It is generally agreed that the legislation is intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide and methane.  However, given the big global polluters including China have no intensions of signing up to such a scheme, it is also generally agreed that an Australian emissions trading scheme will have no significant impact on global emissions or global temperatures. 

But in terms of economics how big will the impact be and what will the flow on effect be in terms of Australian industries and as a consequence the Australian environment.

Very large tracts of Australia support a cattle industry.  The government intends to include agriculture in the scheme down-the-track and Senator Barnaby Joyce, Leader of the Nationals in the Senate, claims that taxing methane emissions from cattle will effectively make beef too expensive.  He has claimed a prime cut roast will end up costing upwards of A$100.

Many would argue that the end of the cattle industry in Australia would be a good thing for the environment.   Indeed Ross Garnaut, a key advisor to the government on climate change, suggested in his final report on climate change that the nation’s farmers should switch to kangaroo and this would have multiple environmental benefits additional to reducing emissions.   But instead of switching to kangaroos, it is perhaps more likely that beef producers in moderate rainfall zones will plant trees to defray their costs.  This is what a reader of this weblog, Luke Walker, has suggested and furthermore he claims that trees in large numbers will impact significantly on catchment hydrology resulting in reduced water yields.

Another industry likely to be affected by the proposed legislation is mining.   While mining has arguably a less diffuse impact on the immediate landscape than either agriculture or forestry it never-the-less impacts.   There is currently a battle between farmers and miners on the Liverpool Plains of northern central NSW as farmers worry about the impact of proposed new coal mines in particularly on their aquifers.      

In short, is an ETS likely to be beneficial for Australia’s natural environment, not because it will reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide, but because it will result in the closure of many Australian primary industries and extractive industries?

***********

The picture is of a young blue gum plantation in western Victoria taken by Jennifer Marohasy on a cold day in November 2006.

Eric Ness was writing about yet another court ruling vindicating his father, Richard Ness, and American gold mining giant Newmont of any wrong doing at his blog www.richardness.org.

Eric wrote, “This verdict resonates perfectly with the ruling in the criminal case by the Manado High Court, thereby reaffirming once again that Buyat Bay is clean.

“While the latest verdict brings one more chapter of the Buyat Bay hoax to an end, it should mark the beginning of serious soul-searching for WALHI [the Indonesian affiliate of Friends of the Earth]. Most importantly, it raises questions about Chalid Mohammed and his leadership of WALHI.

“By now it is commonly known that Newmont followed all the regulations and there are irrefutable scientific facts that show that Buyat Bay is clean. Prominent evidence that supported these conclusions included Government of Indonesia’s own reports and testimonies as well as the findings of researchers from the World Health Organization, CSIRO-Australia and other academicians from Indonesia’s universities.

“So it was not very surprising when Judge I Ketut Manika stated in court, “The plaintiff could not prove its accusations that there was environmental pollution caused by PT Newmont Minahasa Raya in Buyat Bay”.

Read more here:
http://richardness.org/blog/walhilosescivilcaseagainstnewmont.php

Also in late December 2007 Richard Ness retired from Newmont.

Earlier this month, Eric sent out an email, explaining that “with my Dads retirement from Newmont and the case is essentially done, I am looking to conclude updating richardness.org. I am writing a paper to gain additional insight in to how effective the web site was in getting my family’s message out, how blogs work and their network effect. I’m also very interested in how many in the press actually used the site.

I have set up a quick poll with only four questions in it and if you could take a minute to fill out the survey that would greatly be appreciated. It is completely anonymous and I would be willing to share the details of the results if anyone is interested.

Take the survey:
http://www.richardness.org/link.php?link=11&id=69

Read more about Buyat Bay here: http://www.buyatbayfacts.com/

Read many of my blog posts here: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/cat_mining.html

I first started writing about the saga in November 2005, read my first blog post here: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001007.html

I visted Indonesia to hear the verdict in the criminal trial in April 2007

Jen snorkling at Buyat Bay, April 2007

The Indonesian government has since refused to give me a visa to visit Indonesia to continue research for my book about the saga. I had hoped to visit in June 2007, then November 2007 and I have now given up trying and recently asked for my passport back from the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra.

