Mining for Morals: Corporate Social Responsibility and the Mining Industry

From Mr. Ralph Hinnebach, who graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1941 and has been very generous, he, uh, he died. It was two years ago now, but over the course of years, he gave the university over a million dollars. It's an endowment that supports us being able to bring in, uh, occasional guest lecturers, the visiting scholars, and visiting professors.

For the last, uh, year, we've had a couple of post-doctoral scholars from China. And, uh, we decided to do something a little bit different with some of the proceeds from the endowment. And we decided to hire a person. We made an agreement with the university that the program would pick up half the way to tenure. And, uh, once she earns tenure, then the university will pick it up. And maybe we can do something else again with, uh, our interlock proceeds.

But we did a national search last year, and we were extremely fortunate and happy to have been able to get Jessica Rolston as the new Assistant Prof, Analog Professor in Energy and Society. So this is an effort to focus some of the interests of the research and teaching in liberal arts and international studies in a way that will contribute to the larger mission of the Colorado School of Mines. So this is Jessica's inaugural lecture, public lecture, as the Assistant Interlock Professor in Energy and Society. We are very happy to have her here. She has a Ph.D. in Anthropology, in which she has done real-life work in the mining industry. I don't know whether she's going to tell us about it, but she's actually done revolutionary work in the mine, uh, coal mining fields, as well as done research on them. So we're going to ask her to share some of her insights and ideas that will help us all understand and appreciate the mining industry from an anthropological and ethical perspective. So, joining me in welcoming Jessica Ralston.

Thank you. I'm just really thrilled to be here and I'm happy to see all of you. The grappling with extractive industries requires serious, sustained analytic attention to the interface between government agencies, communities, and corporations. And increasingly, this space is framed by discourses of corporate social responsibility, which is the main subject of my talk today.

The corporate social responsibility movement, or CSR, coalesced in the 1990s around the conviction that doing good is good for business. Companies now publicly commit themselves to harmonizing their own pursuit of profit with the well-being of employees, communities, and environments. Today, it is nearly impossible to find a corporation that doesn't commit itself to responsibility, and a veritable CSR industry has emerged, complete with its own reporting genres, conferences, trade and academic journals, books, and software, research centers, business school programs, consulting agencies, awards, and associations. Part of the appeal of CSR is its key terms like accountability, transparency, dialogue, and best practice. After all, who would rightly object to corporations being more socially and environmentally responsible?

CSR remains controversial because people within the academy, certain sectors, and some community groups charge that it's nothing more than an elaborate public relations developed by companies to preempt regulation from government agencies and watchdog groups. So, unfortunately, a lot of the public and scholarly debate has kind of dissolved into this simplistic dualism: Is CSR a hollow experiment in public relations or a hallowed solution for reconciling economics and ethics and morality with the market?

Extractive industries, such as mining, provide particularly fertile ground from which to study CSR. Mines are not simply engineering marvels, but moral landscapes. The geographer Gavin Bridge, for example, argues that mining often figures as, quote, "a metaphor for expressing anxieties about the social and environmental effects of industrialization and globalization." For example, engineers look at a photo of one of the mines in Peru, where I did research, and see a piece of art, and how the technical, environmental, and economic systems come together to form a functioning whole. The environmental managers I met, both in Peru and in the American West, where I did my research, often described their mines as beautiful, lending aesthetic appeal to the technical work that they did. On the other hand, environmental activists would look at the same photo and see something very different. They might see environmental degradation, the destruction of land that's the basis for traditional livelihoods, and the potential for technical systems to fail and pollute the surrounding environment.

So, debates about mining are equally, if not more, polarized than debates about CSR. And what I will suggest in this talk, and in my research in general, is that debates about whether CSR is a, quote unquote, "real" attempt by corporations to improve their practices or a vast conspiracy intended to neutralize critique, this is a crucial point. And that point is that even when there are gaps between corporate discourse and practice, or between their promises and their actions, CSR does produce particular and sometimes unexpected social relationships, processes, and subjects. And analyzing this process will help us better wrestle with the policies we've inherited, as well as the future ones that students and faculty here will help create.

So, in my research, I'm interested in the conditions under which mines, communities, and employees are able to form social contracts, even if they're not perfect. Doing this requires us to look at the cultural and historical context for projects such as the ones that I study in my work. So, today, I'm going to talk about three different areas. The first is coal development in the Powder River Basin, which is in the northeastern part of Wyoming. This is where I did the bulk of my research. The second is a large gold project in Washington State, and the third is a copper project in the Indian Highlands in Peru.

As Professor Mitchum mentioned, I'm an anthropologist by training. I have a deep commitment to studying extractive industries. The photo on the left is, in fact, a picture of me during my employment when I was an undergraduate. Instead of working at McDonald's or Walmart, I got to drive this giant haul truck around during the summers because my dad was an employee there. He's a, my mechanic. My grandfather worked in production at uranium mines. And it was after I went to college, I started taking classes in anthropology. I went back to work, and I couldn't help but look at the mines from an anthropological perspective. I was just fascinated by all the people I was meeting, all these new practices I was learning how to do, and kind of how people made meaning out of their world. And so, since then, I've gone from Wyoming to other parts of the American West and down to Peru, where this is a picture of me with one of my colleagues.

So, what does it mean to study mining anthropologically? An anthropologist, kind of the hallmark of our practice, is long-term, in-depth fieldwork. So we actually go to the place where we're going to study and we try to talk to as many people as we can. So, over the course of my research, I talked with people who worked for mining companies, both kind of in the rank and file as well as managers, engineers. I also interviewed all of their families. I talked with conservation activists, as well as people who worked for government agencies. And the idea is to get as many perspectives as possible. Um, and kind of when we're doing anthropological research, we're going out and talking with people, and our research looks more like conversations instead of interviews. So the idea is that we let the interesting things bubble up from the conversation instead of coming in, kind of with this set list of questions or kind of our own assumptions about what's happening in a place. And a lot of times, we'll find something much more interesting when we open up the space for that kind of dialogue.

So, there are a couple of things I'd like you to think about as I'm going through some of these case studies. And I think what I'd really like you to kind of leave here today with is appreciation for how difficult and complex it can be to define things that a lot of us take for granted, such as the public good, or sustainability, or even corporate social responsibility.

