Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and Their Critics by Stuart Kirsch (review)

According to many international observers, the social and environmental impacts of the Ok Tedi mine, in Papua New Guinea, constitute one of the last decades' worst mining disasters. Since the mid-1980s, this large-scale copper and gold mine has discharged more than 2 billion metric tons of tailings, waste rock, and overburden into the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers, causing colossal environmental degradation downstream. Consequently, the 30,000 villagers living south of the mining site, who are highly dependent on access to natural resources, have been unable to pursue their traditional subsistence practices. At the turn of the 1990s, they initiated a long-running campaign against the operator of the mine (BHP Billiton for the most part), which was reduced in 2004 following an out-of-court settlement of their second lawsuit. Stuart Kirsch, professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and a leading figure in the anthropology of mining, has done over two decades of extensive research and advocacy with the Yonggom people, the Indigenous communities affected by the Ok Tedi mine. In Mining Capitalism, he takes the Ok Tedi mine case as an ethnographic context to examine the protesters' strategies of resistance against corporations and the corporations' strategies to reassert their legitimacy. To broaden the scope of his analysis, Kirsch addresses other mining conflicts and compares the way mining, tobacco, and pharmaceutical industries manage their relationship to the public.

The book reveals that the Ok Tedi mine case was one of the first conflicts between a mining company and communities to gain international prominence and participated in setting other important milestones. A prime example is how the Ok Tedi campaigners sought to hold BHP Billiton accountable for its international operations in its country of incorporation (Australia). This novel strategy led to a successful landmark settlement in 1996, in which the company committed to stop discharging tailings in the Ok Tedi and Fly Rivers. It also set a precedent for transnational legal proceedings as it showed that subsistence rights claims were analogous to more familiar claims based on the economic damage of property. Weighing the pros and cons of international tort claims, Kirsch concludes that whether or not they result in successful judgments to the plaintiffs, they have proven a valuable resource for communities as they put corporations on the defensive and tarnish their public profile.

Kirsch introduces several concepts of his own to make sense of the relationship between corporations and their critics, the flagship being the "politics of space" and the "politics of time." Typical of 1990s environmental activism, the politics of space refers to creating opposition through the use of geographically distributed resources. The Ok Tedi mine case reflects this strategy in the transnational alliances developed by a group of political activists, supported by European non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and international church groups to exert pressure on BHP and the state. The author notes that associating with international organisations provided valuable resources to local leaders and advanced their claims by raising the profile of their campaign. It also mobilised new political discourses in support for actions. Kirsch shows that, although the term Indigenous had not entered the vocabulary of most Yonggom speakers in the mid-1980s, the Yonggom integrated the discourse of Indigenous rights in their campaign following their encounters with people facing similar threats.

A major shortcoming is the time that it takes to address the problem after the fact. It takes too long to implement solutions to save the environment under attack. To counter these limitations, Kirsch indicates that critics of the mining industry increasingly use political strategies based on intervening earlier in the production cycle. He groups these strategies under the concept of a "politics of time." One of the main strategies of the politics of time is accelerating the learning curve of communities facing the prospect of a mining project. To this end, international networks of NGOs have been created to share information, coordinate responses with the mining industry, and apply...