Unhappy Valley
New Zealand Listener : 15th September 2008
Things are hotting up for protesters determined to prevent Solid Energy digging up a pristine valley for a coal mine.
Pete Lusk pokes another log into the pot-bellied stove in the middle of the cosy yurt, and ponders the chances of keeping state-owned coal miner Solid Energy out of the untouched West Coast valley spreading below us.
Yes, he concludes: the campaign to preserve Happy Valley – one of the most bitterly fought environmental protests since the Timberlands battle of the 1990s – will succeed.
Lusk, a fit and lean 60-year-old, has a nose for these things. Over the years, the veteran campaigner has helped see off native loggers from the forests of the Oparara and the Okarito, and from south of the Cook River; he has blockaded logging roads and occupied forests, and was one of those who kicked up such a storm over Timberlands’ “sustainable” native logging scheme that the newly elected Labour-led Government axed it in late 1999.
Latterly, Lusk has been a father figure to the bunch of young firebrands who go under the banner of the Save Happy Valley Coalition, a group determined to prevent Solid Energy from digging up this pristine valley north-east of Westport. He likes their youthful enthusiasm, their unwillingness to be deterred by practicalities. “They’ve put up a good fight,” he says approvingly. “Solid Energy hasn’t moved into the valley.”
Under a clear, blue midwinter sky, Lusk has guided us on the three-hour tramp through streams, snow and scrub, across spectacular raised rock pavements, and up to the elevated, shallow valley about which so much fuss has been made. It’s carpeted in a velvet sweep of red tussock and flanked by native bush. The only sound is the distant drone of heavy machinery working 24 hours a day at Solid Energy’s giant Stockton mine, just beyond a low ridge to the north.
There are many more beautiful places on the West Coast, but this area – part of the Upper Waimangaroa Valley – is nevertheless prized by conservationists for its biodiversity. In geological parlance, it’s called “coal measure” – heavily fractured country where coal seams are overlaid by infertile blocks of sandstone. It’s a cold, wet, harsh place where only the most hardy creatures and plants survive – among them great spotted kiwi, kaka, weka and an endangered native snail, Powelliphanta patrickensis.
Ten years ago, a Department of Conservation report described the area as nationally significant, and recommended that it be included in the Protected Natural Areas Programme.
Instead, it is slated as an open-cast coal mine.
In 2005, Solid Energy won the right to develop the so-called Cypress mine – covering 260ha and comprising two open-cast pits – subject to over 80 pages of stiff environmental conditions. Among them is the requirement to remove, store and rehabilitate the red tussock wetland that lines the valley floor (a feat that renowned conservationist and Otago University emeritus professor of botany Alan Mark says has never been performed successfully in the world), protect the kiwi population, relocate snails, and undertake years of predator control even after the mine has finished.
Expecting the diggers and coal trucks to start pushing through from Stockton immediately, 75 Save Happy Valley stalwarts set up a protest camp on a hillside overlooking the valley in January 2006. The occupation would continue until the miner was defeated, they declared.
A camp kitchen – a sturdy pole structure draped with tarpaulins – went in first, then a tarp “cloakroom”, which provides intermediate shelter from the 6m of rain that falls in the region each year. Just before the winter of 2006, a supporter from Motueka donated the Mongolian-style yurt – a round canvas hut supported by bamboo poles and with a raised wooden floor. It took 18 people seven hours to cart it from the road end to the camp.
One ingenious group member fashioned the efficient little pot-bellied stove that makes the place habitable in the middle of winter, and an igloo-shaped plastic shelter houses a stack of dry firewood. The kitchen is equipped with a gas cooker, well-stocked gas bottles, neatly labelled snap-lock plastic food containers, an array of pots and utensils, and a generous supply of tea bags.
All that’s missing is action. For two-and-a-half years, nothing has happened. No diggers, no blasting, no haul roads, no big trucks. A couple of Australian activists visited the camp recently, expecting the frisson of greenies pitted against miners. They didn’t stay long. The indefinite occupation has turned into more of an occasional visitation by a committed core of protesters. At the first anniversary of the camp in early 2007, 50 people tramped in; at the second anniversary, it was down to 25.
Those who frequent the valley are forced to read the tea leaves for clues as to the mining company’s intentions: some pegs in the ground here, a hint of drilling activity there. Solid Energy’s latest environment report hints that mining will start this year, and Lusk says the company recently brought local kaumatua to the site to bless the kiwi – a sign that something is up.