So, the first case study is the Powder River Basin in northeastern Wyoming. About, this is a map of some of the mines here in red. They're large surface mines that use draglines, shovels, and trucks primarily to extract coal and engage in reclamation. They're the largest producer of coal in the United States. About 40% of all of the coal that's produced in the U.S. comes from Wyoming. Last year, they produced over 426 million tons using just about 4,000 people. If you can imagine that kind of productivity. The reason most people unfamiliar with the industry or this part of the world think that most of our coal continues to come from Appalachia is because these mines rarely bubble up to the public consciousness. We don't have the same kind of big environmental disasters or tragedies in which there's loss of human life, and that's typically when most people outside of the industry tend to hear about it.

So, what's interesting is that in Wyoming, um, it, the basin is held up as this kind of gold standard in how companies engage in community relations. There's, when you talk to people around town, people have very wonderful things to say about the industry. They aren't the same kind of protests that we see in other parts of the country, other parts of the world. And this is despite the fact that back in the 1970s, it wasn't clear that the mines would actually come about. There was a lot of public misgivings about the expansion of the industry into this part of the world, but people have forgotten about it. And so, a big part of my research has been trying to understand kind of what's happened in the in-between.

So, this is the beautiful Powder River Basin. If anybody's had a chance to drive through, it's primarily rolling sagebrush grassland, and there's about two months of the year where it's absolutely green and nice. But there's a very different context in which to mine some of the other places which we're familiar. So, before the, the coal industry really expanded into the basin in the mid-1970s, late 1970s, they were coming on the heels of an oil boom that happened in the 1960s. And before the oil boom, Gillette, which is the biggest city in the basin currently, was this small little ranching outpost. The power base was mostly full of people who were raising cattle and sheep, and they would come into Gillette to buy their supplies. And so the population of the town went from less than a thousand to about 10,000 when the oil boom happened. And so the whole makeup of the town changed. So the people we have are ranchers who live on the outskirts, the energy companies who came in, the environmental organizations that the ranchers ended up aligning themselves with, as well as other community residents.

The 1970s, uh, was a time in which a lot was happening in the United States that directly impacted the way in which coal development happened in Wyoming. The first was that there was a national backdrop of the energy crisis that was spurred by the 1973 oil embargoes. And so it made opening up these mines in Wyoming this patriotic, all-American solution to an energy crisis. There was a lot of national pressure to open these mines quickly. At the same time, the 1970s was also characterized by an increase in labor and environmental activism, both in the United States in general and specifically related to the coal industry. So, for example, in 1977, there was the longest strike on record from the United Mine Workers in Appalachia. And the energy companies that ended up coming into Wyoming and proposing all of these mines viewed the basin as this experiment in trying to be more profitable by smoothing over all of their relations, by investing in community relations, and by treating their people better. So they weren't having strikes and protests. So it's kind of this living lab that they were working with.

On a local level, people were really hesitant about large-scale industrial development because what, because of what had happened in the 1960s oil boom. When the town went from about a thousand people to about 10,000 people, there were a lot of adjustments that had to be made. And there were some social psychologists and journalists that came to Gillette to witness this wild west boom town in action. They ended up coining a term called the Gillette Syndrome to talk about, they called the five D's: so drunkenness, divorce, depression, drug use, and delinquency, which they viewed as just being rampant in town. And so there were outlets from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, even Playboy wrote up a huge article about the Gillette Syndrome. And this still circulates today, much to my chagrin.

In the Energy and Society class I'm teaching this semester, we read about oil development in the Niger Delta. Michael Watts, who's this eminent geographer from UC Berkeley, name-checks the Gillette Syndrome as a comparison of what's currently happening in Nigeria. Uh, so people are really hesitant about seeing another industry come in and bring in a whole bunch of more people. What happened was that the ranchers who lived around town aligned themselves with some prominent national organizations, especially the Sierra Club, to protest the mines from opening. And their biggest success was that they were able to achieve a year-long injunction against future development, um, in the middle of the 1970s. This is in the middle, kind of, of all of this pressure to open the mines quickly. They win this injunction, and it sparks, far, sparks a huge debate, both locally and in the state and in the country, about what's going to happen in terms of coal. The injunction was eventually lifted, and all of the mines were opened toward the end of the decade.

So, what happened in the aftermath? Um, on one level, was there's a change in policy. So in 1977, you saw the emergence of SMECRA, the Surface Mine Control and Reclamation Act. This is what guides current reclamation practices, um, in all surface mines, including those in Gillette. And the ranchers and the environmental organizations weren't totally pleased with this piece of policy. Their original goal in the injunction was to require regional environmental impact assessments rather than project ones. So their argument was that you can't really grapple with or appreciate all of the impacts of having 12 huge surface mines if you're only looking at them on a mine-by-mine basis. That wasn't instituted in this piece of policy, but it did set really tight regulations for how the mines would monitor their environmental performance.

So, there's this policy background. Secondly, the companies all came in espousing a discourse of corporate social responsibility. And this is two decades before, kind of, this term became a buzzword and went all over the world. They talked about themselves as being good neighbors or good corporate citizens. And to back up these appeals, they offered public mine tours, so people could come on site and see how the mining process actually happened. When they started mining enough, so there's something to reclaim, they invited people to see all the reclamation projects. They also invested heavily in community development. And then they paid all of their workers extraordinarily high wages and offered them really generous benefits to dissuade them from unionizing. And so these were kind of the pillars of the social contract that continues to exist in Wyoming. And there's time in the question and answer period, I'd be very happy to talk about how the changes in the energy market, especially natural gas, have influenced this social contract. But I'd like to move on to our second case study, which are the Okanagan Highlands and Washington State.

Here also in the northeastern corner. The reason I chose, kind of, this part of Washington and this Pacific mine project is that there was an unprecedented protest against a large-scale gold mine that had been proposed for this part of the world. So a group of people, primarily they call themselves hippies and back-to-landers, were able to successfully stop an open-pit gold mine that looked like it was about to go forward. A different company came in and proposed an underground mine that they weren't able to stop. So they ended up reaching a settlement in 2008. So this specific project is often held up as, kind of, a best-case example of how you engage communities in, kind of, areas of big conflict.

So, the social situation is different in Washington State. The two big groups of people who were living in this area before the gold mine was proposed and before it went in were unemployed mining families. There was a historic mining industry in this part of the world that had since had a downturn, so unemployment levels were really high, and people were looking for jobs. And there were also ranchers in this part of Washington State. They tended to have smaller organizations compared to the ranches in Wyoming. And the ranchers actually ended up aligning themselves with the companies instead of against them because they viewed the mine as a way to keep their own children close, because it was really difficult for them to make a living from ranching, and so they wanted a way, kind of, for their kids to be able to stay in the area and have jobs.

