Mining the St Paul’s Cathedral
Two Indians visiting St Paul’s Cathedral in London admire the stonework. Ripe for destruction, they conclude. A photoshopped ad in The Times shows a wrecking ball smashing St Paul’s up. That day, their friends at UK’s Action Aid filed a request to mine the holy cathedral.
This provocative prick to the British establishment is less outlandish than it sounds. The Indians came from their home province of Odisha, India to draw attention to a strikingly similar scenario unfolding there. A London-based mining company, Vedanta, wanted to lay waste to the Niyamgiri Hills to extract bauxite, the raw material for making aluminum. Yet these hills and their primeval forest cover are a sacred spot, home to a pantheon of local gods as well as vital water resources, food, medicine and fuel for the local population.1
The St Paul’s stunt was part of a 10-year struggle in which thousands of locals had unwillingly found themselves fighting on an increasingly common kind of frontline. Without a fight, forces foreign to them would have eliminated not just their holiest sanctuary, but the key resource in their existence. But they, like many other inspiring fighters celebrated in this book, stood up and gave it a bloody nose. Their struggle could have been the inspiration for the blockbuster movie Avatar, although there are literally thousands of such stories.
The Niyamgiri Hills story is a good place to start, given its richness in angles to view it. Financial giant Société Générale castigated Vedanta’s “aggressive plans and misplaced self-confidence” and slapped it down with an eye-watering $7 billion write down in value.2 The St Paul’s salvo even galvanized that bastion of the English establishment, the Church of England, into action. The church delivered a very temporal kind of smite afterwards, by selling up its Vedanta stock. In the end, Vedanta had to give up. Vedanta also lost another frontline battle in May 2018. Their plans to expand a copper smelter in the south of India ended in a closure. But the toll of that frontline was heavy: 22 years of resistance, scores of sick people, 100 days of street mobilization in a row and 13 deaths from police fire.3 Many of the struggles for environmental justice face repression and violence.
Coming back to the Niyamgiri hills it’s interesting to see precisely how little David won from Goliath. A foreign and attacking enemy united Indian indigenous people with the Hindu majority. A coalition of people emerged who normally live miles apart and who do not even speak each other’s language. But British anthropologist Felix Padel, who has been following the story for a long time and wrote a book about it, thinks there is a second lesson: “The Indians thought the forest was community-owned and that’s why it was impossible for Vedanta to buy pieces of it.” The company’s commonly used divide and rule strategy didn’t work. But a third reason is undeniable as well: cooperation between activists in India and supporters in London worked. The power of multinationals grows, but so does the power of multinational resistance.
Since 2011, I have been working with hundreds of academics and activists around the world to create an online atlas charting the environmental conflicts that together show that there is a global movement for environmental justice. This Environmental Justice Atlas now contains +-3000 conflicts. We all know even this is just the tip of the iceberg.4
What we also know is that these fires have been fueled by an economic policy that climbed to ascendency in the last half century. The conflicts shine a light on a dark underbelly of an economic worldview that applauds the infinite growth of mining, world trade, consumption and gross national product. This muscular beast came of age with the Thatcher-Reagan tandem and by 1989, political philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared that the free market had delivered us to the “end of history”. Our souls as well as our material needs were sated, or shortly would be. There would be no more upheaval in humanity’s long and rocky road to the good life. Not to the good society, because according to this world view, “there’s no such thing as society”. Then skyscrapers came crashing down in New York, the financial system went bang and the giddy orators sobered up. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump are surely signs that there are chapters in our history book still to be written, but the resurgence of nationalism and fascism is not the only rewrite that will be needed. I’m convinced that the +-3000 conflicts we have been charting around the world will play a part in that new chapter of humanity’s journey on planet earth. The causes of these conflicts remind us that the current political and economic animal is far from stable. To change it, nothing less than a revolution will do. All the signs are there that a revolution based on justice for all, including the natural world, is also brewing.
Visibility of the latter has not been helped by noisy voices who summon alternative facts to call for patriotism, nationalism and white supremacy. The task was already difficult, since the bonds that connect communities across the globe are complex. Our daily routines are irrevocably enmeshed with the ups and downs of rare earth mines in Congo, production lines in Chinese super factories, ebbs and flows within transcontinental gas pipelines and, head in hands, the capricious tweets of one Donald J. Trump.
But we should at least try to separate out the threads of this tangled knot. I will mine down to a seam of understanding, since it is only by understanding the depth of a problem that we can change it. But change also requires telling stories. No revolution ever came about without the stories that moved people into action. Most of our economy starts with mining, so that’s where I start my story. Mining is often where the planet butts up against the global economy in spectacular fashion. The second part of the book pulls a pincer movement to look at the other end of the economic pipeline: waste. The third part takes a step back from it all to look at the full picture of the staggering volumes that are passing through the economic pipeline from mine to landfill and to the macroeconomic myths that are busy pushing humanity’s journey on earth right towards the abyss. In sum, this book is a storytelling journey along a series of frontlines, a brief analysis of what fuels them and finally some words on what it will take to change course, away from the looming cliff. We sorely need a fairer economy that operates within planetary limits. Few are working harder on this than the well-known and less well-known resistance heroes whose personal histories are at the core of many of the stories in this book. In the fourth and final part, I shine a light on what could and should lead us to a brighter and longer-lasting chapter of the story of humanity on planet earth.
Who am I to take on this lofty challenge? I am an investigative journalist by training and a subjective journalist through experience. While facts are sacred, journalists are also mere humans and subject to the same process of pre-selection, filtering and coloring of their stories as everyone else. Just as Google’s search algorithm pre-selects the results I see according to my previous search history, so my upbringing, education and daily interaction with friends and family chain me in a peskily subjective worldview. Yes, I try to approach every story with an open mind and no story deserves this more than the subject of this book. Carl Bernstein’s mantra to “come as close as possible” to the truth will be my bumper sticker. But I equally mark the words of another hotshot journalist, Nick Davies: “Journalists do not have the task of letting each side speak in each story. Look, if source A says to you, the sun shines outside and source B says it’s raining outside, what are you going to do as a journalist? Give both versions equal space? That is not journalism. Journalism is to go out yourself and discover who of the two is right.” This book wants to do both. I seek truth and I believe that requires going outside, researching and finally choosing the side of those that are closer to the truth than others. I’m not going to waste my and your time on truth deniers. Truth is not the halfway point between a fact and an alternative fact.
This book is not about me so you don’t need to know much more about me. Maybe just this: my academic background with masters in both geography and conflict studies as well as my 2 years living and working outside the bubble of Western society prepared me for embarking on the 10- year journey that has led to this book.
Nick Meynen