But I will nevertheless complete my book and use http:www.richardness.org as a handy link to so much information including the english transcript of the final verdict in the criminal trial, click here: http://www.richardness.org/media/Verdict_Transcript%20of%20Hearing%2024%20April%202007.pdf

So, thanks so much Eric Ness!

I attended the verdict in the criminal trial of Mr Ness earlier this year. He was acquitted of all charges.

National environment group WALHI brought a civil suit against Newmont about a month before that verdict was due to be handed down. On Tuesday December 18, 2007 the South Jakarta District Court of Indonesia cleared Newmont of any environmental wrongdoing at Buyat Bay, dismissing the civil suit. A spokesperson for Newmont commented that, “We hope this second exoneration by yet another Indonesian court will put to rest – once and for all – the hoax that Buyat Bay is polluted.”

An opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal included comment that, “Accusations against business folks these days get a lot more publicity than acquittals do, so we thought we’d let you know about a victory for a U.S. mining company facing bogus charges that it was responsible for killing poor villagers in Indonesia. The case was promoted by environmentalists and hyped with a 2,600-word page-one article in the New York Times in 2004.”

The same week Newmont was cleared in Jakarta, Rick Ness announced his retirement. My best wishes to Rick and Nova for life after Newmont.

You can read more about the Buyat Bay Saga at his son Eric’s website: http://www.richardness.org.

Richard Ness, an executive with US mining giant Newmont, sued the newspaper and one of its reporters for more than 64 million dollars for defamation over articles published in 2004.

The stories alleged Newmont polluted the bay with tonnes of waste from its now-defunct gold mine on the island of Sulawesi.

A three-judge panel said the Central Jakarta state court “does not have the authority to hear and judge this case,” according to Gani Djemat and Partners, the law firm representing the defendants…

The defence argued that the journalist was not an Indonesian national or a resident here, that The New York Times did not have a representative office in Indonesia and that it did not commit the alleged defamation in the country.

Read more here: http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5imv8JHIGm6TK1Ky9bZZM-wI8nQXQ

There is a lot about the alleged pollution of Buyat Bay in the archives of this blog, click here and scroll down: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/cat_mining.html

The press release stated:

National environmental organisation, Friends of the Earth (FoE) Australia, has responded angrily to a statement made in the Senate by Ian Macdonald implying that its sister organisation, WALHI/ Friends of the Earth Indonesia is linked to terrorists.

“Today’s statement by Senator Macdonald is scandalously and recklessly incorrect” said Cam Walker, FoE Australia.

Senator Ian Macdonald earlier that day on the Senate floor stated the following:

Interestingly, WALHI appears to have now been joined by radical Islamic groups in its campaign against the US mining giant, Newmont. A photograph— which I could perhaps table if the Senate were interested—recently featured in the Indonesian press shows Abu Bakar Bashir, the spiritual leader of Jemaah Islamiah, flanked by Muhammad Al Khaththah, the leader of the Indonesian chapter of Hizb ut-Tahrir, attacking Newmont’s environmental record.

I also note an article from the Straits Times of 22 April 2006 which states:

The head of Walhi [Chalid Muhammad], the main environmental group, is also a member of Hizbut Tahrir, a hardline Muslim group which emerged over the past year, and which has been famously described as being a ‘conveyor belt for terrorists’. Although the group claims to be non-violent, the Walhi chairman took part in recent violent demonstrations outside the US embassy, wearing full Islamic robes.

Please read the rest of the blog post by Eric Ness here which includes a letter from Richard Ness to Friends of the Earth:

http://www.richardness.org/link.php?link=9&id=69

As Roger Underwood recently explained, bauxite mining causes total removal of all organisms from large tracts of the forest and removal of several metres of soil (bauxite ore), material that is the foundation upon which a forest exists. This is followed by re-establishment of the forest back onto the irreversibly altered soil profile. The changes that are imposed by mining are permanent in terms of geological time scales – these soils/ores were formed on-site by many millions of years of weathering of the underlying granite basement rock. Roger’s post gives additional important information.

