WORKERS CAPITAL
Feds must force pensions to fund Canadian mining, Lassonde, Giustra say

 
Colin McClelland | February 25, 2024 | 

Highland Valley Copper Operations in British Columbia sports the flag.

 (Image courtesy of Teck Resources.)

Ottawa has to pressure pension funds to invest billions in Canadian mining, a radical change from their almost non-existent stakes, if the industry is ever going to produce enough metals to fight climate change, veteran entrepreneurs Pierre Lassonde and Frank Giustra say.


Canada’s eight largest pension funds hold some C$2.1 trillion in assets but only a quarter was even invested in the country last year, according to research by Montreal-based fund manager Letko Brosseau. The so-called Maple Eight devoted just 3% to domestic equities, the lowest of a group of six countries including the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan, data show.

“They’ve taken the vast majority of this money – 75% of it – and invested it outside Canada to create jobs outside of Canada to the detriment of Canadians,” Lassonde, a founder of Franco-Nevada (TSX: FNV; NYSE: FNV) and a former president of Newmont (NYSE: NEM; TSX: NGT), said in a phone interview this month. “Essentially, the mining industry has been ignored.”

Pension funds are not investing in large Canadian mining companies, which may in turn invest in juniors, in part because few domestic options remain. Switzerland-based Glencore’s (LSE: GLEN) acquisition of most of Teck Resources’ (TSX: TECK.A/TECK.B; NYSE: TECK) coking coal assets in November for about C$9 billion is the latest large deal scooping up Canadian assets.

Xstrata, now part of Glencore, bought nickel giant Falconbridge for C$39 billion in 2006, the same year Brazil’s Vale (NYSE: VALE) purchased the country’s other main nickel producer, Inco, for C$19 billion. Australia’s Rio Tinto (NYSE: RIO; LSE: RIO; ASX: RIO) followed a year later in acquiring aluminum producer Alcan for C$38 billion. Lassonde and Giustra say pension fund investing might have helped them stay.

“We’re talking about very large companies, mining giants that we lost to foreigners,” said Giustra, who founded Lions Gate Entertainment (Fahrenheit 9/11, The Hunger Games) and helped start Wheaton Precious Metals (TSX: WPM, NYSE: WPM; LSE: WPM) and Endeavour Mining (TSX: EDV; LSE: EDV).

“These aren’t risky companies. This was the backbone of our mining industry in this country.”

Rules eroded

Indeed, Canadian pensions were required to invest 90% of their assets domestically in 1990, but federal governments gradually reduced the limit before removing it entirely in 2005. Total domestic exposure as a percentage of assets ranges from 55% held by the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan to 13% run by Public Sector Pension Investments (PSP). The average of other pension funds around the world is 52%, according to Letko Brosseau.

Pensions are the largest repository of wealth in many countries and globally hold nearly $50 trillion. Reaching net zero emissions by 2050 will require annual clean energy investment worldwide to more than triple by 2030 to around $4 trillion, according to the International Energy Agency. Just mining enough battery metals over the next three years will cost as much as $450 billion, the agency said. In 2022, Ottawa budgeted nearly C$4 billion in spending on critical minerals by 2030 but it’s not clear how pension funds are being engaged to support projects.

“The government of Canada continues to engage with critical minerals stakeholders, including pension plans and other institutional, arms-length investors,” Michael MacDonald, a spokesman for the federal Natural Resources Ministry, said in an emailed reply to questions.

It was MacDonald’s only reference to pension funds in what was otherwise a page-long list of government programs stemming from its critical minerals strategy. He suggested the Canada Development Investment Corp. (CDEV), a federal Crown corporation that advises the government on financial matters, might explain how mining companies could seek funding from the C$15 billion Canada Growth Fund. CDEV didn’t reply in time for this story.
Pensions mum

Pension funds themselves were even more reticent to discuss the issue. Only the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), which Lassonde praised for its resource funding, replied to emails seeking comment. The Canada Pension Plan (CPP), the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP), the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS), and the PSP didn’t reply or declined to speak.

“CDPQ is active in the mining sector in Quebec and Canada and has an investment team dedicated to the sector,” Kate Monfette, the pension’s media director, said by email. “Among other things, with a fund like Sodémex which supports exploration projects, we remain on the lookout for developments and opportunities in the mining and materials ecosystem. Our priority is to focus on the most promising companies in order to help them develop while generating a return for our depositors.”

British Columbia Investment Management (BCI) said it invests 29.4% in Canada and referred other inquiries to its annual report. OMERS said it wouldn’t comment on the topic.

Canada should consider Australia’s example, Lassonde and Giustra said. Its pensions, which are called superannuation funds, hold A$3.5 trillion (C$3.1 trillion), the third-largest amount behind the US and the UK. Domestic equities make up 21.9% of their assets. The large stakes prevent foreign takeovers, the entrepreneurs argued.

“That’s what keeps their domestic mining industry alive,” Giustra said. “We’re a comparable country in terms of how prolific our mining opportunities are, same as Australia, and we don’t have that same opportunity.”

Letko Brosseau says Canada’s top eight pension funds have invested more in China than in Canadian companies: C$88 billion versus C$81 billion. CPP has 2% in domestic shares, BCI has 0.5% and OTPP has 0.1%, the firm says.

Economics urged

Giustra said mining CEOs must lobby pension funds with moral suasion for why they should invest in Canada and make an economic argument. With China’s current woes from property market turmoil and a long-term population decline in motion, its boom years are over and it’s time for Canadian pension funds to repatriate funds to the world’s second-largest country by landmass that has top-tier mining regulations.

Lassonde went further and said federal and provincial governments must legislate pension funds to increase their investments in Canadian resource companies. He’s backed Letko Brosseau’s presentations to finance ministers in BC and Ontario as well as to officials in Ottawa.

“We’re trying to get to the decision makers and trying to make them understand what Canada is losing by doing nothing,” he said. “They created these funds, it’s in their power to legislate how these funds are managed.”

Giustra, who heads private equity firm Fiore Group invested in Aris Gold (TSX: ARIS) with mines in Colombia, and Ontario-focused explorer West Red Lake Gold Mines (TSXV: WRLG), said Canadian asset managers slashed their non-pension dedicated mining funds to C$2.8 billion in 2022 from C$16 billion in 2010.

“There’s just no source of capital, the industry starves,” he said. “You don’t have the seniors funding them, the pension funds aren’t there and we’ve lost the traditional mining funds here as well.”

Lassonde, who led a group of investors assembling an offer in May for Teck’s coking coal assets that was later beat by Glencore, said he approached BCI and Ontario pensions for input but got no response.

“If you want steel and you want the lowest carbon-emitting steel in the world, it’s that coal, OK, and there was nobody to talk to,” he said. “In Australia, we could have done this deal in about five days.”

Life in a northern B.C. boomtown

Matt Simmons
Local Journalism Initiative
Fri, June 23, 2023 

LONG READ

The town of Kitimat, B.C., is folded into a forested valley, tucked back from where the ocean meets the land at the end of a roughly 100-kilometre long inlet. The hub of the community is a jumbled complex of malls with a handful of shops, restaurants and offices serving the population of around 8,000. You can’t see the ocean from here or the sprawling industrial complexes that crowd the waterfront.

Kitimat was settled on Haisla lands in the 1950s, a planned community built on a promise of prosperity from the Aluminum Company of Canada, also known as Alcan. The town was designed to serve the company’s energy-intensive smelter, which would be powered by a dam built on the other side of a range of snow-capped mountains. Now owned by international mining giant Rio Tinto, the smelter’s smokestacks have been puffing ever since.

Across the harbour from Alcan is Cʼimaucʼa (Kitamaat Village), a reserve home to around 700 members of the Haisla Nation. Nestled along the shoreline directly opposite the industrial complex, the village has had a front-row seat from day one.

Kitimat’s slogan is a “marvel of nature and industry.” But which comes first: nature or industry? Can they exist in harmony? As the community adapts to a burst of new growth linked to LNG Canada, Cedar LNG and other proposed projects, it’s a question the town has to answer, one way or another.

With “Uncle Al,” as it’s known locally, paving the way in the 1950s, other companies saw a chance to capitalize on the industry-friendly town and its access to marine shipping routes. In the 1970s, Eurocan opened a pulp mill a few kilometres up the Kitimat River estuary, and in the 1980s, Methanex started producing and exporting methanol and ammonia from the waterfront. Neither stood the test of time. In 2005, Methanex announced it was shutting down, citing high gas prices. Five years later, Eurocan followed suit. With two of three major employers gone, Kitimat slipped into a period of economic decline.