The third big group of people who live there now are folks who call themselves back-to-landers. So they moved to this part of Washington State in the 1970s, 1980s because they wanted to get off the grid, away from society. They viewed this as the sort of pristine getaway. And so they moved, they built straw bale houses, they have these giant gardens that they feed themselves out of, they hunt, and they try to just have their own little existence. So what happened when the mine was proposed in the early 1990s is that they viewed, kind of, this large-scale industrial expansion as ruining everything they had moved to this part of the country to appreciate. Um, and so they started thinking about how they were going to deal with it.

The first thing they did was they organized themselves into a formal group, gave themselves a name, and then they started working. And they made a strategic decision. They knew they couldn't win the debate just on quality of life issues. They couldn't just win the debate by saying, you know, "We don't want to live next door to a mine. We want to be outside of, kind of, this kind of development." What they did was they focused in on water issues. And so they hired their own technical, um, scientific experts, and they hired their own lawyers to go through all of the permits that were in the process of being approved. And they were successful in revoking the permit that the water board in Washington had originally approved for the mine, which effectively made the project dead in the water. So this was in 2000 that they were able to stop that huge, giant open-pit mine that had been proposed.

What happened was that that company went bankrupt, was bought by another one, and the second company proposed an underground mine. And they argued that the underground mine would have 90 to 95% less environmental impacts than the original project. And so the people in this organization found it really difficult to rally the troops because the threat didn't seem as big. They weren't actually going to see the mine, kind of, up on the hill. Um, and they weren't able to count on the same sort of support that they had from, kind of, the network of environmental activists that they had aligned themselves with. And so they ended up settling with the company in 2008.

One of the lessons that the second company learned was that they had to start off talking about corporate social responsibility from the beginning. So the first company, when they would appear at hearings or when they would be interviewed for the newspaper, they primarily just talked about jobs. They talked about economic growth, and that was what they were going to do for this part of the state, and that's why people should support their project. The second company, when they came in, immediately started talking about being environmental stewards, about trying to develop the communities in a way that was harmonious with their relationship with the land. So they got the language right from the beginning, which made it more difficult to protest against them because they didn't seem, kind of, these evil lords, kind of, lurking in the background, as did the first company.

The second thing they did was they set up a community advisory board. And the community advisory board included representatives from local government, as well as community organizations, and then it was open just to residents in general. And the idea was that it would be separate from the company, but the company would show up and answer questions, and they would address community concerns which were raised. And the people I talked to who participated in this project said that it was generally successful. So the mine ended up changing some of their plans to truck the ore from the mine to the mill site based on what some of the people have said. On the other hand, the main environmental activists decided not to participate in the community advisory board. They said that the mine was a foregone conclusion, that if you looked at the mission of the board, it said that it was to ensure the responsible development of the mine, that there wasn't a space to say no, and that environmental group wanted a space to say no.

So, they kind of kept working. What they ended up doing was having a separate settlement with the company in 2008. And as a part of that settlement, it expanded on some of the work they had originally done. So in 1994, this group was really focused on trying to get people involved in the monitoring process. And if they pushed through some legislation that would make it legally possible for people to enter mine sites and participate in monitoring. What they did with the settlement was make it so that they could go directly to the mine at any point that they wanted to check up on their operations and see how they were doing. They also received a large sum of money to support their own operations. So the main guy who had spearheaded the effort ended up becoming an employee of this group. That turned into his full-time job, and then they were able to do a lot of their own projects, kind of fixing fences, improving creeks.

So, kind of the interesting thing about it is that, and I've been talking to them, they have become dependent on the mine's success at this point. So it's kind of a double-edged sword for them. The main guy who spearheaded this, I think he would still love to be out kind of rallying people to oppose the mine, but at this point, because they have this partnership, if the mine screws up, it looks like he hasn't been a good watchdog. So his organization has kind of turned into this mine monitoring instead of environmental activism, kind of group. And so they're struggling a little bit with their own identity. But he thinks that if there has to be a mine, he wants it to be the most responsible mine possible. Upstream from him, and talking to some of the company people, uh, they said, yeah, it's awkward, you know, having to have these people just come into our operation whenever they want to. But they eventually said that it's a good thing, that it keeps us accountable, and that we're willing to do it. So this is kind of why this mine is held up as a case study in, kind of, quelling conflict.

The third place I'd like to talk about where I've done research is Peru. This was a big, giant open-pit copper mine in the southern part of the country. This is what the area looks like. It's really difficult to support yourself. What most people end up doing, the indigenous folks who live there, they grow alpacas and llamas, and they also grow a lot of potatoes, and then they use those to trade with people farther down the mountain who can grow more things. What happened in this specific part of the country is that in the 1980s, the state opened up a big concession, and a theta mining company decided to develop it. And when they were doing so, they kicked off all of the people who were previously living there, so the campesino or kind of indigenous peasant communities, without giving them another place to live, without giving them money, they just made them leave. And so this sparked a lot of protest from the people who were living there originally. They blockaded roads, they tried lighting things on fire, it was just really acrimonious.

In the 1990s, Peru decided to privatize the mining industry, so it moved over to a transnational corporation, um, in terms of operation, and they wanted to continue expanding the mine. And instead of just kicking people off the land, they offered to buy land. And when we talked to the people living there, they said that there was a lot of pressure involved, that they didn't feel like they could say no, and so that it really, kind of, was a situation in which they felt like they had to leave, even if they weren't legally required to do so. So the protests continued. And then in the mid-2000s, a new company came in, and they instituted some of the projects that I'll talk about in a little bit in order to smooth over all of those relations. So, and if we have more than two decades worth of active protests, the indigenous communities were able to align themselves with national NGOs. They brought in an international NGO to bring attention to their cause.

So, what the, what the second company did was, was two things primarily. And the first is that they made a framework agreement with the provincial government so that more of the revenues that was coming from the mining operation would stay in that specific province instead of going to Lima, instead of going to the capitol in the national government. They also had to negotiate with the indigenous communities because they're governed separately. And so what they ended up setting up was what they called dialogue tables. So they invited six, the representatives of six indigenous communities that were the most affected by the project, to sit down at the table along with their NGOs, um, and their, kind of, international partners, and talk. And they outlined four specific areas that they were going to focus on. And the most successful and the most contentious one was the issue of land, based on the history of the people's land being expropriated.