Logging on the other hand is a short period of harvesting that occurs within a process that takes many decades: the forest is regenerated, managed by thinning, controlled burning and other practices, leading to the maturing of the overstorey trees over a period of between one and several human generations. Harvesting occurs again, followed by the same regeneration and management process. Many Australian native forests have been through two or three such cycles, yet they are now considered “high conservation value” forests by the greens and the public.

Harvesting may be either clear felling at one extreme to selective (individual tree) logging at the other, and there is a continuous spectrum of logging practices between the extremes. But most importantly, the soil is left almost undisturbed compared to mining, and the understory is not stripped away. No species has been recorded as having been driven to extinction by logging in Australia, though this is not a reason to be complacent. It does indicate that the commercial use of native Australian forests since European settlement has had less impact upon biodiversity than urban expansion or farming, or indeed the first arrival of humans tens of thousands of years ago.

Possibly the paradox arises because of three factors and our normal emotional responses to these factors. They are our perception of order versus chaos, a sense of time, and a sense of space.

Order versus chaos

Order and chaos are easy to recognise. In this context, logging is chaotic. The jumble of smashed limbs and small trees presents a confronting image. Furthermore, as timber has a relatively low economic value and the yields per hectare are relatively low, the logging debris is left in place for a year or so and then burnt (more chaos), which means that chaos interacts with time to create the impression of lasting destruction. There is plenty of time for Bob Brown to get up on top of the biggest stump (“big” being related to our sense of space) for photo opportunities.

In contrast mining demonstrates a good deal of order. After logging, the debris, stumps, and all the understorey is heaped and mulched and removed promptly. Access to the entire mining “envelope” is prohibited for safety reasons. Some of this biomass debris is sold for renewable energy and charcoal, whereas native forest logging residues from normal logging are ruled to be non-renewable. This is known as “painting with the Alcoa brush”, because this is all it takes to change a commodity from dirty and undesirable to green and renewable. This simple self-deception occurs at senior corporate and political levels, as well as at the general public level. I maintain that it makes more sense to consider all the biomass residues from logging and mining to be renewable, as occurs across Europe and North America.

The sense of order in mining continues because after the removal of the biomass residues the open mine area looks like a ploughed paddock. The boundary of the surrounding forest is clearly and cleanly defined and looking into a tall forest from the side is an emotionally pleasant experience. As the site is stripped, drilled, blasted and the ore removed, there is little confronting imagery of chaos, though many people find the instant of blasting very confronting if they can see it. By the time the public are allowed back (after the mining envelope moves away through the bush) the pit has been rehabilitated and order continues to reign – smoothed contours, curved parallel rip lines, young plants germinating under-foot. It’s a positively pastoral image.

The importance of time comes up in several ways. During the time of public exclusion from a mining envelope, the public is unaware of the time passing for this particular point in the forest. A tour of Alcoa’s operations takes you from one point in the process to the next by bus: this step is followed by this step, by this step etc, and then … here is the rehabilitated pit. The emotional response of the viewer is influenced by the rapidity of the tour. You’re back home in time for tea. The same occurs if foresters take you on a tour of forest operations, but the demand for such tours is non-existent. The public do not wish to be further informed about commercial forestry and the political arm of government would be reluctant to fund such public relations exercises for an industry that the public tells them should be closed down.

In contrast, the campaigns against forestry always leave the observer with the impression that this smashed up post-logging condition is the end result, rather than the end of one week’s work in a cycle that spans many decades. You are never shown photos of the stump Bob Brown stood on ten years after the logging, because the regrowth at that stage is so thick, it would tend to detract from the message of “devastation, forever”. Bob wouldn’t even be able to find the same stump.

A sense of time

Time can also be influential in other ways; telling people that the devastation in this photo will look like the young forest in that tourist brochure in three decades has little emotional impact. A trivial immediate benefit is of much greater emotional consequence than a major benefit in the next decade. So long periods of time can make it harder to portray the concept of an environmental impact now (logging) being followed by a positive response a human generation in the future.