Then LNG Canada, a joint venture including some of the largest fossil fuel companies in the world, started talking about building its liquefaction facility on the former Methanex site. The promise of good, high-paying jobs fit a familiar narrative of industry taking care of the community. With buy-in from the Haisla elected council and support from the town, the project was approved by the provincial and federal governments in 2016. When the consortium announced a final investment decision in 2018, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called it the largest private investment in Canadian history.

Four years after the first shovel hit the ground, Kitimat is undeniably busier. A continual parade of white work trucks funnels through the town and convoys of shuttle buses ferry workers between job sites and temporary housing. That housing is like a small town, complete with streetlights, roads, restaurants, medical care and other services — all fenced off from the surrounding community.

For more than a decade, the B.C. government has been courting the gas export industry. The province has subsidized LNG Canada and the Coastal GasLink pipeline to the tune of more than $6 billion in tax breaks, incentives and other forms of financial support. The pair of projects will connect rich gas deposits in B.C.’s northeast to overseas markets. Kitimat sits in the middle.

Whether it’s the proverbial boom-and-bust cycle or a different kind of trend, the coastal community is full of anticipation. The Narwhal spent some time in Kitimat hearing from locals what life is like during this period of change. Here are their stories.

Phil Germuth isn’t shy about his support for industry. He grew up in the community and is currently serving his third term as mayor. He said the jobs at the smelter kept the town alive after Methanex and Eurocan shut down, but there were hard times for several years.

“People have said a lot about boom and bust,” he told The Narwhal in the town offices on the top floor of the City Centre Mall. “I would never ever call us ‘bust’ because we’ve had the aluminum industry here for 65 years now. Things were really tough then. The housing market was down and you saw a lot more places starting to look pretty bad.”

“That’s clearly changed,” he added with a smile.

Through an agreement with LNG Canada, the community has received more than $16 million in taxes since 2019 and will get an additional $8 million this year. Once the facility starts operating, the municipality will get $9.7 million annually for the first five years. New houses are being built and old ones renovated. Residents directly inconvenienced by the Coastal GasLink pipeline, which winds its way through suburban neighbourhoods, are financially compensated. Germuth said there’s a “confidence in the community” that hasn’t been felt for more than a decade.

“Families that had to leave after Methanex closed are now coming back, and their kids are now working here,” he said. “I believe the overwhelming majority of Kitimat does support industrial development — when it’s done right.”

But the influx of industry in the community doesn’t mean the “streets are paved in gold,” he added. Many businesses remain boarded up, derelict buildings sit on overgrown lots and housing is a major issue.

“Having that industrial tax base is clearly much more of a benefit than it is a burden, but it does give you unique challenges that nobody else has,” he said, noting as an example local businesses have to offer competitive wages to keep employees happy. “Otherwise they’re all going to leave and go to industry.”

He said the town, like many others in the north, is overdue for major infrastructure updates and the council is trying to balance its priorities during this period of rapid growth.

“We haven’t been able to pave a road now for over two years because we just don’t have that in our budget. We’re trying to do everything else that we have to do.”

The town recently replaced a decades-old bridge over the Kitimat River and is building B.C.’s first 24-hour daycare to support shift workers. A new firehall is on the table as is an upgrade to the swimming pool.

To Germuth, a key success of the LNG Canada project is it strengthened connections between Kitimat elected leaders and Haisla elected leaders.

“The political relationship between the District of Kitimat and the Haisla Nation Council, it wasn’t there, it was terrible,” he said. “LNG Canada came in … and they would bring us into the same meeting. That’s all it really took, was the two councils just hanging out together, getting to know each other at a project that we both support and that we’re both going to be greatly benefiting from.”

He believes the town’s future is promising.

“Kitimat is built on industry. We realize the advantages you have by having industry in your town. Clearly we’re not perfect — we have challenges like everybody else. But if you were to look at most other communities, I would say we’re probably in a little better position.”

A self-described “Saskatchewan farmboy,” Tracey Hittel moved to Kitimat when he was 21 for a job at the methanol plant. He met his wife there and they have two kids together. When the plant shut down, he shifted gears and started up his own businesses — fishing charters, water taxi services and a lodge. He recently handed over the reins after a stint as president of the Kitimat Chamber of Commerce.

“We don’t plan on going anywhere,” he said, driving his boat across the harbour from a small marina while checking his phone for a picture of a halibut he caught a few days before. “It’s pretty easy living here, you know?”

Between Alcan and LNG Canada, there’s almost no access to the water from town. Hittel said that means a lot of the community is disconnected from the ocean and unaware of risks associated with increased marine traffic and disturbance to fish habitat.

“I’ve been doing this for so many years, working at Methanex and then starting my own fishing guiding [business],” he said. “I’ve got to see all aspects of it, from the environmental side and the industry side. Most people are naive. People here don’t understand what’s coming. I would say 80 per cent of the population has never been on the ocean.”

LNG Canada will employ up to 350 people in full-time positions for its first phase of operations. It will also support more in ancillary positions, like tugboat pilots and other related jobs. For example, LNG Canada recently awarded a contract worth more than $500 million to a Haisla-led marine services venture.

Construction jobs have kept the community buzzing for the past few years. In April, there were nearly 7,000 workers in Kitimat building the facility, according to an LNG Canada spokesperson. The majority are employed through the consortium’s engineering, procurement and construction contractor, known by its acronym JFJV, which is not locally owned. Hittel said this means few local businesses have been able to grow as a result of the project.

“One thing I don’t like about what’s happening with these contractors — that money is not staying in the community,” he explained. “It’s not somebody that had the gumption to say, ‘I want to start my own company and start being a supplier to LNG Canada,’ like many young companies have over the years working for Rio Tinto. This opportunity hasn’t really flourished in Kitimat.”

LNG Canada didn’t directly answer questions about how many locals were employed at the project but said less than two per cent of the workers come from outside Canada.

“In both construction and later in operations, LNG Canada is committed to hiring locally first, then within B.C. and Canada,” the spokesperson told The Narwhal in an email. “As of April 2023, LNG Canada and its contractors and subcontractors have awarded more than $4.1 billion in contracts and procurement to businesses in British Columbia.”

The consortium has also invested $5 million in “meaningful trades training and development programs designed to increase the participation of local area residents, Indigenous communities and British Columbians in trades and construction-related activities,” according to LNG Canada.

Hittel said he’s not convinced the project is living up to the promises that were made when the consortium first came to town. On the water, he pointed at the LNG Canada terminal, looming up above his boat.

“All these modules, see them all sitting there? They all have to go on site. They came from ships, they got offloaded and they’ve got to be moved.” He said building the modules overseas and bringing them to Kitimat to be assembled was a lost opportunity for more local jobs.

He added the construction of the liquefaction facility and the pipeline is taking a toll on the town. Between LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink, the number of people in Kitimat has more than doubled.

Though it’s hard to pin down the exact impact these projects — and the shadow population they bring in — have had on local infrastructure, Hittel said everything from roads to water supply have taken a hit.

For all his frustrations, Hittel is decidedly not anti-industry. He just wants his community to fully benefit. He’s doing what he can to make the most of the industrial boom. He noted he’s getting trained in spill response and will be at the Alcan dock that evening.

“Rio Tinto has a ship coming in here at six o’clock tonight,” he said. “What we do for them is when a ship comes in and the ship throws the ropes to the people on shore, we have our boat right there in case someone goes into the drink.”

And when the big LNG carriers start arriving, he’ll be around.

Dustin Gaucher, grandson of the late Wa’xaid Cecil Paul, a revered Xenaksiala Elder who passed away in 2020, stood up from his kitchen table and shook a frog rattle he made. Eyes closed, he boomed out an ancient song.

“When I get my name, this is what I want sung at my feast. All the Kitlope chiefs used to sing this.”

Gaucher lives with his family in a small, expensive rental house in a Kitimat neighbourhood overlooking the town. He has a complicated relationship with his community and ongoing conflict with the Haisla elected council.

His focus right now is on his responsibilities to “wake up” his language and culture and pass it on to youth, he said.

“What I’ve been doing is basically learning everything that we’ve forgotten,” he told The Narwhal, describing his journey with the Haisla language, stories and songs and connections with the land. He credits the teachings of his Elders for guiding him as a child, and now.

“That’s my magic canoe,” he said, pointing to an image painted on a drum he made. “This is the world of the physical realm, so that’s the world we live in and that’s why it has a normal killer whale. And this is the realm of the dead — that’s Wa’xaid’s magic canoe and that’s my baba (grandfather) G’psgolox, Wa’xaid’s brother. That’s them guiding me from the other side in my canoe so I always stay on track.”