So, what the company did was it found land for the people who had lost it, and then handed it over. The, the local people were generally, I don't want to use the word appreciative, but they had positive things to say about the work that the land commission had done. But they still had some misgivings. There were a lot of complaints that the new land was higher in altitude, so that it was more difficult to grow all of their crops, that their animals didn't do as well, but there wasn't enough water. And so it kind of wasn't ideal. When we asked the company people about this, they kind of dismissed it and they said, "Oh, these people are just nostalgic." Any land's not going to be as good as the stuff that they had before. And, and then you all might appreciate this, they said, "We did all these studies, and they had the same soil composition, it had the same access to water." And so the land technically looked the same from the company perspective, but it didn't have the same kind of family histories that the people there had appreciated.

The second thing that was that came out of these dialogue tables was small business training. Uh, so they worked with local people to, kind of, encourage them to create things that they could sell, either at markets to, kind of, other people in the area, or perhaps to tourists who got lost on their way to Machu Picchu, because otherwise people don't come to this part of the world very much. So these things were all good that came out of this process, but there were a lot of limitations that are still being worked out. The first is the definition of a stakeholder. So I mentioned before that there were six indigenous communities invited to participate in the dialogue table, that meant that there were a lot that weren't invited, even though that they viewed themselves as being impacted by the development and the pollution in the area. So those people have continued protesting and still protest and try to make road blockades.

There's also complaints of paternalistic corporate discourse, as I mentioned before, about, kind of, dismissing people as being nostalgic. Some of the community development officers thought that if just they could have more scientific farming, you know, then this would just all be solved. They just need to become better farmers, and everything would be okay. The third big limitation is that even though there was space for local people to participate in environmental monitoring, to look at all of the data that was coming out from the studies and the sampling, they didn't know how to interpret it because they didn't have the same kind of formal education that an engineer would, and that the company representatives did. And at the last that I was aware, they hadn't found a way to ally themselves or hire someone to do that kind of work for them, as we saw the people in Washington State did, you know, who hired all of their own experts to speak the same language as the company.

And, kind of, the last, kind of, big limitation that the community people identify is that the company largely sets the agenda for these dialogue tables. So the state-owned company, the first transnational corporation, and the second transnational corporation have always promised jobs as one of the inducements to get people to support the mine. And so far, hardly anyone is employed by the mine. There are a few people who work part-time in a janitorial capacity, but in general, they're not getting the same kind of full-time, well-paying jobs that they've been promised. And from the company's perspective, it's because they don't have the right kind of training or knowledge to do some of the jobs that they have available. And the community perspective is that there has to be something we can do, like invent something or teach us how to do something. So that's one of the, kind of, last contentious issues. And I think it's telling that, and if, even though it's one of the community's main concerns, it's not one of those four commissions, so it's not one of the things that they can legally talk about, kind of, in this space.

So, one of the big differences in this case study is that there's a much more vulnerable population that's interacting with the company. And the second big difference is the policy context in which this is happening. So if you go back to the Wyoming and the Washington case studies, both groups of people were able to create new policy that would support their own interests. They're able to, kind of, use existing government channels to, kind of, support their own activities. In Peru, they weren't able to do this because there's very weak government structures for them, kind of, to access. The Ministry of Energy and Mines, up until 2008, was responsible both for encouraging investment and development in the mining industry and regulating it. And even people who worked for the government, even, kind of, the most pro-mining company people, said that you can't do both of those jobs well at the same time. It wasn't until 1998 that environmental impact assessments were even required for large-scale mining projects. It wasn't until 2002 that there was a formal mechanism for people like the indigenous groups to be consulted on these projects. And it was so bad that in 2005, the World Bank issued a report that concluded that the political will to resolve a perceived contradiction between promotion and regulation of the mining industry is still too weak. The MEM, through the Ministry of Energy and Mines, still has to establish itself as a credible, efficient, and neutral reviewer and approver of environmental impact assessments and licenses.

So, partially in response to this, in 2008, they created a new agency for environmental control and assessment within the Ministry of the Environment, which would be separate and from this Ministry of Energy and Mines to make it a little bit more independent, so it could actually do some regulation.

So, there's three things that I'm hoping you can take away from the talk and from these case studies. The first is that CSR is absolutely integral to the production process. What we found while we were doing interviews and talking with people is that they tended to separate, kind of, this hard, real work of mining and engineering from this, kind of, fluffy community development, soft, you know, sort of stuff. And what all of our case studies have shown is that you can't get to that second part unless you have a social license to operate, you know, unless you're good at producing good community relations in addition to being good at producing something like coal or gold or copper. And this interdependence isn't reflected in the way a lot of the companies were structured. So, for example, at the Peruvian case study, they outsourced all of their community development stuff to a separate foundation that was totally separate from the mining company, even though they said that they were working together.

The second thing is that CSR means different things, not only to different companies, but different people who are engaging those companies. So, in a review of CSR research, all that all distinguish between what they call old and new corporate social responsibility. And for them, old corporate social responsibility is philanthropy. So that's a company just throwing money at somebody, giving you a college scholarship, for example, if you live in Gillette, kind of where the coal mines are. A new corporate social responsibility is directly related to the core business practices. So, for example, a mine is going to improve its water management instead of just sponsoring a sports team. And I think this is good and useful, but I think we need to take it a step further to think about where community empowerment and, kind of, what NGO people like to call capacity building fit into corporate social responsibility.

One of the things that especially came out of the Peruvian case study is that there wasn't a lot of room for the communities themselves to say what kind of development they wanted or needed. And as an anthropologist, I want to step back and take apart terms all the time, but I think it's really important to think critically about what we even mean by community before we can start thinking about what community engagement is. I think a lot of times it's really, uh, we'd like to assume that we, that there's some kind of community out there that's easily definable, that all we have to do is talk to people and we will figure out what our solution will be. Um, but when we actually get down to the complexities of the social universe, communities aren't so easily defined as distinct entities. So, for example, who gets to count as a community in Peru? We saw that there were a lot of people who were impacted by the mining industry who weren't invited to any of those dialogue tables. If you think back to the Washington case study, you know, we had these ranchers and the hippies, they lived right next door to each other, they both kind of existed living off of the land, but they had very different interests, and they had very different goals in terms of their relationship with the mine. So how would you define that community? Um, and lastly, we have to think about who gets, who's privileged to speak for and represent communities. In Peru, one of the big complaints was that all of the indigenous leaders were men, and that the men weren't necessarily going to represent the interests of the women, and or that you had all of these, kind of, elderly folks who weren't representing, kind of, the younger generations. And so these are all things we have to think critically about when we're talking about corporate social responsibility and the role of the communities in that.