It is interesting how green activism often involves the use of photos taken in regrowth forest. In this case, the beauty of the tall evenly-spaced trees (the sense of order again, but did you realise they are spaced that way because of thinning?) is used to convey the impression of permanence, and the permanence of a good thing being desirable. Senescing forest, with it’s dead tops and crooked old trees, is rarely used for this type of publicity, because to do so would disrupt the sense of order and implies decay, and so undermines the association between the attractive forest and permanence. However if you take people to that same patch of regrowth forest and show them a photo of what the exact same spot looked like immediately after it was last logged, or killed by wildfire, they are astounded and often excited. In this case it is possible to use a long period of time from the past devastation to convey the understanding that the forest is a vibrant dynamic system. I find young forests uplifting.

A sense of space

Space is critical. Big is always better in emotional terms if you are contemplating an object of which you approve, but the reverse applies if you are contemplating something of which you disapprove. (If you want to minimise the effect of a traumatic memory, you repeatedly visualise it and then make the image smaller in your mind.) A tall dominant tree species is generally much more emotionally influential than a dumpy sub-dominant species. A tall straight tree is more valuable than a crooked or heavily forked tree, which comes back to the sense of order and possibly the perception of beauty being related to symmetry.

Selective, or single-tree logging is widely perceived to be more benign than clear-felling, because the area of chaos is smaller. The small clearing created by the tree’s falling crown is surrounded by undisturbed forest. The big stump used for the anti-logging photo opportunity is always taken against a background of an open space caused by clear felling, and that space always continues to the local horizon, which creates the impression that this chaos extends, if not to the nearest coastline, certainly as far as the eye can see. A short camera lens is used and the image cropped to convey the impression of perhaps a thousand metres to the cleared horizon. It is never taken with the 50 year old regrowth just behind the photographer in the shot.

But this use of space to engender a feeling of anxiety about total destruction over vast tracts of land may be at odds with the evidence of forest science. In some forests (typically the tall wet forest types in Australia) it is better to regenerate blocks of forest as even aged self-sown seedlings over areas of perhaps 10 to 30 hectares to reduce competition between established trees and seedlings. And 10 hectares, photographed from the right angle with a short lens, carries a strong emotional impact. The data that demonstrates the degrading influence of selective logging in some forests has no appeal at the emotional level.

It is a curious contrast between public and activist reactions to logging and mining. Examining the basic differences in perceptions of logging and mining, for example, the perceptions of space, time and order/chaos, demonstrate that the emotional responses to logging are not related to the fundamentals of conservation.

In the context of this discussion, none of these factors directly relate to the fundamental principle of conservation of protecting biodiversity. To prevent the extinction of any species seems to me to be the inviolable principle of conservation. If we were really honest with ourselves, then our emotional responses to these three factors would have little relevance to the preservation of biodiversity.

Boxer is a regular reader and sometimes contributor to this blog.

Open cut mining of State Forests in Western Australia by two alumina producers (Alcoa and Worseley) has been going on for about 40 years. Mining involves clean cutting of the forest (removal of all saleable timber, including woodchips), full agricultural clearing, blasting with explosives and then removal of the forest soil. This converts the jarrah forest into a patchwork of pits 8-10 metres deep and up to 40 hectares in size. In and around the pits the remnant forest is criss-crossed with haul roads, crusher sites, conveyor belts and power lines. The rate of forest clearance is about 1000 hectares a year. It is estimated that mining will proceed for at least another 50 years.

The mined-out pits are “rehabilitated” by smoothing the edges, ripping the pit floor (a white kaolinitic clay) with bulldozers and replacing a film of topsoil. Various tree and shrub species are then sown or planted. Pre-1988 the revegetation was basically a plantation of exotic species, mostly eucalypts indigenous to NSW; post 1988 the main tree species planted or sown is jarrah.

Jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata) is a tall long-lived tree noted for its superb timber, toughness and resilience. It grows in a relatively harsh environment of long dry summers, frequent fire, and infertile soils. Jarrah occurs only in a restricted area in the southwest of Western Australia. Most of the northern jarrah forest is also an important water resource area and protects the city and goldfields water supply catchments. It also provides important habitat to native species, a range of recreational activities and is famous for its springtime display of endemic wildflowers. Jarrah timber played an important role in the development of Western Australia. It was used almost exclusively in the construction of the State’s harbours, bridges and railways, for telephone and electricity distribution, for house and building construction, for fine furniture manufacture and domestic and industrial firewood. For many decades it was the State’s third most valuable export (after wheat and wool) and was regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful, as well as strongest and most durable timbers.