En route to the camp, we meet a group of Save Happy Valley campaigners – five, plus a 14-month-old baby – who are heading back to civilisation after a few days’ vigil at the yurt. Among them is Daniel Rae, a quietly spoken Christchurch builder who achieved prominence for the anti-mining cause by scaling Solid Energy’s head office building and also by chaining himself to the Midland Line, along which export coal from Stockton is transported to the Port of Lyttelton.
“Open-cast mining in the 21st century, especially in kiwi habitat, is not a goer,” Rae says. “The Government talks about climate change, and its state-owned enterprise does this. It’s up to us to take direct action to stop them.” He admits it’s been hard to keep the campaign going when nothing is happening, but says activists will be out in force at the first sign of mining in the valley.
West Coaster Paul West (who gives his name only reluctantly, saying he fears his employer might be punished by pro-mining customers) complains that the protesters have been tarred as snail-loving weirdos – a reference to Save Happy Valley’s headline-grabbing attempts during 2006 and 2007 to obstruct Solid Energy’s multimillion-dollar programme to remove and relocate rare Powelliphanta augustus snails from the Mt Augustus ridgeline at the western edge of the Stockton mine (see sidebar, page 30).
He says his main grievance is the threat to the wetland and the possibility that kiwi will be killed (a Solid Energy expert told the Environment Court that up to 10 birds may be lost), at a time when millions of dollars are being spent elsewhere in the country to salvage the kiwi population.
“And Big Corp is riding roughshod over ordinary people. It’s the whole David and Goliath thing.”
Big Corp, of course, has been famously sprung by activist writer Nicky Hager for using security company Thompson and Clark, which in turn recruited paid informants to infiltrate the Save Happy Valley campaign. West says there have been other insults, too: on one occasion a group of protesters tramped back to the road end to find the local police out in force, doing random seat-belt checks and gathering the names and photos of activists. “It’s fascist. It’s the state and the company in bed together,” he asserts.
But while the Save Happy Valley protesters wait for the coal miner to roll in some heavy machinery to which they can chain themselves in a display of direct action, the higher-ups in the conservation movement have started to turn up the political heat on the mine proposal.
The Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society has cited the protection of the Upper Waimangaroa as one of the 20 most important environmental issues for this year’s election.
This week it was expected to send a slim, hard-hitting dossier to Prime Minister Helen Clark accusing Solid Energy of trashing hundreds of hectares on the Stockton plateau and polluting the adjacent Ngakawau River. Instead of letting a miner with a sorry environmental history loose in untouched and ecologically valuable territory, it argues, the Government should instead hand the Upper Waimangaroa/Happy Valley area over to the Department of Conservation and tell Solid Energy to make do with the coal it has at Stockton.
Forest and Bird advocacy manager Kevin Hackwell thinks the mood is right for politicians looking for votes to put a stop to the Cypress mine, given widespread public concern about climate change and awareness that coal mining is a major contributor, and the Government’s pledge of carbon-neutrality. He sees the issue as a potential rerun of the Timberlands decision of 1999, which Clark has cited as one of her Government’s proudest moments.
“And we’re not saying no coal,” Hackwell says. “We’re just saying don’t go into a new area when you don’t have to. This is a rapacious industry and they’ve got their eyes on the easy stuff … They have coal available to the north, at Stockton. It may be easier to just carry on moving south [to Happy Valley], but they can take coal from elsewhere without destroying that area.”
But the coal in Happy Valley is not at all easy, according to Solid Energy chief executive Don Elder. Indeed, so tough are the conditions imposed on the resource consents for the Cypress mine that throughout 2006 and into the early part of 2007 – by which time the company had originally planned to be extracting coal – the project was uneconomic. In addition, he says, Solid Energy had adopted new internal standards for mine developments in the wake of costly problems at the Spring Creek underground mine near Greymouth, which meant Cypress didn’t get past “go”.
“If [the protesters] had asked us, we would have said, ‘You could probably save yourselves two or three years and then come back and protest.’ But they didn’t ask us.”
Since then, the economics of the mine have improved as the value of the semi-soft coking coal (an ingredient in steel making) that Solid Energy plans to extract from Happy Valley has surged, as it has for other grades of coal.
But Elder says the company is constantly reviewing proposals for new projects. “We have a six-step process in developing a mine and Cypress is only at step four.” No decision on going ahead with the mine is likely until later this year, he says.