In late 2021, when police arrested Wet’suwet’en land defenders and their supporters who were attempting to prevent Coastal GasLink from drilling under the Wedzin Kwa (Morice River), Gaucher and a few others travelled to Gitxsan territory to show solidarity. They were met with heavily armed tactical units of the RCMP.

“We had sniper rifles [aimed at] us,” he said, choking back tears. “I told these officers, ‘This is Canada, you are not allowed to point guns at unarmed civilians.’ ” He said he called them out for “pointing guns at innocent people and children” as helicopters flew over the gas station and an elementary school.

Gaucher said he’s not totally opposed to LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink but he doesn’t stand for colonial violence against Indigenous people. Speaking out publicly alienated him from much of his community, he said, who he described as “too afraid to speak.”

“What’s crazy is being classified as one of those ‘crazy anti-pipeline people’ because not once did I say I was against it,” he said, his fists clenched on the table.

He hopes neighbouring nations would come show their support if Haisla people were subjected to the same treatment as Wet’suwet’en land defenders. What he wants most is to repair what was broken during colonization. He talked about grease trails and how the trade networks connected the Haisla, Xenaksiala, Wet’suwet’en, Nuxalk and others. When Indigenous people across B.C. were moved onto reserves and forced into residential schools, the trails grew over and the connections were severed.

“They’ve trained us to hurt ourselves,” he said. “And then they’ve trained us not to talk to our neighbours, to the neighbours we used to trade with — we’re isolated and we fight amongst ourselves. That’s what my grandfather calls ‘crabs in a bucket.’ ”

He paused and shook his head. “The only destination for it is in your boiling pot on the stove.”

To heal and move forward, the youth need to reconnect with songs, stories and language, he said. Through the youth, those rekindled connections can be brought back to the Elders and to his generation, spreading through the community.

“My whole goal in the long run is to support the youth,” he said, dreaming about bringing ceremony, songs and dances back to Haisla territory. “I want to start dancing them again in our lands — our trees, our plants, they all remember. When we hit our drum, it’s the heartbeat of Mother Earth.”

“The old ways are good. That’s why they’re there.”

As members of a local environmental group, Cheryl Brown and Lucy McRae have been working for years to minimize the impacts of industry and ensure development is done with transparency. They have a good grasp of provincial and federal environmental assessment processes and keep a watchful eye out for potential infractions. They attend municipal meetings and try to keep one foot in the door with industry.

“Kitimat is touted as ‘nature and industry’ but when you listen to most of council and a lot of the chamber of commerce people, they refer to it as industry and nature,” McRae said. “Industry always comes first.”

As they stood chatting with each other on a path that follows Sumgas Creek through the middle of town, a passerby grinned.

“This looks like a regular meeting of the Douglas Channel Watch,” he laughed.

For all its current busyness, it’s still a small town.

The creek is being restored as an offset project. To compensate for damages to fish habitat at the site, LNG Canada is required to complete several restoration projects to previously impacted areas. A series of concrete weirs built decades ago cut off fish access in the Sumgas system. They’re slated for removal, getting the creek closer to its once-natural state. If successful, the restored waterway will see trout and salmon repopulate the heavily disturbed habitat — but Brown and McRae have their doubts.

“This could be a really good news story. It could come out really nice,” Brown said. “The part that wasn’t done properly, though, was they felt there was no need to consult with anyone.”

She said during the environmental assessment process for LNG Canada, there were numerous opportunities for public engagement, ways in which residents could voice their concerns or get answers to questions. But since the project’s approval, that dynamic has changed.

“As soon as the decisions were made, it was just like,” Brown made a slicing motion, “cut off. We’re always scrambling, trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s really difficult to get the full story.”

LNG Canada told The Narwhal it established a quarterly “environmental forum” in 2019 to “inform and engage with local environmental organizations” — including Douglas Channel Watch. A spokesperson said its contractor, JFJV, sends regular notices and invitations directly to the environmental group and others for public engagement opportunities.

The goal of the group is to hold companies like LNG Canada and Coastal GasLink accountable and make sure they’re playing by the rules. Brown said she wishes the pipeline company listened to locals more, noting a section of the route flooded in the fall of 2020, stranding heavy equipment for days. Brown and McRae gestured to the creek and said everyone knows the river and its tributaries regularly flood — Kitimat gets a lot of rain.

They recently managed to meet with the council to discuss the pair of projects and to share information. They were visibly relieved as they told The Narwhal the most recent meeting went well.

“As groups, we’ve been working towards working better with council,” McRae said. “They are willing now to sit down with all the groups and listen to concerns.”

She insisted they’re not coming from a position that shuns industrial development. After all, without Uncle Al, the community wouldn’t exist.

“My biggest concern is everything is for export,” McRae said. “Can we manufacture more stuff here? Once this project is finished and everybody who’s renting houses in town leaves, this town is in big trouble.”

“For me, it’s about the environment,” Brown said. “Maintain the integrity of the land base, the biodiversity. There are huge opportunities here to do this right — and the window is closing.”

For Nick Markowsky and Brandon Highton, opening a brewery in Kitimat was more than an entrepreneurial leap paired with a love of craft beer. Growing up in the town and knowing what it has to offer, especially in terms of access to outdoor recreation, they wanted to help Kitimat’s identity evolve.

“My background is my grandfather came here in the ’50s for Alcan,” Markowsky said, leaning on the bar of the recently opened brewery. “I moved away for a fair bit of time, went to school and kind of just lived all across Western Canada, and missed what Kitimat has to offer and being close to family and friends.”

Like many others who’d left the community, he came back to a job working on Rio Tinto’s smelter modernization project, a $4.8-billion expansion that was completed in 2015.

“It’s been nice to get back into the lifestyle,” he said. “I love knowing that I can walk into the bush and disappear.”

Markowsky said part of the vision behind the brewery was “trying to get away from it just being an industrial town with services being provided to industry.”

“The biggest thing that we, as born-and-raised Kitimat guys, want to share and promote is growth outside of industry,” he explained. “More being given back or produced for the community and less about industry, industry, industry.”

That doesn’t mean, of course, that their business isn’t serving industry workers as well. In the evenings, the parking lot is full of work trucks. Inside, high-visibility vests and steel-toed boots look very much at home in the warehouse-like building. But, as Highton explained, working with the district on the project and building a brand new space in the heart of the community has a knock-on effect.

“They had this downtown revitalization plan that we’ve heard about for years and years, but we’ve never really seen anything be developed down here,” he said.

Since opening in April, they’ve been hearing from people about a desire to see Kitimat invest in infrastructure like more biking and walking paths, green space and other ways to improve quality of life in the community.

“With us going up, we’re starting to see them put more work into developing some of these spaces, starting to pretty up this town because we are a bit dated in some areas,” Highton said. “It’s time for us to get a bit of a refresh here.”

Matt Simmons, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Narwhal

https://www.britannica.com/place/Kitimat

Kitimat | British Columbia, Canada - Encyclopedia Britannica 

3 days ago ... Kitimat, district municipality, on the west coast of British Columbia, Canada. It lies at the head of the Douglas Channel, a deepwater fjord ...

Glencore deal for Teck would face stringent review, Trudeau says
Bloomberg News | April 28, 2023 |

Image: Screenshot from CPAC on Youtube

Teck Resources Ltd. is a “great company” that’s important to Canada’s economy, and any takeover bid for the miner will have to get through a “rigorous process” to win government approval, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said.


The company’s tense fight with Glencore Plc is “certainly something that we’re looking very, very carefully at because it is important to have these great companies in Canada,” Trudeau said Friday in an interview on Bloomberg Television. He promised that, if the government is asked to approve a deal, it will be consistent in applying Canada’s takeover rules “so investors can know what they’re getting into.”

Teck has been trying to fend off an approach from Glencore Plc, but the Vancouver-based company suffered a setback this week when it couldn’t get enough shareholder support for its own plan to separate its metals and coal divisions.

“What’s more important to me is the company behaving the right way towards the environment, whether it’s a local company or a foreign multinational,” Trudeau said. “We have high and stringent expectations, not just on environmental issues but on partnership with indigenous peoples.”

The possibility of the Teck — Canada’s largest diversified base metals producer — being taken over by Glencore has become a broader political issue.

British Columbia Premier David Eby has weighed in against it. The federal government stopped short of that: In a letter to Vancouver’s board of trade this week, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said Canada needs companies like Teck as part of its strategy to move toward cleaner forms of energy.

“The mining of critical minerals is key to the future — and only companies that make serious commitments to ESG and strong partnerships with Indigenous peoples will succeed,” Freeland wrote. “Rest assured that the federal government is following this very closely.”

Any acquisition of Teck would have to undergo a government review, with the final decision likely to fall on the desk of Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, who signed Freeland’s letter with Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson.