In a biogeographical and ecological sense, the jarrah forest is virtually an island. It falls within the Australian south-west botanical province, known as a biodiversity hotspot – most jarrah forest can carry 60 or more different species of plants in the understorey – and is home to a unique fauna. To the west of the forest belt is the coastal sandplain, these days increasingly becoming one large residential subdivision. To the north and east are the cleared agricultural regions and to the south the narrow strip of karri forest and the Southern Ocean. The forests were traditionally managed for water production, catchment protection, sustainable timber production, wildlife conservation and recreation. In more recent times the management priority has been designated simply as “conservation of biodiversity”, but as we shall see, this is subservient to minerals production. The jarrah timber industry scarcely now exists. This has been virtually extinguished over the last 5 years as logging became a politically unacceptable activity in the state’s forests. The few small timber production operations remaining are all based on regrowth forests, where they are under constant challenge from protest groups whose aim is the total elimination of the industry.

Jarrah forest soils are lateritic and contain bauxite. This is the ore from which alumina and ultimately aluminium is produced. In the 1960s, the State government issued leases for bauxite mining over 800,000 hectares of jarrah forest, and put in place State Agreement Acts which guaranteed easy access to the leaseholders. Mining commenced in the forest in the mid-1960s and expanded rapidly. At first there was a single mine near Jarrahdale. The ore was railed to a refinery at Kwinana. Before long a new refinery had been built near Pinjarra and new mines were opened up at Del Park and Huntly on the banks of the South Dandalup dam (part of Perth’s water supply). By the early 1980s there was a third refinery at Wagerup, a new mine in State Forests south of the Murray River, another mine at Mt Saddleback and a fourth refinery near Collie. As recently as 2006 the WA Environmental Protection Authority approved a further expansion of the rate of mining for the Wagerup refinery, and there are current moves by the State government to expand the rate of mining for the Worsely refinery, so that it is likely that the annual rate of forest destruction will soon exceed 1000 ha.

There was some initial opposition to the forest mining, mainly from foresters, including a campaign run by the Institute of Foresters in the 1960s. The Institute produced an excellent booklet, detailing the undesirable impacts of mining on the forest ecosystem. However, these protests were quickly snuffed out, the problem being that most foresters at that time were also public servants, and it was illegal for them to criticise government policy, even as members of their professional institute. The “conservation movement” showed an initial flicker of interest, but this died away almost immediately. At that time and ever since, the focus of environmentalists was on the timber industry, bushfire management and forestry. Over the last 40 years, there has not been a peep of protest from any green organisation in WA (government or NGO) about bauxite mining.

In this light, it is worth looking at the mining operation in more detail. Mining eliminates the entire forest ecosystem both above and below ground. Following clearing no native plant or animal survives. Following mining the forest soil itself is irreplaceably gone. The natural landscape is greatly altered, since the best bauxite deposits are on the gravely uplands, and these disappear, leading to a landscape with less topographical variation. The post-mining revegetation is sown into well-cultivated and fertilised topsoil and comes away rapidly. Visually it resembles even-aged regeneration after clearfelling or in the gaps created by selective logging (the latter being the normal silvicultural approach in jarrah forest).

There are many concerns however. No experienced forester would guarantee the long term viability of dense forest stands growing on a film of topsoil over highly impermeable clay and granite. Jarrah prefers deep friable gravels with excellent water-holding capacity. Where thin, heavy soils occur in the natural forest, jarrah tends to be replaced by wandoo and on shallow soils over granite it is more common to find sheoak. The oldest minesite rehabilitation is now about 40. Some of these stands have started to look very sick as the present period of below-average rainfall persists. Ecologically, the revegetation is very different from the original forest, and some obvious niches have been eliminated. For example no “habitat” trees are retained to provide for hollow-nesting bird species, as is the case in areas from which timber is cut. Some “old growth” elements, such as grass trees, will take centuries to re-establish, or may never regrow on the new substrate.