I think one of the things that comes through really clearly from all of these case studies is the absolute importance of having resources, um, so that you can access expertise, so you can access a lawyer, so that you can draw on the knowledge of somebody who's able to interpret, you know, all of these numbers that come out about a stream, you know, and what's being found in the stream. And that when you have those resources, then you can speak the same language that the mining company is speaking, and then you can have a bigger say in how that development is happening and how that responsibility is being negotiated. If you're not able to speak that language, it's much more difficult to set the terms of that engagement. And lastly, there seems to be some sort of need or to be able to use government to your advantage, to be able to create policy or amend it in a way that's helpful to you.

So, just as corporate social responsibility can mean different things to different people, so can sustainability. So, sustainability is the ultimate goal of all of these efforts. That's what people on the ground in the companies talk about. And in each of these cases, what we see is a debate between what sustainability is. So we have people, we could classify as being agriculturalists, in some extent, whether it's the ranchers in Wyoming and Washington or some of the small-scale herders in Peru. And when they talk about their lives, they talk about living in a sustainable way, that they're able to provide for themselves and their families up through the future. When the mining companies that they interacted with talked about sustainability, they primarily focused on the economic dimension. So they talked about having long-term economic growth, they talked about having jobs, they talked about training people to do other, kind of, jobs once the mine left. And that's a different version of sustainability.

And I appreciate Professor Mitchum has this wonderful chapter about sustainability, and he said that it can be a bit of a plastic word because it can be molded to mean different things for many groups of people. And there's an anthropologist, Stuart Kirsch, who writes specifically about sustainability in the mining industry. He said that it's turned into what a linguistic anthropologist would call a strategically deployable shifter. So the, the definition of this term only exists in a very specific context, so that it means different things depending on who's invoking it. And what he finds is this gradual shift from ecological definitions of sustainability, about being concerned about human impact on the environment, to human-centered definitions of sustainability, as this is the Brundtland Commission meeting our own needs without compromising the needs of future generations, you know, to almost entirely economic definitions of sustainability. And we might ask ourselves if this is an expansion of the term. Kirsch takes a little bit more critical of an approach when he said it's an emptying out of the term. But in any sense, a, I think what's interesting about terms like these, whether sustainability or corporate social responsibility, um, is that it's something that gets people talking. It gets people to a table, and it's a way of negotiating what this is going to look like. So what development is going to look like.

So, what I'd like to leave you with, kind of, the, the very basic take-home point is that, kind of, looking at the mining industry anthropologically shows that these are not just technical problems, that they're cultural problems. And that really grappling with them requires cultural expertise and solutions, as well as the technical ones. And that's why I'm just really thrilled to be here and working with you all.

So, I believe you're up. We are also. Thank you very much. We are also very pleased to have Murray Hitzman from the Geology Department do a brief comment and response. If there is anybody who is not in LAIS, any professor who is not in LAIS, who we feel very strongly that we would like to get him in LAIS, it's very Hitzman. He's been, he's been putting exactly these kinds of issues on the table for all of us here at CSM ever since I've known him. I actually had the occasion to team teach with him, of course, on, uh, "Social License to Mine," probably six years ago now. So, uh, Murray, appreciate your coming, and we welcome your comments.

So, I guess I'll just stand up here and try and do a couple of things. I want to keep it brief. Yeah. Hi. One, Jessica started out her talk by saying that that anthropologists do fieldwork. So, so I actually had a degree in anthropology too, and I wasn't able to do fieldwork, and that's why I went to geology. So the fieldwork in anthropology is talking to people. Fieldwork in geology is talking to rocks. Probably might give you a bit of my sense of personality that I ended up in one and not the other. First, um, there were a whole bunch of things here on this talk which I thought was fantastic, which this talk actually deals exactly what this school deals with: Earth, Energy, and the Environment. The talk sums it up. We tend to think of this school that Earth, Energy, and Environment is an engineering and science issue. True. But I think, as Jessica showed, the underpinnings to all that is, in fact, anthropology and culture and understanding people. So, a couple of different sort of highlights I heard. One of the ways all these issues come together is a sense of place. And for many people, in many cultures, that's land. But it's also a sense of scale. And I, one of the questions that she dealt with at the end is, what is community? Well, what is community? There's a community right here in this room. There's a community of Mines, which is all our different colleges and departments. There's a community in Colorado of the educational pieces with CSU, CU, DU, etc., Mesa State. And then, of course, there's the community of the state, the nation. We can go on. Which of those are important? And having worked in the industry and having to actually had to do this in several countries in the world, that's a very difficult question to answer because no matter how you answer, you're always wrong, period. And you always will be because you want to be as inclusive as possible, but to be totally inclusive, obviously, is economically and usually technically not possible. So, what are the boundaries? How do they, how do we set those boundaries? And that's an anthropological question. That's not an engineering question. And so I guess the way I'd like to leave it is the last slide here: not just technical, but cultural problems. Having been an anthropologist as well as part of, part of my career, I guess what I'd say is technology is part of culture. Technology is defined by what culture you're from. Having worked in Peru, up in the highlands, they have technology. It's not a technology we learn here at Mines, but it's just as realistic a technology. So we need to think about culture actually in all aspects, right? And maybe not just the ones we normally think about. So maybe there'll be a class coming up, the school, in the anthropology of engineering. Don't laugh. The best class I ever took in my entire life in school was the anthropology of law, okay? How legal systems vary around the world. It was a mind-blowing experience to realize that lots of different cultures have lots of different ways of looking at legal systems. I would love to see a class on how different cultures have actually adapted or looked at engineering. I don't think such a class, I've never seen one anywhere in the world, but it'd be a neat one to try and think about. So with that, I don't know what I do now, but I guess there's questions. Probably. I think what did you say up there? And, uh, we invite, uh, questions and comments. Let's first of all thank, uh, Murray too. Yes. Yeah.

