Gerry van Klinken
The Limits to Growth report by the Club of Rome in 1972 shocked the world with a ‘business as usual’ graph projecting apocalyptic collapse some time in the 21st century. An inability or refusal to stop exponentially rising per capita consumption caused pollution to shoot up and resources to plummet to the point of no return.
Signs of that nightmarish reality have actually been visible at every mine site around the world now for some time. With ‘easy’ high-grade mines long gone, far from stopping to think what they are doing, miners are pushing along bigger and dirtier mines in poorly managed frontier regions.
Few in the rich global North look interested in stopping them. People there feel they ‘need’ all those metals to sustain their lifestyles - even more so now that they have to decarbonise with the aid of rare-earth-rich windmills and electric cars. So who can stop the depredation of the mines? Looks like resistance is all down to Mother Earth herself, and to the humans who call those mine sites home. Lian Sinclair’s book is about the fight those humans are putting up – on behalf of themselves, their descendants, and their environments. Three in-depth Indonesian case studies examine what they have done, how those enabling the mine have responded to them, and what this portends for the future of mining around the world.
Most of them are peasants living subsistence lives. Some are small-scale miners – whose presence showed the mining giants where the good ore was. Many are women, made fearless by the harm they see being done to those dear to them. None sit on company boards; none in parliaments or government offices; none have private armies.
Turns out they can be remarkably effective. Rio Tinto’s Kelian gold mine in East Kalimantan was one of the largest in the world. With the help of Suharto’s New Order military, the company pushed 4,000 small-scale miners and their families off the area in the late 1980s. The evicted artisinal miners were resettled downstream along the Kelian River, where they were exposed to the mine’s cyanide-laced effluents in the water. A decade later they still felt cheated out of compensation. When the New Order collapsed amid popular protests in 1998, they seized the opportunity to organise. They blockaded the mine for two months in the year 2000, costing the company at least US$12.5 million in lost revenue. As they built alliances beyond the mine site, their protests found supporters around the world.
Similar internationalisation of community protest at other extractive sites – from the Nigerian oil delta to Papua New Guinea’s Ok Tedi – began about this time to focus the minds of mining company executives around the world. They feared they would lose court battles for massive compensation, and that governments would regulate what they could do at their mine sites. They began talking publicly about having learned the importance of earning their ‘social licence to operate.’ The Kelian mining company was among the first to start negotiating through more ‘participatory’ consultative mechanisms. Many of those evicted accepted substantial compensation packages as part of these new mechanisms.
The Gosowong gold mine in northern Halmahera – the book’s second case study - was part-owned by Australian miner Newcrest. It started operating in 1999, and adopted the same ‘corporate social responsibility’ mechanisms that Kelian and others had pioneered earlier. Here the mine did not have to evict people – it opened in a sparsely inhabited protected forest (after lobbying to bend environmental rules). But locals living downstream protested about water pollution. Cyanide was indeed found in the seawater at the river mouth. The company had learned from the mistakes of others. Rather than bring in the police, it implemented a range of mechanisms by which people could lodge complaints. It was also quick to make concessions in response to demonstrations.
The thing is – Lian Sinclair demonstrates this convincingly – these consultative mechanisms didn’t do anything to reign in the damage the miners were inflicting on their social and ecological environments. The principles that various meetings of mining company executives had agreed to act upon, she writes:
are voluntary, unenforceable, vague, focused on process, neglect measurable outcomes, and have little independent reporting or monitoring requirements, allowing great flexibility for individual corporations in their implementation.
The Gosowong mine owners never felt compelled to release their own environmental monitoring to the public – the cyanide study was done by independent academics from outside. The grievance mechanisms this and similar companies operated dealt only with individual problems. But:
while the grievance process produced interesting scientific data, the technocratic framework meant that social, political and ethical dimensions of conflict were ignored. However, the data produced through investigations into grievances can be used by actors in other sites of political participation.
The only thing that did work, Sinclair demonstrates, was militant, direct action by locals, who moreover had access to their own subsistence land. In the case of Gosowong, that took the form of repeated demonstrations led by a customary leader, a woman named Afrida, acting completely outside the consultative framework set up by the company (and which was supported by the United Nations program UNDP-LEAD). That is what won residents their compensation, not the institutionalised company processes.
The best example of successful resistance is seen in the third case study. This concerns a proposed iron sands operation in Kulon Progo, on the beach facing the Indian Ocean within the province of Yogyakarta. The Indonesian consortium that put it forward was led by two royal families - Hamengku Buwono and Paku Alam. Mining the sand dunes behind the beach would have yielded two million tonnes of pig iron concentrate a year for 18.5 years – to be refined elsewhere in Indonesia.
There were people living there. They were not wealthy – they grew chillies and melons in the rather dry coastal sand. They were not well-connected, and had no history of political organising. But in 2007 they began setting up roadblocks, holding parades and demonstrations. To do this they had to overcome deeply ingrained cultural deference towards the sultan, whom many credit with divine qualities. In the end, they rejected the royals because they came to believe that ‘it was the sultan and Paku Alam who first betrayed Javanese tradition to capitalism’ (p154). These direct actions have so far kept the miners out. The peasants did this without international assistance. The company offered them CSR mechanisms, but they rejected them.
John Bellamy Foster et al in their book The ecological rift (2010) suggest that ‘post-materialist’ urban activists in the rich North delude themselves who think they are the only obstacle in the way of this destructive juggernaut. They point instead to what they call an ‘environmental proletariat’ (p440). This emerges wherever the capitalist system damages the environment and simultaneously harms the people who live and work there.
The inhabitants of these places, as in the case of Marx’s proletariat, have nothing to lose from the radical changes necessary to avert (or adapt to) disaster.
An environmental proletariat might be exactly what these Kulon Progo peasants are. They might in the end do more to save the planet than anyone else. They do it for us, as much as for themselves. One of them said it just right:
People must take care of the environment and then the environment will take care of them, protect their life. It is like a mutual connection. So, they understand if somebody wants to take the land or build something or change the function, it will destroy everything.
Lian Sinclair. 2024. Undermining resistance: The governance of participation by multinational mining corporations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Gerry van Klinken (gvanklinken@gmail.com) is a member of the board of Inside Indonesia. He lives in Brisbane.