Apart from the loss of native forest, there has been a significant loss of run-off into streams and dams in the mined-over catchment areas. Pits have been designed to retain rather than shed rainfall, so run-off to forest streams is close to zero, and in many cases old mine pits cover nearly 50% of each sub-catchment. This has obvious impacts on water resources and aquatic ecosystems. The revegetated mine pits also represent a challenge to bushfire management. Although the young rehabilitation (up to about age 4) will generally not carry a fire, litter and flammable understorey soon begin to build up and the new plantations are extremely hazardous and vulnerable to fire over the next 10 years.

There are other environmental concerns. Alumina refineries produce toxic waste (soil contaminated with caustic soda) and both the refineries and aluminium smelters are significant consumers of electricity and emitters of greenhouse gasses. Bauxite miners are exempt from the requirements of both the State’s Wildlife Conservation Act and the Clearing Control Legislation. These Acts can severely constrain landowners who wish to carry out commercial timber production in their own native forest, or to undertake prescribed burning for bushfire remediation (which the government includes within the definition of “clearing”).

Given their fierce opposition to the comparatively benign and ephemeral impacts of timber cutting and prescribed burning, it might be expected that environmentalists and green bureaucrats would be dying in their boots to oppose and hamstring bauxite mining in the jarrah forest. This has not occurred. For over 30 years the alumina industry has enjoyed total freedom from green displeasure and support from conservation bodies – including the Environmental Protection Authority. None of the standard features of a protest campaign against logging, for example, have ever been seen. There are no protest camps in the bush. No students or yuppy celebrities are chained to trees. Mining equipment has not been vandalised, ore trains have not been derailed, haul roads blockaded or port facilities bombed (all features of the campaign against woodchipping). There are there no marches on parliament, no orchestrated campaigns of letters to the paper and call-ins to the talk-back stations. Senator Bob Brown does not appear to have voiced the merest concern. The WA Greens Party has no policy about bauxite mining in the jarrah forest. They seek to prohibit mining and exploration in national parks, wilderness areas and conservation reserves, but do not extend this policy to State Forests. Nor has Janet Woollard (who was elected to the WA Parliament representing a Save-the-Forests party) taken any position on bauxite mining in the jarrah forest. Even the ABC’s Four Corners has shown no interest. Normally they would find irresistible a story about destruction of Australian forests by big business, especially in an industry which is such a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and is American-owned. Instead they are down in Tasmania fulminating against timber production and plantations.

I am not anti-mining. However as a forester I wish the alumina industry would go elsewhere. Nor am I anti-Alcoa. I have always found them to be an efficient and clever organisation, and it is a pleasure to see the professional way in which they have approached their operational and research obligations. They have poured multi-millions of dollars into the WA community over the years, including generous donations to conservation groups, cash payments to government departments, grants to sporting bodies, sponsorship of the arts, dispensing free tree seedlings to farmers and funding academics in the universities.

The uncritical and universal acceptance of bauxite mining in the jarrah forest is disappointing, but not difficult to understand. The government clearly believes that the economic returns from bauxite mining and alumina refining justify the impact on the forest and other forest uses. The broader community has no understanding of what is going on, since the media is silent, and in any case there has never been any public affection for the jarrah forest in the way there has been for the more visually attractive karri forest.

There are two possible reasons why the environmentalists have chosen not to fight bauxite mining: (i) they have been bought off; or (ii) they have decided that it is a battle they cannot win. The latter is the most likely. The alumina industry well-established and prosperous, is fully supported by government agencies, and has a superb public relations machine. The environmentalists would be done over, and they know it. It would be different if 1000 ha of native forest each year were being destroyed for cattle grazing, timber plantations, or water resource development, all of which are easy targets – any protest campaign against them would attract strong media support, especially from the ABC.

Despite environmentalist and community apathy, my personal view is that there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when West Australians realise what has gone on, and the extent and cost of the ecological damage which has occurred. Then perhaps they will look back on the government, agency and NGO-supported destruction of the jarrah forest by bauxite mining as one of the greatest conservation blunders in our history.