In the meantime, Solid Energy is spoilt for choice. It can meet its customers’ requirements for semi-soft coking coal from Spring Creek, while up at Stockton – the company’s biggest mine, which produces some of the best coking coal in the world – a boom is under way.
Stockton manager Ian Harvey says that in 2001 it was thought the mine had an economic life of four to five years. Since then, the price paid by steel makers for coking coal has increased more than sixfold (see graph page 32), which means sections of the plateau that were previously uneconomic to mine are now back in contention – including the historic underground Millerton mine at the northern end of Stockton, which the company is now preparing to open-cast.
Stockton is now a 20-year-plus mine, says Harvey.
As production has rocketed over the past few years – from around 500,000 tonnes in the late 1990s to a peak of 2.1 million tonnes in 2006, with a forecast volume of 1.8 million tonnes this year – so has the workforce. Five years ago, 180 workers were onsite; now there are about 600.
And many are on good money. Rangi Hicks, Stockton project manager for Doug Hood Mining, the biggest subcontractor on the site, with 400 staff, says heavy machinery operators make $50,000-60,000 a year, and with overtime can be pushing $85,000. Hicks’ biggest problem is finding enough workers and heavy machinery to keep up with demand.
Stockton is a $500-600 million business, says Harvey – which is good news for Westport. Buller District mayor Pat McManus says the mine is the town’s biggest employer and he regards Solid Energy as a good corporate citizen: it is helping to fund a new leisure centre and has backed the district’s “Vision 2010” urban refurbishment project. Long term, he says, mining will come to an end and the district needs to attract replacement industries, but in the meantime the Stockton boom – and, he hopes, the development of the Cypress mine in Happy Valley – provides a welcome buffer.
Miners have been digging coal out of the Stockton plateau for well over a century, and it has operated as an open-cast mine since the 1950s. It’s a geologically complex area and the coal, while high quality, comes in various types. Consequently, instead of starting at one end and working their way to the other, replacing soil and vegetation as they go, miners have ripped up vast areas of the plateau to get at coal of various specifications that can be blended into recipes to suit the needs of offshore steel mills.
The result is a vast, 700-odd hectare scar of denuded rock and soil – which Green Party leader Jeanette Fitzsimons aptly likened to Mordor – and an appalling legacy of water pollution caused by acid mine drainage (AMD).
AMD happens when exposed rock containing the mineral pyrite reacts with air and rain to produce sulphuric acid, which then leaches metals – including aluminium – from surrounding rock and raises the acidity of streams draining off the mine to a level that’s toxic to fish.
Five years ago, Solid Energy confessed to its awful environmental record and promised to clean up its act. Elder says the company pulled in world experts to help solve the AMD problem – which is made all the more complex by the region’s enormous rainfall and hostile geology – and spent some $10 million just trying to understand and quantify the issue.
Since then, it has put $50-60 million into a new water management system on the site, including a series of settling ponds, sumps, diversion channels and a water treatment plant. At the same time, says Harvey, there’s been a push to reduce the number of working coalfaces – and thus the amount of rock exposed to the weather – so that the source of AMD is minimised.
According to Phil Rossiter, Stockton’s environmental manager, all this has been accompanied by heightened environmental awareness at the mine. “These days people are citing water management as our single biggest achievement.”
Rossiter, a lover of the West Coast’s bush, mountains and rivers and one of 30-odd environmental specialists recruited by the company in the past few years (previously there were none), passionately believes it’s possible to mine coal and look after the environment at the same time.
“I’d rather work from the inside than fire shots from the outside … There’s a great opportunity to take this place from being a laggard to a leader. Nothing will change overnight. But I’m a pragmatist and this is a very important business for New Zealand.”
But Forest and Bird’s Hackwell snorts with contempt at the suggestion the miner has redeemed itself. No matter how it’s dressed up, coal mining remains an unsustainable extractive industry, just as native logging was.
“You only have to look at the old shanty towns around the Coast where extractive industries have done just that – they’ve extracted and they’ve gone … They will pay the good wages and do all these things until there is none left, and then they will just pack up and do something else. There’s nothing sustainable about consuming a finite resource.”
Hackwell concedes Solid Energy is now working on improved water management at Stockton, “but they’ve been dragged kicking and screaming”. Along the way, he claims, the company has played “mean and hard”, including unsuccessfully trying to sue Forest and Bird for nearly $380,000 in costs over the group’s failed 2005 Environment Court appeal against the Cypress resource consents – despite a clear message from the court that the appeal had been properly brought and that costs were not appropriate.
