Freeport-McMoRan loves money and hates the environment

folks... it's all about MONEY...

The closest most people will ever get to remote Papua, or the operations of Freeport-McMoRan, is a computer tour using Google Earth to swoop down over the rain forests and glacier-capped mountains where the American company mines the world's largest gold reserve.



Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold, an American company, operates this mine in the easternmost province of Indonesia, on the island of New Guinea.



A view of lowland area where Freeport has sent its mine waste, taken in 2000. By today, almost one billion tons of waste have been sent down the river from the copper and gold mine.

With a few taps on a keyboard, satellite images quickly reveal the deepening spiral that Freeport has bored out of its Grasberg mine as it pursues a virtually bottomless store of gold hidden inside. They also show a spreading soot-colored bruise of almost a billion tons of mine waste that the New Orleans-based company has dumped directly into a jungle river of what had been one of the world's last untouched landscapes.

freeport is hardly unique among american and other first world corporations that have no qualms about trashing the world we live in as long as they can get away with it... all one has to do is look at the terrible destruction wrought by companies in bolivia, as one example, or even in many of the western united states like, for instance, montana...

but in irian jaya, freeport is engaging in environmental destruction on a massive scale...

Much of that waste has already been dumped in the mountains surrounding the mine or down a system of rivers that descends steeply onto the island's low-lying wetlands, close to Lorentz National Park, a pristine rain forest that has been granted special status by the United Nations.

A multimillion-dollar 2002 study by an American consulting company, Parametrix, paid for by Freeport and its joint venture partner, Rio Tinto, and not previously made public, noted that the rivers upstream and the wetlands inundated with waste were now "unsuitable for aquatic life."

but freeport has nothing to hide... ya, right...

Freeport says it strives to mitigate the environmental effect of its mine, while also maximizing the benefits to its shareholders. The [NY] Times made repeated requests to Freeport and to the Indonesian government to visit the mine and its surrounding area, which requires special permission for journalists. All were turned down.

go read the entire article... it's a massive exposé of untrammeled greed...

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