Large-scale mining takeovers have been a sensitive topic in Canada ever since a wave of deals more than 15 years ago took out some of the sector’s biggest players, including nickel miner Inco Ltd. and aluminum producer Alcan Inc.

In 2010, when BHP Group proposed a takeover of Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, the government of then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper blocked it on the grounds that it would not be of “net benefit” to the country.

(By Brian Platt and David Westin, with assistance from Randy Thanthong-Knight and Stephen Wicary)

Teck mining magnate stands between Glencore and mega-deal
Bloomberg News | April 8, 2023 |

(Reference image by Teck Resources).

The fate of the biggest mining deal in more than a decade lies in the hands of a Canadian magnate who built a fortune on copper and coal.


Norman Keevil Jr., 85, is the controlling shareholder of Teck Resources Ltd., a mining company he built with his father nearly six decades ago. Today, the Vancouver-based firm produces copper and zinc from a handful of mines scattered across the Americas, and steelmaking coal from lucrative operations in Canada.

Those assets make Teck appealing to global miners hunting for more of the industrial metals that underpin the global transition to cleaner energy, prompting Swiss commodities giant Glencore Plc to make an unsolicited $23 billion bid on March 26.

Glencore’s interest doesn’t guarantee a deal gets done. The Keevil family’s control of Teck through voting shares has long insulated the company from takeovers. While Canadian metals producers like Falconbridge Ltd., Inco Ltd. and Alcan Inc. fell to foreign firms in the early 2000s, the family’s iron grip kept Teck independent. Even now, Keevil shows little interest in selling the company he spent decades building.

“He’s like the last of a generation of mine builders in Canada,” said Pierre Gratton, president of the Mining Association of Canada. “You think of all those people that built Canada’s biggest mining companies, and Norm is the last one standing.”

Keevil was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1938 and spent the better part of his childhood in northern Ontario’s wilderness. His father, a Harvard University graduate turned prospector, abandoned academia in the 1950s to develop a small copper deposit near a remote settlement named Teck Township, about 600 kilometers (375 miles) north of Toronto.

‘Rest on your ores’

The mine became a family business, and Keevil joined his father’s company after completing a doctorate in geology from the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s. In a 2017 memoir, Never Rest on Your Ores: Building a Mining Company, One Stone at a Time, Keevil recalled attending monthly board meetings in a log cabin on an island across from the mine.

“Norm and his dad really started the company from grassroots, with nothing,” said Edward Thompson, 87, who befriended Keevil in college and became one of Teck’s first executives.

Keevil shared his father’s penchant for high-stakes business gambles, and when Keevil took over as chief executive officer in 1982 he enacted a flurry of acquisitions that netted the company some of its most lucrative base metal operations. At the apex of the 1980s oil shock, he borrowed heavily to finance oil and coal projects in Canada’s western provinces. Later, he sought backing from Japanese and Chinese investors to pitch in on expensive mining ventures further north.

Keevil didn’t possess the typical bravado of mining executives of the time, Thompson said, calling him “aggressive in business, but quite soft-spoken — almost shy.”

“When we’re together, I sometimes have trouble hearing him because he’ll talk so quietly,” he said.

Still, Keevil rarely minced words when it came to business. During the battle to acquire Inco in 2006 — which drew bids from foreign firms as well as Teck — Keevil said its CEO “sold Canada out for his own purposes.”

Today, Keevil lives in British Columbia and has largely retreated from public life. He holds a spot in the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame and has departments named after him at the University of Toronto and University of British Columbia. Keevil didn’t respond to Bloomberg requests for comment.

After Glencore’s proposal, Keevil — who holds an honorary position as chairman emeritus at Teck — issued a brief statement on April 3: “I unequivocally support the board’s decision to reject Glencore’s unsolicited offer to acquire Teck. Now is not the time to explore a transaction of this nature.”

Teck has been protected from such takeovers thanks to the Keevil family’s unusual choice in 1969 to separate shares of the company into two classes, with one set carrying more power than the other. Through a holding company called Temagami Mining Co., the family has the majority of class A shares, each entitled to 100 votes, while the public has class B shares, which carry one vote.

“Without the protection of our dual-share structure, Teck would have been swallowed up,” Keevil wrote in his memoir. “We could have been the target of an opportunistic takeover and a longtime Canadian mining champion lost to foreign hands.”

Corporate filings released on April 3 showed that Teck board members began talks with Keevil a year ago to consider collapsing the share structure, citing growing investor unrest. Keevil and the board spent about four months negotiating before arriving at an agreement in January.

That deal, which requires approval from shareholders in an April 26 vote, would give the Keevils six more years of control of a company they’ve so carefully guarded.

“It’s like giving your baby away,” Thompson said. “It’s tough to see something you spent a lifetime creating disappear.”

(Reporting by Jacob Lorinc).

Canadian entrepreneur Lassonde plans to buy blocking stake in Teck’s Elk Valley – Globe and Mail

Reuters | April 8, 2023 |

Pierre Lassonde. (Image by Gilbertus, Wikimedia Commons.)

Canadian entrepreneur Pierre Lassonde is planning to buy a blocking stake in Elk Valley Resources, the steel-making coal unit to be spun off by Teck Resources, the Globe and Mail reported.


In an interview with the Canadian newspaper published on Friday, Lassonde expressed his interest in the soon-to-be divested unit of Teck, saying he wanted the company’s assets to “remain Canadian.”

Lassonde’s comments came after Teck Resources rejected an unsolicited takeover offer of $22.5 billion from Glencore Plc earlier this week, citing reluctance to expose its shareholders to thermal coal, oil, LNG and related sectors through the merger.

Lassonde would “love” to own up to 20% of Elk Valley, the report said, adding that he is planning to put together a group of investors who would buy up to C$300 million of the company’s shares, giving them a 10%-20% stake.

Teck Resources could not be reached immediately for comment. There was no contact information for Lassonde immediately available.

Under terms of a deal offered previously by minority shareholder Nippon Steel, the Elk Valley unit will have an enterprise value of C$11.5 billion. Teck Resources in February said it will receive an 87.5% interest in gross revenue royalty from the steel-making coal business through the transition period.

(Reporting by Rahat Sandhu in Bengaluru and editing by Leslie Adler).

MONOPOLY CAPITALI$M 

CHART: Glencore’s big bid for Teck extends Canada’s mining deal heritage

Bloomberg News | April 5, 2023 | 

Glencore Plc’s $23 billion proposal for Teck Resources Ltd. would mark one of the world’s biggest mining takeovers, if it happens.


The deal would be the second-largest mining acquisition in Canada, where some of the industry’s biggest transactions have emerged in the past two decades.

Many top-tier Canadian metals producers have disappeared over the years thanks to domestic and foreign takeovers, leaving the country with few remaining mining champions on the global stage.

Rio Tinto Group’s 2007 purchase of aluminum maker Alcan Inc. is the largest takeover of a metals producer in Canada.

(By Doug Alexander)

Social Morals and Ethics of Nature: from Peter Kropotkin to Murray Bookchin


DARIO PADOVAN


Abstract: 

The aim of this paper is to take up the problem of continuity and discontinuity in Ethics in relation to the actions taken by humanity as regards transforming both the natural environment and its own, interior Nature. This issue is explored through the writings of Kropotkin, Guyau, Reclus and Bookchin. According to the ethical naturalism advanced by Kropotkin, struggles within Nature were often limited and “mutual aid” was the dominant factor. In Kropotkin’s work, special mention is made of Jean Marie Guyau who outlined a moral that could be called “ecological”. Guyau stressed that the facts of everyday life were the basis of Ethics and that a sort of natural power exists within moral duty, a natural force that came before knowledge. Also, close to Kropotkin’s work was the work of Elisée Reclus for whom “man is Nature which has become conscious of itself”—a statement which perhaps contains one of the most efficacious descriptions of the moral feelings that link man to his environment. Finally, the work of Murray Bookchin is directly linked to that of Kropotkin, Guyau and Reclus offering an important synthesis of ethical and ecological thought.

At the beginning of this century Peter Kropotkin, a Russian anarchist geographer and philosopher, highlighted the “modern need” to elaborate the conceptual basis for a new moral. In Kropotkin’s view, the progress achieved in the fields of the natural, social and historical sciences and, also, in technology had, for the first time, placed humanity in the position of being able to go beyond the realms of necessity and scarcity and enter a period of well-being, justice and freedom. With his optimistic, positivist spirit, he convinced himself that humanity’s actions should be marked by responsible and modest behaviour:


Modern science has thus achieved a double aim. On the one side it has given to man a very valuable lesson of modesty. It has taught him to consider himself as but an infinitesimally small particle of the universe. It has driven him out of his narrow, egotistical seclusion, and has dissipated the self-conceit under which he considered himself the centre of the universe and the object of the special attention of the Creator. It has taught him that without the whole the 'ego' is nothing; that our 'I' cannot even come to a self-definition without the 'thou'. But, at the same time science has taught man how powerful mankind is in its progressive march, if it skilfully utilises the unlimited energies of Nature[1].

