, Australians, and others—who de
cided which of their core values were worth fighting for, and which no longer made sense.

Those examples of courageous leaders and courageous peoples give me
hope. They make me believe that this book on a seemingly pessimistic sub
ject is really an optimistic book. By reflecting deeply on causes of past fail
ures, 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
m
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
■

A

ll 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 syn
thetics. 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, environ
mentalists, 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 oil fields at opposite ends of the spectrum of harmful versus beneficial environmental impacts. I found these experiences instructive, because I had
previously assumed that oil industry impacts were overwhelmingly harm
ful. Like much of the public, I loved to hate the oil industry, and I deeply
suspected the credibility of anyone who dared to report anything positive
about the industry's performance or its contribution to society. My observations forced me to think about factors that might encourage more com
panies to set positive examples.

My first experience of an oil field was on Salawati Island off the coast of
Indonesian New Guinea. The purpose of my visit there had nothing to do
with oil but was part of a survey of birds on islands of the New Guinea region; it merely happened that much of Salawati had been leased for oil
exploration to the Indonesian national oil company, Pertamina. I visited Salawati in 1986 with the permission and as a guest of Pertamina, whose
vice president and public relations officer kindly provided me with a vehicle
to drive along company roads.

In view of that kindness, I am sorry to report on the conditions that I
encountered. From a long distance, the field's location could be recognized

by a flame shooting out of a high tower, where natural gas obtained as a by
product of oil extraction was being burned off, there being nothing else to
do with it. (Facilities to liquefy and transport it for sale were lacking.) To
construct access roads through Salawati's forests, swathes 100 yards wide
had been cleared, much too wide for many species of New Guinea rainforest
mammals, birds, frogs, and reptiles to cross. There were numerous oil spills
on the ground. I encountered only three species of large fruit pigeons, of
which 14 have been recorded elsewhere on Salawati and which are among
the prime targets of hunters in the New Guinea region because they are
large, meaty, and good to eat. A Pertamina employee described to me the lo
cation of two pigeon breeding colonies, where he said that he hunted them with his shotgun. I assume that their numbers within the field had been de
pleted by hunting.

My second experience was of the Kutubu oil field that a subsidiary of the
large international oil company Chevron Corporation operated in the
Kikori River watershed of Papua New Guinea. (I shall refer to the operator
for short as "Chevron" in the present tense, but the actual operator was
Chevron Niugini Pty. Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Chevron Corpora
tion; the field was a joint venture of six oil companies, including Chevron
Niugini Pty. Ltd.; the parent company Chevron Corporation merged in
2001 with Texaco to become ChevronTexaco; and in 2003 ChevronTexaco
sold its interests in the joint venture, whose operator then became another
one of the partners, Oil Search Limited.) The environment in the Kikori
River watershed is sensitive and difficult to work in because of frequent
landslides, much limestone karst terrain, and one of the highest recorded
rainfalls in the world (on the average, 430 inches per year, and up to 14
inches per day). In 1993 Chevron engaged World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to
prepare a large-scale integrated conservation and development project for
the whole watershed. Chevron's expectation was that WWF would be effective at minimizing environmental damage, lobbying the Papua New Guinea
government for environmental protection, serving as a credible partner in the eyes of environmental activist groups, benefiting local communities
economically, and attracting World Bank funding for local community
projects. From 1998 to 2003 I made four visits of one month each to the oil
fields and watershed as a consultant to WWF. I was allowed freedom to
travel throughout the area in a WWF vehicle and to interview Chevron em
ployees privately.

As my airplane flight from Papua New Guinea's capital of Port Moresby droned on towards the field's main airstrip at Moro and was approaching its

scheduled arrival time, I looked out the airplane window for some signs of
the oil field infrastructure that I expected to see looming up. I became in
creasingly puzzled still to be seeing only an uninterrupted expanse of rainforest stretching between the horizons. Finally, I spotted a road, but it was
only a thin cleared line about 10 yards broad through the rainforest, in
many places overhung with trees growing on either side
—a birdwatcher's
dream. The main practical difficulty in rainforest bird studies is that it's
hard to see birds inside the forest itself, and the best opportunities to ob
serve them are from narrow trails where one can watch the forest from the
side. Here was such a trail over 100 miles long, from the highest oil field at
an altitude of nearly 6,000 feet on Mt. Moran down to the coast. On the following day, when I began walking along that pencil line of a road during my
surveys, I found birds routinely flying across it, and mammals, lizards,
snakes, and frogs hopping, running, or crawling across it. It turned out that
the road had been designed to be just broad enough for two vehicles to pass safely in opposite directions. Initially, the seismic exploration platforms and
exploration oil wells had been put in without construction of any access
roads at all, and had been serviced instead just by helicopter and on foot.

My next surprise came when my plane landed at Chevron's Moro airstrip, and again later when I flew out. Although I had already gone
through baggage inspection by the Papua New Guinea Customs Depart
ment upon my arrival in the country, on both arrival and departure at
Chevron's airstrip I had to open all my bags for further inspections more
thorough than on any other occasion I had experienced except when I flew
to Israel's Tel Aviv airport. What were those inspectors looking for? On the
flight in, the articles absolutely forbidden were firearms or hunting equipment of any sort, drugs, and alcohol; on the flight out, animals or plants or their feathers or parts that might be smuggled. Violation of those rules re
sults in immediate automatic expulsion from company premises, as a WWF
secretary innocently but foolishly carrying a package for someone else dis
covered to her misfortune (because the package turned out to contain drugs).

A further surprise came the next morning, after I had walked out on the
road before dawn to bird-watch and returned a few hours later. The camp
safety representative summoned me to his office and told me that I had al
ready been reported for two violations of Chevron regulations, which I was
not to repeat. First, I had been noticed stepping several feet out into the
roadway to observe a bird. That posed the hazard that a vehicle might hit
me, or that in swerving to avoid hitting me it might crash into an oil

pipeline at the side of the road and cause an oil spill. From now on, I should
please stay off the road while bird-watching. Second, I had been seen bird-watching while not wearing a protective helmet, but this whole area was a
hardhat area; at this point the officer gave me a hardhat, which I should
henceforth please wear for my own safety while bird-watching, e.g., in case
a tree fell.

That was an introduction to Chevron's extreme concern, constantly in
stilled in its employees, about safety and environmental protection. I have
never observed an oil spill on any of my four visits, but I do read the reports
posted each month on Chevron bulletin boards about incidents and near-
incidents, which are the concern of the safety representative who travels
around by plane or truck to investigate each. Out of interest, I recorded the
full list of 14 incidents from March 2003. The most serious near-incidents
requiring scrutiny and review of safety procedures in that month were that a truck backed into a stop sign, another truck was reported with its emer
gency brake improperly set, a package of chemicals lacked the correct
paperwork, and gas was found leaking from a compressor needle valve.

My remaining surprise came in the course of bird-watching. New
Guinea has many bird and mammal species whose presence and abundance are sensitive indicators of human disturbance, because they are either 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 par
rots (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 vis
ited 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