Are there ways? I mean, when a project doesn't go, then clearly that's a failure from the corporate side, maybe a success from the environmental side, not sure. But are there indicators, gradations the corporation can say, "Yes, it was worth us doing this," and not just from a, you know, go-no-go sort of, uh, dichotomy, but rather some kind of, some kind of way to infer this that they can see that it's one, profitable, two, that's good for the community, and there's ways that there's measures? So, what are those dashboards or indicators look like from a corporate view?

Well, I think the case that might be the easiest to talk about is Wyoming, because those are some of the most profitable coal mines in the whole world, and that's partially because of the way that they can do the extraction, right, with these huge draglines and shovels, and it's more productive. But it's also because they have employee buy-in, that people are caring about making those mines really productive, and they don't have the same kind of work stoppages that we see in other parts of the industry. And I tend to me, when I talk to corporate people, it tends to boil down to economic indicators, so profitability. But I think it would be really important to think about other, kind of, measures, as you said. And I don't know of anybody who's done that. So maybe a, a follow-up to that from your last comment about the corporate economic indicators, um, in the Peruvian example, you said that they're in, like, money, energy, Ministry of Energy, yeah. And you said it was kind of, uh, come to be viewed that they can't do, kind of, promotion and regulation.

At the same time, well, if you have a company who is trying to adopt kind of CSR as well, I mean, don't they have maybe the same conflict, right? I mean, so at some level, is that actually possible? This is, this is the million-dollar question. So this is why CSR is so controversial outside the business world. So most of the people who write about CSR in anthropology write about it in a very critical way. That is, a way that it's, that one, it's purely voluntary, right? And that people don't have the same kind of access to check up on what the companies have actually been doing. And that the most extreme conspiracy theorists take it to the level that this is kind of a way for companies to preempt regulation altogether. You know, don't worry yourselves about it, you know, we're already doing it. And I think one of the things that comes out of these studies is how important it is to still have the government in the background, at least in order to make sure that there's a way for people to access in a democratic way, um, the industry. Um, so, for example, there's an anthropologist who doesn't work in mining, he works with Coca-Cola studying them. And the way that he gets access to their shareholder meetings is by buying one share of Coca-Cola every year. And that's the only way that, you know, he can get into that space because otherwise they control it, you know. So I, I think that's a really important question that we're going to keep thinking about.

Let me just answer that too, and slightly from a different perspective. So when I worked for Chevron Corporation, we were trying to put a mine into operation in Ireland. And at that time, Ireland didn't have an EPA or the equivalent. Chevron Corporation actually helped the Irish government form an EPA to regulate us. And the reason was, without rules, we didn't know how we could do a feasibility study to actually figure out if we were going to make money or not, or whether we should go forward. So it cuts sort of both ways, right? One, one, we really do need regulation to be able to have an economic environment where we have some certainty. So, so I think there's socialism. But the same thing happened in Wyoming, actually. Um, and so when I was doing my research, it turned out that the people who sat on all of these boards to read these permits, all were employed by the industry at some place, you know. And, and for people in Wyoming, that seemed very natural. I mean, who else is going to sit on a board unless you have some kind of education? And the people with the education all work for the company. But when I took this back to my dissertation advisors, they're like, "Oh my goodness, you know, like the companies have taken over the state, basically, you know." So there's kind of this practical place, kind of where there's problems again.

Let me jump into him with the example from Ireland. So we had the same issue, and we had an advisory board, which back then there wasn't. I mean, this was a novel concept. It would have been about the same time as Powder River. And, and while a lot of the people that the company wanted to put on the board were people that have the expertise, um, I actually convinced them to put on people from the Women's Country Women's Association, from the local anglers group, and from Greenpeace. Okay? And, and the Greenpeace person actually had had technical expertise. The others were a farmer's wife and a 70-year-old guy who liked to catch trout, right? Who didn't know what a mine was, didn't even know what a rock was, basically. And that was fine, that was great because by having lots of inclusion, we actually did get points of view very early on that we never would have gotten any other way. And so I think as companies go forward, I mean, there's going to be all sorts of companies doing this in their different ways. And, and the ones that I think are, are forward-looking and actually really do want to do something well will go this way. I think governments also need to take responsibility and have regulations that probably force companies to actually do that sort of thing, right? So there's ways of making regulations that I think help what we're learning from anthropology about how to do this this better.

Elizabeth, I, I want to go back to a point that Marie raised about engineering culture. And so if I could start with you, Jessica, when you talk about the Wyoming case, it seems to be very successful. But then when when Murray brought up his point, I thought, well, okay, so Western engineering, a Western civilization, a Western community, they know, you know, lawyers have got to talk to lawyers, and engineers have got to talk to engineers. And so they know how to interact, and there's some basic agreement on what the main concerns are, right? But then when you talk about what's going on in Peru, you have one kind of civilization, which is mostly Western engineering and, and, uh, concepts, and they have their lawyers and regulations and all the rest of it. And then you have a very different kind of community that they're coming into. And as you said, you know, they don't know to have lawyers, just right? To, okay, if you could just address.

Yes, so actually, um, before they could even have a dialogue table, they had kind of these cultural trainings. So they trained all of the company people, this is what Indian culture is like, these are some of the basic world views that people here have and expectations. And they did the same thing with the communities that were living there. You know, this is what a corporation is, you know, this is kind of the issues that are important to them, this is the framework that they have. So they could even start talking to each other because there wasn't that at the beginning. And what's interesting about the Peruvian case study is that there was also a difference, not just from kind of the Western transnational corporations, but kind of the people in Lima, kind of who were coming in, were so enculturated into kind of this engineering kind of technocratic culture that there was also a big difference within the country that we couldn't just kind of like say that not not me. Why don't I keep saying the thing about Ecuador based on kind of our class today? Um, but there's a distinction with the urban center and then kind of the, the outside too.

So let me just ask Jessica, and something that just came to my mind, that the Powder River Basin is a fantastic example in a whole bunch of ways. But what if you actually studied now the coal mining, which is also large-scale, open-pit, on the Navajo Reservation, where some of the issues are different, right? It's culturally different, but not quite, it's not like Peru, but it still has some of these other issues. Has anyone tried to make that link?

