A polluter’s Potemkin propaganda

Among environmentalists, it’s defined as greenwashing. In the energy sector, greenwashing is when polluters refer to their circulating fluidized bed (CFB) coal-fired plants as clean coal technology. That is a lie. It is by no means clean. It is just not as dirty as the toxic and deadlier flat bed pulverized coal-fired plants. Less deadly however does not mean it does not kill.

In forestry, greenwashing, is when polluters claim to replant magnificent centuries-old rain forests with quick growing coconut trees, shrubs or smaller flora to replace what cannot be replaced.

In the mining sector, greenwashing is a major million-peso industry. It includes the millions of lobby money polluters spend on legislators and the media to demonize those who would complicate their lives and temper their greed by imposing limits to the destruction they wreak. It includes employing editorials to paint the industry as a GDP and employment driver, recruiting crowds to rally against environmentalists and peppering congressional commissions with solons thickly suited-up with conflicts of interest.

The default greenwashing protocol is however the guided tour. Who doesn’t enjoy an all-expenses-paid junket? The tour is standard operating procedure. So is the overnight stay and the marvelously filling dinner, pre and post entree cocktails and the free flowing wine to fatten the proverbial calf.

The tour protocols are cookie-cutter predictable. So typically one-size-fits-all garden variety that someone must have written the single-edition playbook on mining public relations and publicity stunts, unabridged, un-updated and dog-eared like an old heirloom bible adhered to religiously like it was written by an omnipresent deity. Unfortunately it is the brazen deception and the diabolical disconnect that are insidiously concealed between the pages and lines of the mining PR playbook that speaks volumes of what exploitation is really all about.

But let us take the tour first. It’s free. Like those mandatory city tours that travel agents package including the side trip to the silk factory and the necessary gift shop right where the strategically located restrooms are. Conscious that as in any tour, it is meant more to impress than to inform, it is still difficult to seek beneath the hyperbole the defiled once living quantum universe killed and buried beneath the post-planted showcase forests and gardens..

The focal point is a freshly grown forest comprised of fertilized flora, young trees thick with leaves and foliage and where possible, fruit trees with the most attractive fruit. The ground beneath is unnaturally green in contrast to what are actually underneath the canopy of genuine ancient forests. Almost always there is a convenient path through the growth that offers magnificent views designed to astound and impress the un-trained eye. The re-genesis easily convinces the gullible that miner’s can indeed create just as well as God did.

The tour nears its end with a visit to the brightly whitewashed school buildings with its room of laptops and flat screen monitors. The accompanying spiel declares how the mining company has enabled the unfortunate denizens of the boondocks to time travel to the age of the internet from the slash and burn communities they were condemned to had not mining come to town.

The final stop are pop-up clinics and the makeshift stalls and stores erected for the disenfranchised families of the farmers and fisher folk whose principals now work at the mines, some cleaning up wastes, effluent mudflows and other such fulfilling careers offered by the mining company.

In 1787 as the Russian Empress Catherine II journeyed to the Crimea along the banks of the Dnieper River, she was greeted by impressive settlements and villages. The reality was that the villages where recently erected by her lover, Grigory Potemkin. These were meant to fool the empress. They would be disassembled after being viewed and then, being portable; they were re-assembled farther down her route.

As apolitical economics was infected with a viral political gene, the term “Potemkin Village” came to be anything built to deceive, camouflage or hide an ugly reality. Today we can often see this in the vicinity of the international airport, along scenic routes by the bay or at the perimeters of slum and squatter neighborhoods.

Unfortunately, some of those mining communities that are part of the mandatory media tour are nothing more than Hollywood backlots or Potemkin villages. Nothing more than a publicity stunt to accompany the greenwashing campaign launched by mining companies as they cite questionable economic data they imagine would appeal more to conflicted legislators or starving opinion writers and mining engineers than it would to the tragically victimized and affected farming or fishing constituencies now extinct under the political subdivision represented by solons.

Add to the default Potemkin village tour a healthy dose of publicity, throw in millions more for a full fledged campaign, purchase meters of column space, hours of prime time talk shows, fund strategic congressional seats and popular albeit intellectually low-caliber mouthpieces, and the greenwashing spin cycle revs up, enters a new chapter of the PR playbook, and can fool even the highest officials of the land.