Q & A: The Big Dig

An interview with Robert Moran

In his nearly 40-year career as a hydrogeologist and geochemist, Robert Moran has crisscrossed the globe studying the impact of mining on water, both below and above ground. For the past dozen years, he's worked as a consultant for nonprofits in diverse places such as Romania, Peru, and Kyrgyzstan, helping local communities understand the realities of metal mining. Until late 2008 the industry was booming amid what PricewaterhouseCoopers called an "unparalleled period of soaring commodity prices and economic growth." The global recession put a halt to that -- but it could be temporary. Once the economy picks up, fast-developing nations like China will be "looking for metals anywhere they can get them," as Moran puts it -- which generally means in less developed countries, where lack of oversight could wreak environmental havoc. Hillary Rosner spoke to Moran at his home on Lookout Mountain, Colorado.

Give me a quick overview of the mining industry today.

It's huge. I don't pretend to know the number of companies involved, but it must be in the thousands. In general, it's the smaller ones that are the least careful about environmental and socioeconomic concerns. Often they don't care; often they fly under the radar; often they don't have the resources. The big publicly traded international companies have to report to their stockholders. If I had to generalize, I'd say they were much better than the smaller companies.

You used to consult for big mining companies, and now you're consulting for the nonprofits fighting against them. How did that happen?

It's a kind of natural progression you see in a lot of scientists. As you mature, you look a bit more carefully at the consequences of what you're doing. When I said controversial things about projects I was working on, the companies would put them in reports and lock them in a safe somewhere, and they'd never see the light of day. I got tired of that. It was clear that the public-interest side was being outgunned time after time. So I did make a conscious effort to switch sides.

You're working on a project right now in Guatemala. Tell me a bit about that.

It's called the Marlin mine. It's a gold and silver mine in the western highlands of Guatemala that a lot of the local people have opposed. There's a good chance that the project would contaminate their water and that their springs would dry up, and they feel as if they haven't been consulted.

I read that one local opponent of the project was just killed.

Sadly, such things do happen when companies operate without restraints from host government agencies, when they don't bother to work out some sort of give-and-take with the citizens. The violence isn't all on one side; citizens who feel they are outgunned may also resort to violence. But it's the companies that have all the assets and all the power.

And think they're above the law?

For thousands of years metals have had two basic uses: as weapons and as money. That means they have an automatic connection to central governments and automatic protection. Mining companies have always felt able to walk into the prime minister or whomever and say, look, we want to do such and such. And regardless of what the rules may say, they've done it. The level of corruption is phenomenal. In the majority of countries in the developing world there really isn't effective oversight. Several times in Latin America I've asked knowledgeable audiences what the word for "enforcement" is and the room goes silent.

There seems to be a clear correlation between mining and poverty.

Yes, most metal mining occurs in developing countries. And even in the United States mining has always been concentrated in states and regions with some of the lowest levels of economic development: rural Idaho, rural Montana, rural Arizona. There are almost no mines being opened in highly developed parts of the United States or Western Europe. Companies just can't get approval any more.

Why is that?

Think of the Kennecott copper operations in Salt Lake City. Those mines have caused some of the most extensive groundwater contamination I've seen anywhere in the world. But eventually the state and the Environmental Protection Agency brought lots of legal actions and forced Kennecott to build water treatment plants and supply alternative water sources for the Salt Lake suburbs. It's cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. No company wants to take on that kind of liability. So that's one reason corporations look more and more to the developing world.

Isn't it depressing, constantly being the little guy in these fights?

It can be, but there's a perverse side of me that enjoys provoking the corporations and the regulators. I use the metaphor of opening the box. The flow of information is almost totally controlled by the mining industry. So part of my role is to help people see what the main questions are, get the dialogue going. It's not to tell people that they should or shouldn't mine. I've worked with indigenous groups who often don't have a lot of choice. They're really poor, so they want a mining project to go forward because they want the jobs -- they just want to minimize the impacts. It's never going to be perfect. But once we open the box, it's up to the local citizens to decide whether the consequences are acceptable.

Once people have that information, can it change the outcome?

I'm working now in Alaska with a broad coalition of commercial fishermen, environmentalists, NGOs, and university staff, who are opposing the development of a huge copper-gold-molybdenum mine in the headwaters of the largest remaining wild-salmon fishery in the world, above Bristol Bay. Most of the company data have been kept secret. Or the company drags its feet and releases part of it or partitions it into so many tiny pieces that no human could ever make sense of it. But the people I'm working with are well organized and almost well enough funded that they can make the issues public and change the dynamic.

We hear a lot these days about a growing world water crisis. How is mining related to that?

In much of the world, companies are given access to water for their industrial processes free of charge. They may pay for pipelines and so on, but the commodity, the water itself, has no cost. That will have to change. Water should be controlled as a collective resource, not as private property, and societies are going to have to put a true market price on the industrial use of water that factors in the real cost of its depletion and contamination.

I've heard you're also looking at the impact of mining on the oceans.

Last November I was in Papua New Guinea talking about a proposed metal mining project, promoted by the European Union, that would dump waste into the ocean in an area that contains some of the best reefs in the world. You can get around the problem of the local impact if you build a long pipeline and dispose of the waste in deep water. On land, you can go in and physically see the effects, take samples. But in this case, you may be 3,000 feet under the surface. The cost and difficulty of monitoring in that setting are phenomenal. So I think that's a trend we're going to see: more ocean dumping. And also a lot more ocean-bed mining in international waters, where there really isn't any agreement about who the governing bodies are.

A lot of what you've said seems to revolve around the idea of lawlessness. Aren't you concerned for your own safety?

Yes, I've become more and more wary. I require my clients to have some security measures. That doesn't necessarily mean we have bodyguards, although sometimes we do. I don't travel by myself anywhere. I don't stay in hotels that make me vulnerable. I once had my computer stolen in Peru; it was clear they were after the hard drive. My work has been involved in getting several multimillion dollar projects shut down, so I'd be a fool if I didn't take it seriously.