Almost a century later, Hans Jonas introduced an analogous principle of responsibility into his writings, but his reflections reveal a very concerned and pessimistic view of modern developments in science and technology. The new moral, which must be identified and outlined, in this case serves to keep a check on the negative effects of scientific progress:

The Prometheus which has been uncontrollably unbound, to which science attributes a power without precedents and on which the economy imprints an unceasing impulse, demands an ethic that, through self-limitation, stops its power becoming a misadventure for man. The knowledge that the promises of modern technology have been transformed into threats, or that this threat has been indissolubly linked to the promises, is the hypothesis that underlies this reflection. [...] Dominating Nature with the aim of nurturing human happiness, with its extraordinary success which now involves the nature of humans themselves, has launched the greatest challenge to human beings regarding their own behaviour that has ever been launched. [...] The virgin terrain of collective practices, which we have entered with the advent of high technology is still, for Ethics, a no man’s land[2].

In less than one century, attitudes towards science, technology and progress had changed radically. This paper intends to take up the problem of continuity and discontinuity in thought on Ethics in relation to the actions taken by humanity as regards transforming both the natural environment and its own, interior Nature.

Ambivalence of moral feelings

Although he shared the philosophical and scientific positivism of his times, Kropotkin believed that the advance of technological and scientific knowledge would either have left unchanged or even damaged the field of Ethics, the “science of the foundations of morals”. The dilemma Kropotkin highlighted concerns the tragic ambivalence contained within the development of scientific positivism which, although it is able to offer an objective basis for social morals, is closed against any ethical interpretation The study and understanding of Nature, of the evolution of living beings, of the laws of psychic life and of the evolution of society, cannot but offer a natural explanation of the birth of moral feelings. Given these general scientific conditions, the science of morals would, undoubtedly have shown “where the forces are which are able to carry this moral feeling ever higher, thus rendering it more and more pure”.

Kropotkin identified three great moral systems: Comte’s positivism, Bentham and Mill’s utilitarianism and the altruistic evolutionism of Darwin, Spencer and Guyau. None of them were entirely able to satisfy the social and political needs of the period-- needs (and dissatisfaction) which were, at that time, expressed through the resurgence and spread of a “new mystic-religious idealism”, by Kantian intuition and even by neo-Platonism.

But it was, above all, the incoherencies and difficulties within evolutionist thought that weakened any moral reasoning which was based on real life and not on something that would transcend it.

When Darwin formulated his theory of the “struggle for existence” presenting it as the main factor in evolution, he once more raised the tricky problem of morality, or potential immorality, within Nature. Darwin’s followers considered Nature as a vast battlefield where the weakest were exterminated by the strongest, the most skilled and the cleverest. Under these conditions, as Kropotkin rightly observed, Nature could only teach human beings about hand-to-hand fighting.

On the basis of this natural philosophy, Kropotkin argued that it was impossible for human beings to have a precise idea of good and that, consequently, they would never be able to think that good could triumph over evil. A bloodstained Nature, red in tooth and claw, would never be able to give birth to any individual and social morals, thus the code of Ethics could never prescribe rules of subordination and domination otherwise it would disappear under the blows of an all-out war with everyone against everyone else.

The naturalism advanced by Kropotkin on the basis of which a new ethic could be founded, was radically different from the Darwinist concept, even though it did recapitulate the more important elements of Darwin’s theory. He was convinced that struggles within Nature were “often circumscribed, restricted to a struggle between different species, whereas within the group formed either by one species, or by more than one species cohabiting, the general rule was that of mutual help. Mutual aid is the dominant factor in Nature”.

The sheer simplicity of this statement, which today is almost risible, posited entirely different parameters for evaluating moral behaviour. The fact that mutual aid was considered crucial for the prosperity, development and preservation of each species or eco-community, indeed so crucial that it had become a permanent active instinct in all social animals (humans included), offered new principles to moral conscience. Even though such principles could be considered to be only rudimentary, the instinct of mutual support lay at the origins of all feelings of benevolence, justice, equity and equality. Thus, in Kropotkin’s view, Nature did not automatically offer lessons in amoralism, rather it offered a much more precise notion of good and evil, clear reasoning on the supreme good that every code of Ethics should have followed up.

Quite rightly, Kropotkin pointed out that the study of Nature and history showed that two tendencies exist: “on the one hand, the tendency towards sociality and, on the other, the desire to lead a more intense life, from which springs the idea of the greatest happiness for the individual”. The proof of this dual and contradictory aspiration within individual and moral life is not far removed from recent statements regarding the ambivalent nature of human beings. Kropotkin hoped that modern Ethics would be able to find a common ground between feelings of “domination” and feelings of “mutual collaboration”. These two groups of feelings must necessarily be in conflict, therefore, some synthesis was necessary if one did not want to pay the price of that relativism which, today, seems to dominate.

Kropotkin divided the feelings and actions that Comte described as “altruistic” into two categories. On the one hand lay those actions which were necessary in order to live in society: these cannot possibly be defined as being altruistic because they are characterised by reciprocity and are carried out by an individual in his or her own interest, as is any act which is inspired by the instinct for self-preservation. On the other hand, there were those acts which did not presuppose that any type of reciprocity would be involved. Whoever carried out such acts offered their strength, force, energy and enthusiasm, without expecting to receive anything in exchange, without presuming that there would be some reward. These acts, which permit moral perfection, are defined as obligatory.

Undoubtedly, this analytical distinction between types of moral feelings was, in his time, innovative and were adjuncts to an analytical position which had only recently been studied and articulated. The absence, in the relationship between I and the Other, of any form of reciprocity, expectation, or calculation of gain or reward, that is, the subject’s indifference to the fact that there is no “rational” reason for the exchange, renders Kropotkin’s moral unique and close to the pre-ontological moral impulse described by Emmanuel Levinas and by Zigmunt Bauman[3]. However, this conceptual analogy concerns the pre-social dimension morals, which belongs more to sociability than to socialisation, and to unconditional responsibility towards the Other rather than to rationally based decisions and duties.

Moral obligation towards the other based on responsibility and lacking in any expectation of reciprocity makes it possible to distinguish between the moral domain and the legislative domain. In Kropotkin’s view, moral was beyond rules and laws. Thus the task of Ethics was not to stress the defects of human beings, admonishing them for their shortcomings or “sins”, but rather Ethics should play a positive role, focussing on humanity’s best instincts and on that moral impulse which came before any social order. Ethics could explain the fundamental principles on whose basis both animals and human beings were able to live in a society. Furthermore, such principles would appeal to higher feelings, such as love, courage, brotherhood and sisterhood and respect for oneself, characteristics which fill the pre-ontological space of moral relations. Within the study of humanity’s nature and past, Ethics, by describing the harmony between I and the Other, could indicate the truth through which the moral space could be understood. Hence, in Kropotkin’s opinion, the reason why human beings behaved in a manner which could be described as moral, lay in Nature or in history.

The way in which Kropotkin outlined the idea of a private Ethic which contained no elements of coercion or imposition is surprising, and distances him from his contemporaries who saw rules and state legislation as the way in which personal interests could be protected and the moral relationship between I and the Other codified. In Kropotkin’s opinion, Ethics did not and could not offer any fixed rules of conduct, because the individual must weigh up for him/herself the value of different ethical arguments. The main purpose of Ethics was not to offer counsel to individuals rather:


it tends to offer all men a supreme end, an ideal that will guide and encourage them to act instinctively in the desired direction. [Its aim] is to create a social climate which is able to make the majority of men understand, in a completely natural, habitual way, that is without hesitation, which acts will contribute to the everyone’s well-being.

The moral theory Kropotkin was criticising was that which had isolated the individual from his/her neighbour shutting him/her up in asocial and monadological solitude. Hobbes, Locke, and other theorists imagined an individual linked to society only for his/her own ends; they believed that social institutions existed only in order to preserve, protect and defend the personal interests of the individual. Hobbes was furthermore convinced that there was a need for an authority, the Leviathan, able to create a social moral and impose it through disciplinary procedures. In this way, the individual was exempted from any obligations towards other human beings. The rights of the individual were, in reality, only defended in the economic sphere, the limits to which spontaneous economic activity could be interfered with were prescribed by the state and political, intellectual and artistic activities were subject to state control. The resulting inadequate development of the individual could not but lead to a “gregarious mentality”, marked by the lack of personal initiative and creativity. Economic individualism and ownership had failed clamourously to achieve its aims as it did not lead to “the abundant flowering of the personality”.