You know, I attempted to do this project. I was going to work at some mines in the Four Corners region, and I had, I had contacts with the environmental group. We were set up to do some interviews. I mentioned on the phone that I was also going to the company, they're going to give me a tour, and they stopped returning my phone calls because the situation was so polarized that they weren't willing to work with someone who was talking to everybody, basically. But I think that would be a wonderful project if you could. You say that CSR needs to be implemented during the production stage? Have you done any research with companies that implement CSR at the more exploration stage first, people on the ground to sort of, uh, you know, get the, get the wheels turning as far as conversations with, uh, local indigenous tribes and communities, so it kind of makes the impact later on less severe?

Yes, and this is much more successful. Um, if you start from the beginning, I'm instead of having to pay for the sins of the people who've come before you, even if they were your own. Yeah. Well, I'll tell the role of attendance. He said one of the key points is that you mean we have access to that we speak to something you can see. A lot of us in here being a technical expert, right? Issue and being an advisor. So how, um, different advisors, obviously have one for, you know, the mining companies have theirs, and potentially NGOs have theirs, and maybe there's some provided for communities from somebody somewhere else. But can you speak to how the, the experts interact on on issues of uncertainty, which there inevitably will be uncertainty with different biases, um, and how that uncertainty is communicated to the community in those discussions? Yeah. Did you have something in the face? I will, but go first. No, why don't you go first? I can collect my thoughts.

Well, I was going to address a slightly different point first, and then then we'll come to yours. One is how do you get advisors for the, some of the participants, and usually it's the local communities that don't have as much access. And, and I don't think we figured out how to do that. Um, typically the company will actually put up money so the local community can hire somebody. That's because the community doesn't have the economic wherewithal to do it. That's probably not ideal, but in an early situation, I'm not sure how else you deal with it unless you have some sort of fund in a governmental sense that can do it. But another area I worked in my career was up in Northern Alaska with the Red Dog Mine and with some of the native corporations, you know, there. And what they did is they didn't have the expertise when they started, but natural resources have become an important part of several of the native corporations in the state. And the corporations have invested heavily in actually training their own members, a cadre at places like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford, in law, engineering, and science. So that now, 20 years on, those native corporations are as sharp as any company in the world. So they actually went out, that community went out as a, you know, very systematically to gain the expertise. And I think that's a really neat example of in places like Peru, where we expect that resource extraction will be important for many generations to come, how can Peru actually help some of its native communities to gain expertise among their own people? Again, we don't know how to do that, but that's where I think we need to be, what we need to be thinking about. That's an anthropological problem. Yeah.

You know, it's the interim that's really challenging, right? Um, when you don't have the local people who have the right training. Um, so in what they ended up, what the people in Washington State did was that they just hired a consulting agency that was an independent third party that they could just have on a contract basis, like you would have a lawyer, kind of at your disposal. And then they could kind of use, kind of this consulting agency when they needed it. The company also put up money, kind of as Marie was saying, to hire independent contractors, independent consultants to look at some of these things. And the problem is that when it comes from company money, then the local people are very suspicious of it. And so it's difficult figuring out where you're going to get the money to fund all of this stuff because money has its own kind of obligations and ties. So the way that they were able in Washington to hire their own people was through raising money through these other networks of activists and bringing attention to their causes. Yes.

Right here, you mentioned you talked about the two cases here in the U.S. and done quite parallel with the one in Peru. And you mentioned also the situation in the Delta region of Nigeria. Yes. What I'm wondering is, are the extracting companies like ExxonMobil and others who are going into these countries, do you see that they're actually learning how to work better with the local communities? Because they're coming in at the government level, and they're crafting their contracts and getting their admission into their countries through the federal government. And so they're really not beholden to the local communities and the society they go in to do extraction, or even whatever kind of planning they come up with. It's all vetted at the government level, not the community. That, how is that happening? Is it changing from your experience? I mean, it's a question for both of you because you've observed this for several years. Is it changing at all, or is it staying at that federal level, or not really? They don't really care for their communities.

Yeah, I think this is one of the problems of scale that you were talking about earlier as well. And the problem what's happening, kind of in Nigeria, is that even if they try to identify a community that they can work with, someone else identifies themselves as a community so they can access those funds. And then someone else identifies themselves as a community. And so I think the, the challenging thing is that I see in the cases where I've art, there's this division of labor, uh, between what the company does with the federal government, um, and then, kind of, there's all of this voluntary stuff on the local level that it's not as beholden and framed, kind of, by the regulations as much. I don't, you have more experience.

I agree with him and she said, but let's just take Nigeria. I haven't worked Nigeria, but I know the example somewhat. In most countries, Nigeria included, the rights to the resource, in this case oil, belong to the federal government, not to the local community. That's by law in Nigeria. So that, that's an inherent problem, right? Because Shell, who's the main producer there, has to, they want access to that resource, which means they're doing it through the federal government. Now, they also know clearly they have to be on the ground and use surface rights, which is the local community. But this is sort of where the anthropology of law comes in, right? How legally do these things work in different, different cultures and different societies, right? Now, in most of the world, resources are held by sort of a larger government entity rather than by the local government entities. So there's already a tension. In Peru, one of the things Jessica talked about in her example was one of the ways to try and alleviate problems were to get more of the the rents or the royalties, the taxes, to not go to Lima, but to go to the local local area. That's a big deal. But, but in Peru, that's taken 15 years now, and we're still, there's still a lot of attention. Not so much among the companies. The companies would all love to see the taxes all go to the local place and not for, not Lima, you know, they all would love that. But that's not legal. So how do you change Peru's laws? As an American, I can't help influence their laws, and you would be looked badly if you did try to go influence their law. Exactly. So, so again, this gets back to culture, very firmly.

Wonderful. Let a little pause here because, uh, Murray set us up for a little, uh, advertisement that I want to make before we lose, uh, Juan Lucena. He said he'd love to see a course in the anthropology of engineering. Well, we, one actually teaches something pretty close to that, Engineering Cultures. He's an ethnographer of engineering. Uh, so would you just say just two, uh, two or three words about your course to call it the attention?