“These are the guys who put out their glossy annual environment reports and they have failed year after year after year to do anything about the coal fines and acid mine pollution. The Upper Ngakawau River is just appalling.”
Indeed it is, but not as appalling as it was. Debbie Chorley and Billy Tyler have led us from the tiny settlement of Ngakawau, at the foot of Stockton mine, along the heavily forested riverside track to the Mangatini Falls. This is where the Mangatini Stream, which flows off the mine, joins the Ngakawau River.
The torrent of water cascading off the falls is a milky yellow. The pool at the bottom ought to be a splendid bathing spot, but no one in their right mind would want to swim in water that looks like this. From the falls out to the sea, the Ngakawau runs an opaque yellowish-brown.
Chorley and Tyler, founding members of environmental group Ngakawau Riverwatch, inspect the vegetation around the base of the falls, much of it coated in yellow powder. Some is blackened and dead. Running her fingers along fresh green flax, Chorley observes: “That’s good. That’s all fresh growth.”
A year or two ago, she says, this was a “deathscape”. Much of the vegetation around the falls had been poisoned by the acidic water spraying from the falls. For her and Tyler, the yellow water and fresh vegetation represent progress.
The awful discoloration is caused by Solid Energy’s 15-month-old programme of dosing the Mangatini Stream with lime to reduce the acidity of the water. Eventually, when an enormous new sump up at the mine is completed, the lime-treated water should settle out before flowing off the plateau as clear as any other West Coast river.
To the outsider, it looks like a sewer, but this year the water in the Ngakawau was good enough to lure the whitebait back. And Solid Energy’s national environmental operations manager, Phil Lindsay, says freshwater crayfish – something not seen in a long time – were recently spotted in the Mangatini Stream.
Chorley, a veteran of environmental protest group Coromandel Watchdog who moved to the Coast in 1998, joined local miners Tyler and Dick Marsh to form Riverwatch in 2001. She thought she’d left her activist days behind when she shifted south, but the sight of locals unable to swim or fish in their dreadfully degraded river prompted her to fight for change.
In the early years it was a bitter campaign. Senior mine management openly described the Ngakawau as an industrial river. Marsh and Tyler – a third-generation miner who lives on the banks of the Ngakawau – were, along with other miners who spoke up, blacklisted from working at Stockton. The word was put about that the group was trying to have the mine closed. Chorley and her allies had to batter down the doors of a resistant Solid Energy and an uninterested West Coast Regional Council to be heard.
But two-thirds of Ngakawau’s population of 600 joined Riverwatch, and things began to change when a new manager, Mike Lynn, took over at Stockton. The company formed a community consultative group in 2004, and Chorley says in recent times Riverwatch has been kept well informed. In particular, she credits Lindsay for his commitment to restoring the river.
“He doesn’t see us as the enemy, and we haven’t been extremists. We have just been adjacent neighbours, and we have given them room to change.”
For his part, Elder says it’s Riverwatch, not critics “at the other end of the country”, that he wishes to satisfy. He concedes only in the past year has the health of the river really started to improve.
These days, Elder says, the company must constantly “earn the right to mine” by meeting high environmental expectations. So, has it earned the right to mine Happy Valley?
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. The conditions imposed by the Environment Court are rigorous, but the company has accepted them. Even seemingly Herculean tasks like removing and rehabilitating the complex tussock wetland are achievable, he insists. “People say it hasn’t been done before, but it has – we’re doing it on Stockton, and we’re transplanting [tussock] very successfully on Stockton … We have closure targets we have to achieve, and we will have to keep on going until we achieve them.”
But if, in years to come, this and other mine mitigation efforts are found to have failed, says Pete Lusk, Elder and his team will be long gone.
Yes, Lusk acknowledges, mining is important to the West Coast economy, and it runs deep in the history and consciousness of Coasters. He realises as well as anyone that the coal boom is injecting wealth into Westport: until recently he was repiling houses for a living, and among his customers were Stockton miners who, in earlier times, may not have been able to afford such an investment in their homes.
“It’s hard being a conservationist when you are threatening the economy and people’s jobs – and we are. Someone has to speak up for the environment, but that doesn’t mean we are blind to the consequences. But with mining, it’s like the logging debate – we should stop while we have something left.”