In Kropotkin’s opinion, sociality and mutual aid were the elements that could build a new social moral. Even as these spontaneous moral attributes developed among individuals and became social custom so they would lead to the development of the sense of justice and of its necessary corollary: the sense of equality and equity. Kropotkin was, however, well aware that the new moral would not be established without radical social transformations. His moral theory quite deliberately avoided formulating a class or party moral: it transcended all social divisions, denied that “inequality was a natural law” and could only become a reality in the context of a society of equals. The idea that the rights of the individual were as inviolable as were the natural rights of all the others would only develop with the progressive disappearance of class distinctions and with the transformation of social institutions.

Kropotkin argued that thanks to the establishment of social relations marked by the principles of equality and justice, individuals would learn to understand and evaluate the repercussions of their actions on the whole society, starting from avoiding causing any harm to others even when it meant that he/she would have to restrict their own needs. The concepts of limits and responsibility appear in this description of the phenomenology of the new moral, concepts which reappear in the work of Hans Jonas. The subject identifies his/her feelings with those of the Others who show that they are ready to offer the subject their own energy without asking for anything in return.

For Kropotkin, the combination of responsibility and limits ― usually, though imprecisely, defined as altruism and abnegation ― was the moral itself. The moral, which was freed from social and institutional conditioning that sprang from sociality rather than from socialisation, from the anti-structure rather than from the structure; the moral which went beyond the morally adiaphorous social action of the socialised individual who has been deprived of responsibility for the Other. But the aporia in this combination ―which seeks to find the difficult equilibrium between “looking after” and “exercising power”, between responsibility and oppression, between encouragement and constriction― could not be resolved, even by Kropotkin, except by founding the origins of moral law within the moral instincts which naturally reside in humans, in those more lasting social instincts which prevail over less enduring instincts.

Thus, Mutual help, justice and morals, the ascending steps of psychic states, discovered through study of the animal and the human world, were an organic necessity.

The natural foundations of Kropotkin’s Ethics

Through his study and interpretation of Nature, Kropotkin sought to offer a solution to the problem of the foundations of the moral actions of individuals. These foundations lay in Nature and could be experienced and rendered intelligible by means of the natural and social sciences: after all, wasn’t society just one consequence of Nature? Similar convictions distanced him from the moral theory that argued that moral behaviour was the outcome of the influence of state institutions. In order to escape from the moral dilemma of his time, he identified an objective foundation for Ethics within the evolution of Nature and of humanity.

Kropotkin did not conceal the fact that he was strongly influenced by Darwin’s works. Indeed, he recognised that Darwin had opened up a new path for moral sciences and had founded a school of Ethics in the same way as had Hume, Hobbes and Kant. He also agreed with Darwin’s explanation of the origins of moral feelings: that they derived from an innate, instinctive sociality that existed in both humans and animals. For Darwin, the basis of all moral sentiments lay in that social instinct that “made men find pleasure in the company of others like himself, could make him like them and want to render them some service ”[4]. Furthermore, Darwin believed that all species of animals had developed the same social instinct as had man, and when this instinct was not satisfied that its lack would generate a feeling of discontent and suffering in the individual, especially when it was revealed that, in some cases, the social instinct had given way to another more transitory and superficial instinct. In Darwin’s opinion, moral anxiety, uncertainty about the moral judgements of his/her behaviour, the sense of incompleteness within his/her actions characterised the biological nature of the subject.

However, Darwin rejected Kant’s belief that moral sentiments were a mystic gift of unknown and mysterious origin. As Kant had said, the individual could always, at a certain point, declare “I will not permit the human dignity of my person to be violated”, but Darwin felt that this statement was none other than the expression of natural instincts, such as sociability and liking, which were reinforced by reason, experience, imitation and by the desire to gain the approval of others[5].

Basing his arguments on Darwin’s statements, Kropotkin even contested the conviction held by many theorists that the most powerful of all human instincts, and even more so among animals, was the instinct for preservation, which was wrongly identified as egotism. Under the heading of “the instinct for preservation” the moral preachers brought together, on the one hand, primordial impulses, such as defence, preservation and hunger and, on the other, derived feelings, such as passion for domination, cupidity, hate and revenge. Contemporary moral thought identified the nature of man as this chaotic mixture of instincts and feelings which had hardened into an omnipotent force that had penetrated, without meeting any resistance, into both humans and animals.

This “inconvenient” statement could not but provoke those moralists who sought to legitimise their theories of a world that fell outside or beyond Nature, suspended in a supernatural dimension. The triumph of the moral element thus appeared as the triumph of man over Nature and over his/her intrinsic egotistical and evil nature, a victory that he/she could not obtain without outside help, help from the state and intelligent legislators[6].

Kropotkin, however, shifted the interpretation of Nature diametrically. He identified mutual support within the species as the predominant factor, as the most powerful agent of social and cultural development. Nature became humanity’s first teacher, teaching Ethics and moral principles to human beings. The social instinct, innate in humans, lies at the origins of all notions of Ethics and all subsequent evolutions in morals. The altruistic social instinct, referring to the definition offered by both Comte and Spencer, in the context of natural and social evolution, can only prevail over egotistical and transitory instincts. The compromise, sought by Spencer, between the laws of aggression and of friendship, between inequality and equality, could never emerge.

The moral without obligations of Jean-Marie Guyau

In Kropotkin’s work, special mention is made of Jean Marie Guyau (1854-1888). A brilliant, young sociologist and moral philosopher, Guyau’s work was ignored for a long time, even though he had founded an original system of Ethics, and it has only recently been re-evaluated and begun to receive the attention it merits.

Guyau sought on the one hand to free moral thinking from any sort of mystic or supernatural presuppositions, those that mark the religious conception of Ethics. That is, he sought to free it from any duty imposed from outside. On the other hand, he also sought to eliminate, from the moral domain, both any personal interest of a material nature and, consequently, the hopes and aspirations for happiness of this type, that on which the Utilitarians had founded their moral theories.

Guyau posited the facts of everyday life as the basis of his system of Ethics, and rejected both Kant’s metaphysics and the intuitions of Bergson and others like him. He argued that a positive moral, based on facts, could not pretend that good or the generosity of society was its first (prime) impulse, because what is good for society is often not good for the individual. The positive moral must, therefore, be individualist, concerned about the fate of society only to the extent that it involves the fate of the individual as well.

In Guyau’s view, an exclusively scientific moral must accept that the ends and the natural cause of human action coincide, and that this provokes the instinctive effort to maintain and nurture life:


the end that, really, determines all conscious action is also the cause that produces the entire unconscious action: hence, it is life itself, life at its most intense and most varied in all its forms[7].

Guyau argued that all the movement of being has its cause in life and its evolution, but, from another point of view, this universal cause of our actions is also the constant effect and the end of those actions. Thus, individual and social action has life itself in all its manifestations as both cause and ends. The tendency to persevere in life is the law that is necessary for life itself not only for human beings but for all living things and, perhaps, even for the “last atom of ether”, because the power inherent in life is merely an abstraction of life itself.

For Guyau, Ethics was none other than “the science whose subject is all the means for preserving and nurturing material and intellectual life”. The individual enhances the intensity of life by widening the domain of all forms of activity; the aim of the culture of human activity is action. To act is to live, which means increasing the focus of inner life. Thus, in Guyau’s eyes, the moral ideal was “activity in all the variety of its multiplicity of manifestations” to the extent that is compatible with recuperating any power dispersed in social activities.

In Guyau’s opinion Ethics should stand on the nebulous border between the sphere of rational action and that of irrational action creating a comprehensible link between the two:


Since, on the one hand, there is the unconscious sphere of instincts, habits and blind perceptions and, on the other, the conscious sphere of reasoning and the will to react, then morals must be found on the border between these two spheres: thus moral science is the only one which has neither purely conscious nor purely unconscious facts as its subject. It must therefore seek a common ground for these two categories of facts in order to be able to link the two spheres[8].

Guyau criticised the presupposition on the basis of which the “conscious” was considered to be separate from the “unconscious”: on the contrary, he argued that scientific moral should demonstrate how action, produced by the effort to act, arises from the depths of the unconscious of the individual in order to emerge within the conscious domain. Such action must find the locus where instinct and reason meet and, interacting, transform each other.

The problems posed by Guyau were one of the main conundrums that faced sociologists in that period. Some years later, Vilfredo Pareto constructed an entire sociological system based on the life-giving centrality of non-logical action from which, fundamentally, all rational arguments elaborated both by social and moral science and by individuals derived.

