2590 1. GROUND ZERO: WHERE PROJECTS MEET PEOPLE I have spent much of my working life in the space between — between people and organizations, between companies and communities, between the technical and the social and the institutional, in the resource sector across Canada and internationally. It is a space where complex projects collide with complex realities, where different world views meet, where people who attach value to fundamentally different things have to find a way to see each other in the picture they are creating together. My role has always been that of the outsider-inside: not embedded within any one organization or interest, but navigating the cracks between them — between mining corporations and communities, governments and Indigenous peoples, environmentalists and resource developers. It is in those cracks, where interests collide, overlap and often conflict, that the real work happens. Over five decades of practice, I have come to describe this body of work as The Art of How — working with the parties to understand what each attaches value to, and finding a way to bring those elements together in a creative exercise so that everyone can see themselves in the picture they are building together. The more the parties own the way, the more committed they will be to delivering the outcome. My role is to lead without owning — because if I own it, they don’t. And if they don’t own it, it doesn’t get done. Mining projects struggle for many reasons — technical, engineering, financial, regulatory and political. Yet in the preoccupation with managing those variables, one of the most consequential is often overlooked: the path a project travels to reach an outcome. That path is where projects meet people. It is where risk is managed, value is created or lost, relationships are built or damaged, and decisions either hold or unravel. The pressure to move faster is real. Geopolitical forces are intensifying that pressure — compressing the time available to discover, access and develop the critical minerals on which the economies and technologies of the world we have built now depend. But speed without a credible way of making decisions can defeat itself. It can compress the very relationships, information flows and trust conditions on which durable development depends. There is an important history to draw from. In June 1998, seventy-six participants from eleven Latin American countries gathered in Lima to ask how mining could contribute to balanced, harmonious and sustainable development. Industry, governments, communities, Indigenous peoples, research institutions, NGOs and multilateral organizations were in the room. The question was not abstract. It was whether a depleting resource could still leave a sustainable legacy if the value generated by extraction was converted into durable economic, environmental, social and institutional outcomes. That gathering was part of a broader arc: the World Commission on Environment and Development, Canada’s Round Tables on the Environment and the Economy, the Whitehorse Mining Leadership Accord, the Lima workshop, and then the global Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) project. The World Mining Congress now returns to Lima. The questions have not disappeared. The stakes are higher. 2. SUSTAINABILITY AS STRATEGY, NOT A REPORTING CATEGORY When Gro Harlem Brundtland introduced sustainable development to the world in 1987, she was careful to insist that ‘the environment does not exist as a sphere separate from human actions, ambitions, and needs.’ She understood that the heartbeat of sustainability is human behaviour. The definition she offered — development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs — challenged the world to embrace a new way of thinking, being and acting, and to find resolutions for conflicts in values, interest and power. It spoke to questions of conduct and culture. In the decades since, we have struggled to hold onto that essence.¹ The original force of sustainability was strategic. It was not simply a desired state, a reporting system or an environmental label. It was a way of making decisions in circumstances where environmental, social and economic considerations must be held together rather than sequenced or traded off after the fact. Those three streams do not exist in the abstract. On any watershed, in any region and around any mine, they are personified by people and institutions: communities, Indigenous nations, local governments, regulators, employees, investors, suppliers, environmental organizations and companies. Each operates with different currencies of value. For one party, value may mean return on capital. For another, cultural
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