Okay, so let the record show that I was on my way out to pick up my kids, and he brought me for the for the sales pitch. So, okay. So the course, uh, the Engineering Cultures class, and actually there is one here called Engineering Cultures in the Developing World, actually looks at three key questions: What is an engineer? What constitutes engineering knowledge? And how are engineers expected to work in in a particular society? And we look at a number of countries, uh, mainly in Latin America and Africa, um, where Colorado School of Mines has either projects or affiliations to companies on on on those. And through the answers to those three different questions, we look at the similarities and differences of engineering cultures in different countries. But I was also interested in Sean's question because the question of expertise and where the expertise resides. And in listening to the answers, I realized that the companies are trying to sometimes provide expertise to the communities, expertise that they don't have. The communities are trying to find different ways to seek expertise that they don't have. The corporations often don't have expertise about community development. And one of the things that I argue, and that I would like us to do more here, is actually give the expertise to the engineers about sustainable community development. So instead of expecting that the expertise is going to reside in some corporate boardroom or in some community organization, and there are places there for expertise to reside, how about also in the engineers themselves? How can we educate engineers to be able to navigate a complex landscape like the ones Jessica presented here, to understand both what are the goals of the corporations and what are the goals of the community? And can I, as a technical expert, navigate those different and sometimes conflictive interests?

Okay, and Juan is the director of our Humanitarian Engineering Program with the support of Kevin Moore and Elizabeth Davis. So this is another avenue for me. I'm sorry, I'm excited by what you're doing, so I can't help but try to promote it. All right, so now I got to go get my kids. Yes.

I had a question. You talked about how the corporate discourse tends to be paternalistic in the situation of specifically of the most marginalized groups. And it seems to me the most marginalized groups, that's where there's the most responsibility on the corporation because there's such a disparity between the power of these two groups. So are there other kinds of discourse models? It seems to me very natural that you would use a paternalistic discourse because you don't know anything and I know everything, right? I mean, that's that's how we sort of think of it. The corporation has all the technical expertise, these people have localized knowledge, which there's some lip service given to the importance of local knowledge and all that kind of stuff. But what other kind of models are or how would you recommend to do to do that differently?

I think, well, this is kind of where the community empowerment stuff comes in and the capacity building, right? So then you, I, one of my, or I guess one of the larger critiques about corporate social responsibility that everybody talks about partnerships, and but those partnerships aren't equal because they don't have access to the same kind of resources. And I think it's insulting to call something like this a partnership. Um, and so the, where I would look is the literature on kind of community empowerment and community development.

So, just as a quick follow-up question, I mean, to me, it, I mean, even that seems like it's still a kind of, "we are going to empower the community." You know what I mean? So which, I mean, to me, that seems like there's this fundamental question of, "we, we are going to teach you how to be empowered."

Well, but I would look, I would look at what's called participatory action research. So participatory action research is kind of when you go in and you work with the community to help kind of them identify their own needs, not you saying, "these are what your needs are," but I know that I have this roundtable model that maybe I get everybody here and we can start talking, you know? And the idea is to help them identify what knowledge they already have and what needs they're already able to express, but in a more formal way that can be understood by outside groups. Those are great questions though.

Okay, maybe one or two more questions here. Yes. Uh, Jason. So I wonder, following up on that question, if you see a pattern of, um, a mining interest coming in and sizing up the power of the community, either in terms of regulatory environment or organizing potential or sense of community, or what have you, and that the sort of CSR response is proportional to that estimate ahead of time? And so, I mean, it's a bit of a cynical view, but you might say, for example, you know, when, when the state came in and just took land away from all of the peasants in Peru, that's an example where, you know, the sense was, we have so much power, there's so little that these peasants can do, CSR doesn't need to play a role. Um, and yet, if you look in the U.S. context, where you have organized labor, at least the threat of it, you have some environmental regulations, there's a sense that you have to do some CSR, otherwise you're going to fail. Yes. You know, and this is one of the arguments made from the academies that CSR only emerges kind of when you have this counterbalance coming from this way. Um, and so, kind of, this is the critique of it being a voluntary effort, right? That it's not voluntary, that it's something that they're doing to address a criticism of their practices.

I'd go further. I don't think it's cynical, I think it's realistic, period. There are parts of the world where I know mining companies won't go because the communities are just dead set against mining, and it's not worth it, period, right? Um, I think it comes down to culture again, and it comes down with your question to one word: respect. You have to respect the people you're going to be working with, and you have to have somehow see if they can respect you back, okay? Because to do this, if I'm a company, when I was in the company, why would I spend my money in a place where I think I'm not going to be able to do a development? It's wasted money. Why should I even go there, right? There's parts of Peru right now that I would not spend a penny in because I think the chance of developing a project are zero. So why would I do it? There's other parts of the world where I think it's probably much easier from a CSR point of view, but it basically means the culture of the community there is much more receptive. That would make me more attractive to go there. I, I don't think that's cynical as much as pragmatic. Maybe I'm being wrong.

Okay, let's, uh, let's give a final, uh, question, comment, right here. Um, yeah, I, I was actually up in Northern Peru last summer. I was doing very similar studies and, um, you know, I was looking at, like, just both, like, the economics from the business standpoint of CSR and the sustainable development of CSR, and kind of, you know, the balance between the two, where you find that, though around. And, you know, it doesn't matter really what the intentions are, if it's the outcome. And I think a really interesting case study to look at that I was just kind of getting into was the Kuelap project. And, you know, it's fascinating because what the Yanacocha Consortium has done is very unique and very, it's very much community empowerment. But at this point, it's local government and environmental activists that are coming in instead. So, you know, it's, it's almost like CSR was starting to like formulate in this area. And, you know, because it's Peru, and I'm sure there's a whole slew of historical context that goes into that, you know, I'm just wondering, like, will CSR begin to spill over into the other big actors, which are government and other organizations that, you know, really kind of like halt this kind of big progress? Yeah. And I don't mean to be a pessimist, but people are killing each other like over this project.

But, but I think you're absolutely right. I mean, I think CSR for a company who's doing it right, it's not just the local community, more at all. That's what I meant by scale. If you're really thinking about this, it has to be the local community, the provincial area, let's, let's use Peru, the federal government, the NGOs, as a community that you're going to have to deal with, period, right? So you need to think about that and bring them in into the project early on and assume that they're going to hate you and not want it, but you have no choice. You might as well do it early on.

Do you see anybody developing any kind of global standards?

So there are all sorts of global standards, but they're all voluntary, right? And so it ends up being kind of the shiny thing that you can put on your year-end report, you know, that we met this kind of international convention, and there's no enforcement behind it, you know? So the companies that aren't doing a good job aren't going to do it.

Okay, I think we ought to stop here. I'm sure they will be willing to take a few more questions after somebody wants to come up, but I think you can see why LAIS is very pleased that we were able to get our first choice in the search that we did is our new Assistant Handlebach Professor in Energy and Society. Thank you. Thank you all for coming.