Unlike Pareto, for whom the best way to push human beings to act was the myth, Guyau argued that individual and social action were the result of a moral fecundity that existed in each individual, of a surplus of life-force that should be directed towards the Other. Hence, fecundity was the basis of social life, or better, five types of fecundity: intellectual, emotional, sensitivity, will-power, and, lastly, that fecundity which could transform the environment. Because of this excess of life-force, which each individual would generously offer to Others, the ideal of individual life becomes life together: “at the heart of individual life there is an evolution which corresponds to the evolution of social life and which makes the latter possible, which is the cause rather than the result”[9].

The passage that brought the moral theory advanced by Guyau closer to a definition of a natural duty and, consequently, to a Moral that could be termed “ecological”, is clearly outlined in his criticism of Kant’s categorical imperative. Kant’s “duty” was, in Guyau’s opinion, artfully held to lack explanation. Rather, he argued, a sort of natural power/force existed within moral duty, a natural power/force that came before knowledge, a power/force that could constrain individuals to act and to produce. Thus, the fact that this “power/force” existed could offer a concrete answer to the mystery of moral duty. Natural tendencies, habits and customs, argued Guyau, were manifest proof of the fact that they themselves could oblige the individual to act without offering any further explanations. Moral obligation could thus be linked to a certain inner power/force. It could not be referred to feelings of need or of constriction: moral obligation was, above all, inner power/force, an overabundance of life that asked to be dedicated to social life, a natural inner force that permeated society even as it created that society.

The moral fecundity on which every type of moral obligation depended allowed individuals to open themselves up to society, up to the point in which the individual conscience exactly reproduced the social conscience, to the point where “the individual would feel the whole society within his/her heart”[10]. The inner power/force of each individual could not but open its sphere of action to others, reducing the distance between each “I” indeed increasing the need of every other “I” to come forward and to exist. Guyau’s analysis of the relationship between the social “I” anticipated some of the more common questions concerning educating individuals in the context of social life. Not only did Guyau admit, like other sociologists of his time, that the “mind of society” was, basically, the product of the interaction of all individual minds and consciences, which contemporaneously acquired different characteristics, he also added the remarkable statement that each “I” is made up of an infinity of “other beings” and of small states of consciousness: thus society enters every mind[11].

The social construction of Nature

The attempt to find the principles of a universal ethic within Nature posits a series of questions that have to do with the social and cultural interpretation of Nature itself. The cultural interpretation of Nature is a way of interpreting both the individual and society. Kropotkin’s work, like that of Darwin, describes a Nature that behaves like society, animals that behave like human beings, species that have social characteristics. There is no doubt that discoveries in natural sciences, both before and at the time of Kropotkin had brought to light information and knowledge that had revealed a Nature that was regulated by its own laws and was no longer subject to divine laws. However, it would be realistic to think that the categories used to interpret and criticise the social orders of the time could also have been used to interpret the generic world of Nature, in a utopian key. A constructionist vision of Nature is very useful for understanding how it is possible to draw conclusions about individual and society in the human world from this vision of Nature. In this case we could say that Nature is the cognitive mirror of society itself, perhaps even a positive utopia, one which calls for a world of justice equality and freedom.

Nature simultaneously conceals and reveals a culture. Nature is a mask. It reveals its deepest meanings only to those who know how to look, after they have learned how to observe it. In reality, this would mean stating that everything is culture. Roland Barthes formulated the problem in these terms:


To say that culture is in contrast with Nature is ambiguous, because we do not know exactly where the boundaries of either lie: where is the human being’s nature? To call himself a man, a man needs a language, that is a culture. In biology? Today, in the living organism the same structures have been found as in the speaking example: life itself is constructed like a language. In short, everything is culture, from clothes to books, from food to images and culture is everywhere from one extreme to the other of society. Thus culture is a paradoxical object: it has no boundaries, no antithetical terms, no traces/residues[12].

If everything is culture then the Nature/culture contrast begins to vacillate and lose its meaning, until it is reduced to a simple operating distinction. If everything is culture, then how can one think about Nature in itself?

In reality it is very hard to accept this position entirely, because it would reduce Nature to a simple expression of the ‘cultural’, to an “apparent Nature” with no life other than that it is given by the cultural spirit. However, from the point of view adopted by the natural sciences, we have the opposite, a “causal Nature”, perceived as a system of molecules and electrons which act on the spirit in such a way as to elicit solicit the sensation of an “apparent Nature”. These theories of the duality of Nature have already been criticised by Alfred North Whitehead according to whom:


there is only one Nature, which is the Nature that stands before us within our perceptive knowledge. The characteristics that science has discerned within Nature are very difficult to discern, and certainly never at first sight: they are relations of relations and characteristics of characteristics. But notwithstanding all their subtlety, they are marked by a certain simplicity, thus one must take them into account when unravelling the more complex relations that exist between the more concrete characteristics of perception[13].

Nature is knowable in itself, even though such knowledge also depends on the cultural and social conditions in which it exists and takes develops. Nature cannot be separated from a given culture, but the culture cannot reconstruct it only as an apparent or imaginary Nature, it cannot attribute entirely new and separate characteristics to it, characteristics that are different from its perceivable concrete characteristics.

The combined action of man and Nature

In reality, between the domestication of animals, their selection and their training, between the education of human beings, their correction and their exploitation, between the use of natural resources and their over exploitation, there is, sometimes an imbalance, sometimes coercion and power, sometimes violence and this latter is indeed against Nature and anti-Nature. At this point it must be recognised that not all the process of reduction to a culture are the same and that humanity must learn to evaluate them: destruction, extinction, transformation, modifications, inventions and improvement. It does not matter either what the object or the objectives are (vegetation, the Earth, raw materials, species, human beings themselves, knowledge and values); the main thing is to know what one is doing because merely to be conscious of the action is not enough.

Thus, asking what human intervention either in favour or against Nature is worth, means positing the question of the nature of humans themselves, of humanity’s condition, its destiny and its culture, since the destiny of Nature and of natural beings lies, in part, in the hands of humanity itself.

Elisée Reclus (1830-1905), a social geographer, developed a similar line of reasoning in which he gave the question of Nature a decidedly moral flavour. For Reclus, “man is Nature which has become conscious of itself”. This phrase contains perhaps one of the most efficacious descriptions of the moral feelings that link man to his environment. It highlights the intimate link that unites the succession of human actions with the energy of the Earth and shows how the life of human populations is transformed in conjunction with environmental changes, it explains the combined actions of Nature and human beings.

The mutual “agreement” that develops between the Earth and its inhabitants is, in Reclus’ opinion, made up of both analogies and contrasts, as are all the harmonies of organised bodies. It arises out of struggle and union and does not cease to oscillate around a fulcrum in an equilibrium that is in continual movement. Today, humans continuously react against the planet that is their home. After having allowed themselves to be cradled by Nature in ancient times they have slowly become emancipated and now make every effort to appropriate the energy of the Earth, to make it their own. Indeed the history of the human species is the story of the planet acting on humanity and of humanity acting on the planet. After having, for a long period, been a simple, scarcely conscious product of Nature, human beings have become increasingly active agents in defining their own history[14].

In Reclus view, human actions can guide and improve the development of Nature, but only if humanity wants it and is conscious of it too:

The action of man, who is so powerful in draining lakes and marshes, levelling the obstacles between different countries and modifying the primitive divisions between animal and plant species, thus plays a very important role in transformations in the external appearance of the planet. Humans can make the earth more beautiful but can also make it more ugly, depending on the social status and the habits of each people: they can contribute both to the degradation of Nature or to its transfiguration. Man makes the village in which he lives in his own image: after long centuries of brutal exploitation the barbarian will have given the earth a cruel ferocious aspect just as, thanks to intelligent husbandry, a civilised man can make it glow with grace and penetrating allure, can make it human, that is to say humanise it, in such a way that a stranger passing by will feel gently welcomed by the earth and rest trustingly in its arms[15].

It smacks of banality to say that these words anticipated the current debate on ecological questions and on the problem of sustainability. Reclus’ reflections go well beyond this simple analogy. They clearly state that human beings not only have a responsibility towards Nature but also towards themselves and towards the Other, the stranger who, when looking at Nature, will understand the degree of caring and social responsibility that can be found among those who live there. Where Nature has been rendered ugly, impoverished, denuded, imagination dies out, spirits are impoverished, routine and servile behaviour dominate the souls of people and prepare them for topor and death. In this sort of environment there can be no caring or willingness to help the Other who is passing through. Just like Nature, in that place, he/she too will be subjected to indifference, if not cruelty and exploitation.