Roger Underwood is a former General Manager of CALM in Western Australia, a regional and district manager, a research manager and bushfire specialist. Roger currently directs a consultancy practice with a focus on bushfire management. He lives in Perth, Western Australia.

from http://richardness.org/blog/walhisstrangebedfellows.php

I’ve previously written about the Buyat Bay saga – where Richard Ness and Newmont were accused of having polluted a fishing village and its fringing coral reef with mine tailings.

You may remember that the story made the front page of The New York Times and that five miners, including Australian Phil Turner, were arrested and thrown into a Jakarta jail in September 2004. Richard’s son Eric runs a blog on the saga entitled ‘Watching My Dad’s Trial’.

When the claims of pollution where investigated by The World Health Organisation and CSIRO they were found to be bogus – a hoax. You can read a summary of the saga in my latest piece for the IPA Review entitled Politics and the Environment in Indonesia. There are copies of both reports’ at Eric’s website.

Richard Ness and Newmont were cleared of all charges in April this year, but the finding has been appealed.

In her journalism master’s thesis entitled ‘Tall Tailings: Truth and Friction in the Buyat Mining Scandal’ Canadian Kendyl Salcito suggested some of the key protagonists in the saga are members of the Islamic organisation known as Hizb ut-Tahrir.

Muhammad Al Khaththah, the leader of the Indonesian chapter of Hizb-ut Tahrir, appears in the above photograph with Abu Bakar Bashir.

It is perhaps not surprising that militant environmental and Islamic organisations are joining forces, they both believe that issues of poverty and corruption are a consequence of capitalism and the exploitation of people and natural resources by large multinational corporations. As a consequence many Islamic and environmental activists want to close down mining in Indonesia – at least the most efficient, high tec, modern systems of mining. Interestingly they are supported by activists from countries like Australia and Canada – countries that continue to enjoy a high standard of living as a consequence, at least in part, of capitalism and mining.

On the 26th of June 2007, Jakarta-based reporter Mr. Geoff Thompson aired a program for ABC’s Foreign Correspondent on the Buyat Bay Case entitled “The Battle of Buyat Bay”.

This documentary has some revealing statements from NGO activists, and it gives a good insight into how the Buyat controversy originated and how it has persisted for this long.

The chronology of events presented in this documentary clearly shows that political interest and ideologies can easily overturn the scientific findings of reputable organizations like the World Health Organization and CSIRO in favor of pseudo-science. And the power of politics in Indonesia remains strong enough to throw innocent people into jail and disregard their human rights—reminding the viewers that the rule of law in Indonesia still has some way to go.

Read the rest of the blog entry here: http://www.richardness.org/link.php?link=7&id=69

Cheers,
Eric Ness

See Buyat Bay and watch the documentary on the internet at: http://www.richardness.org/presentations/thebattleofbuyatbay.php

And I was in Indonesia in April to visit Buyat Bay and hear the verdict in the criminal trial.

Richard Ness and Newmont were cleared of all charges.

The ABC TV program ‘Foreign Correspondent’ is running a story on the Buyat Bay saga on Tuesday night. The promo says:

“The tiny inlet of Buyat Bay, has been a battleground with one of the world’s biggest mining companies, Newmont, facing monumental lawsuits from environmental groups, activists, and most importantly the Indonesian government itself.

Newmont has been accused of poisoning an entire community through the discharge of its mining waste into the bay. Water samples taken by Indonesian police indicated massive levels of mercury and arsenic were to be found in Buyat Bay but other tests including those conducted by Australia’s CSIRO found the bay to be clean.

At the centre of these accusations stands Richard Ness, the executive director of Newmont’s Indonesian operations. For the past two years he has been dragged through the courts, and if convicted of the criminal charges brought against him he faces three years in jail.

But Buyat Bay is not what it appears to be, and recent events have exposed serious implications for foreign investors who venture into Indonesia.

Jakarta-based correspondent Geoff Thompson travelled to North Sulawesi to try and discover whether Buyat Bay is an environmental disaster?”

You can read more about Richard Ness at this blog here: http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/001697.html

I am writing a book on the saga.