Knowing which of humanity’s actions served to embellish or to degrade Nature was crucial for Reclus, “man himself is man’s environment”. The solution to this gnosiological problem depended on humanity’s opportunity to become the “conscience of the Earth”. A process that would unfold as part and parcel of the development of humanity itself, linked in the closest possible way to Nature and creating a secret harmony between the Earth and the peoples it nurtured. But, as Reclus noted, when imprudent societies allow themselves to lay their hands on that which constitutes the beauty of their domain, they always come to regret it.

Thus Reclus considered that society was responsible both for Nature and for itself. Even though it would be science that in the future would reveal the image of Nature transformed, even though science could not carry out this enormous task alone. Progress in knowledge must, in Reclus’ view as in Kropotkin’s, be flanked by progress in the field of morals and in that of social justice. A society that is not free cannot take care either of Nature or of the Other:


So long as men are struggling to shift the boundaries of their property and the false borders between one people and another, so long as the soil which feeds us is reddened with the blood of the unfortunate who struggle for a strip of land, for reasons of so-called honour or, simply, through pure anger, so long as the starving have to seek, with no guarantee of success, both their daily bread and food for their spirit, the Earth will never be the paradise that intellectuals predict for the future. The lineaments of the planet will have no harmony unless men are first united in a chorus of peace and justice.

Elisée Reclus believed that, in his Utopia, Nature was waiting and would not become truly fertile and good until Humanity, united in society, could agree and found the “great federation of free men/human beings”.

The Ethics of freedom in Murray Bookchin

To conclude this brief survey of moral thought connected to the philosophy of Nature we will introduce the work of one of today’s most original theorists of ecology. The work of Murray Bookchin (1922-) is directly linked to that of the thinkers described above and offers an important synthesis of ethical and ecological thought.

His approach could be described as being constructionist, in that it accepts that every image of Nature can be directly deduced from the image of the society that humanity, historically, has built for itself:


The way in which we posit ourselves in relation to the World of Nature is strongly conditioned by the way in which we see the social world. To a large extent the former is derived from the latter and serves, in its turn, to reinforce social ideology. All societies extend their perceptions of themselves to Nature[16].

Thus, to a large extent, a society’s image of Nature reflects the social structure of that society which has developed that image. In this, speaking sociologically, Bookchin is following in the footsteps of sociologists such as Durkheim, Weber, Mannheim and Pareto, for whom knowledge and the production of knowledge could not but be the reflection, or ideal projection, of the society itself. From the anthropological point of view he agreed with cultural anthropologists, such as Mary Douglas who argued that Nature can take on the role of a sensitive indicator of social morals, thus can be both a cruel judge and a victim of the generalised moral disorder[17]. In Bookchin’s view, societies extend their perception of themselves to Nature: such as tribal universes, built on kinship relations; feudal universes, founded on a rigid hierarchy of rights and duties; bourgeois universes, built around a market society which promote rivalry and competition between individuals; or even like techno-bureaucratic universes founded around flow diagrams and feedback systems or with hierarchies that reflect the operating systems of modern limited companies.

However, even though this image of Nature reveals community or systemic aspects, imperialist expectations regarding Nature are difficult to overcome. According to Bookchin, only a society that has found its own truth will be able to free itself from the limits posed by a hierarchical society on understanding Nature. Limits that could be summed up in that prejudice that posits Nature as the “hard kingdom of need”. A prejudice that can be found in any school of thought.

Bookchin argues that this prejudice lies behind the gnosiological dualism that has for centuries placed culture and Nature, man and woman, freedom and need and dominant and dominated in opposing positions. Within this dualism also lies the moral that has generalised a pervasive epistemology of domination, which:


classifies the difference as (the Other in all its forms) into a set or a pyramid of antagonistic relationships constructed upon command and obedience. The idea that the Other could be seen as part of the whole, whatever the degree of differentiation, lies beyond the understanding of the modern mentality which is governed by a flow of experience that only understand division in terms conflict or dissolution. Effectively, the real world is divided antagonistically: therein lies its defect[18].

Thus the division between society and Nature reflects this dualism on whose basis Nature is seen as the kingdom of necessity. In Bookchin’s opinion this ideology conceals the main feature of Nature itself, that is, the fact that it is potential freedom or liberty. Biotic evolution as well as social evolution is characterised by an increase in the internal diversity of the eco-community a process which entails not only greater stability within this eco-community, but also an increase in liberty within Nature in the shape of the number of choices for self-management and participation of life forms within their own evolution. Freedom, or liberty, and the “incremental” possibility of choices, are the central feature of participatory evolution the concept coined by Bookchin which is different both from neo-Darwinian syntheses and from Bergson’s mystical creative evolution.

Participatory evolution lays emphasis on symbiosis rather than on struggle, on participation rather than on competition. This concept of nature marks a return to that of Kropotkin, Reclus and Geddes, or to lesser known geographers such as Ernst Friedrich and Alexander Woeikof and, at the same time, rejects all socio-biological determinism, from that of the sociologists of the Chicago School, who speak of a society of competitive co-operation[19], that of the ethologists and socio-biologists who attribute most human behaviour to the genetic pre-disposition of the individual[20].

Hence, research on the foundations of Ethics must look again at the interface, the surfaces that are in contact, between nature and society. Philosophical and sociological reflection has been built on the rational research carried out on the relationship between society and Nature after the advent of utilitarian, scientific and instrumental thought. In Bookchin’s view, the task of social ecology is to place not only the incorporation of the ecological into the economic and social on the agenda, as “ecological economics” and environmental sociology claim, but also to carry out an in depth analysis of the way in which society has emerged from Nature, of the continuities and discontinuities that exist between the two, of a science and a technology which agree with these reflections and, lastly, of an Ethics whose foundations lie both in Nature and in Human Rationality.

Murray Bookchin argues that it is possible to found an objective Ethics. His task is similar to that undertaken by Kropotkin: to found an objective Ethics that can make the latent freedom in Nature a reality within Society. An ecological Ethics that can re-establish society’s responsibility towards Nature, reawaken the evolutionary continuity between Nature and culture and lay the emphasis on freedom and participation rather than that on competition and hierarchy. In Bookchin’s opinion an ecological Ethics should associate society with ecology and culture with Nature, because only in this way can society cease to be the sui generis social fact, separated from and antagonist to Nature, as described by Durkheim.

The theoretical views of Murray Bookchin are still some of the more interesting in terms of closing the gap, re-assessing the dualism, between Nature and culture. The approach espoused by environmental sociologists such as William Catton and Riley Dunlap does not offer a credible solution to this dualism even if it turns to the social biology of Robert Park or the functionalism of Talcott Parsons[21]. The social constructionism of the phenomenologists, of the ethnomethodologists or, of sociologists such as John Hannigan is weak, in terms of its recognition of the “ecological crisis”; the degeneration of the relationship between society and the environment which cannot entirely depend on the biased perceptions of the social actors themselves[22].

Bookchin offers a more rounded argument which is very close to Whitehead’s ideas:


Insofar as order does exists in reality ― hence the very possibility of science ― and is not simply imposed upon It by mind, we can say that reality has a rational dimension. More colloquial, we can find a “logic” in the development of phenomena, a general directiveness that accounts for the fact that the inorganic did become organic as a result of its implicity capacity for organicity, that the organic did become more differentiated and metabolically self-maintaining and increasingly self-aware as a result of potentialities that made for a highly developed hormonal and nervous system[23].

In this respect, Bookchin appears to be a true follower of the best ideas of positivism developed during the nineteenth century. Philosophers and sociologists such as Jean Marie Guyau, Alfred Fouillée, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, thought that evolution should increase the awareness of society about is own ends and means. In this case, evolutionism was not completely identified with natural selection, one of the possible principles of universal evolution, as said Fouillée. The darwinism was criticised because it stated the right of stronger, its despotism and aristocracies, its apology of inequality, the masses manipulation.

But this kind of evolutionist morals is not the Bookchin’s one. For him like for Fouillée the evolution selects the best qualities of humanity as intelligence, rationality, sympathy, justice, science[24]. But, and here I end these reflections, Fouillée and Haeckel stressed the danger when we brutally transfer the scientific theories in the political domain. Ernst Haeckel claimed to have the right to ask the policy makers whether they were aware of these dangers when they embarked on an effort to draw some political consequences from natural theories[25]. They, continued Haeckel, should abstain from deriving conclusions out of these theories, which are opposite to those that raison itself can draw. Only an ethics which is independent from theology and metaphysics could develop a more fruitful relationship with nature. The words of Fouillée are very interesting in this respect: “to develop all the faculties of our Nature subordinating always those which are only the means to those which are the real goals of the humanity”[26]. In modern words, it means to subjugate the instrumental reason to the ethical values founded by objective and dialectical reason.


[1] P. Kropotkin, ETHICS,ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT (Prism Press/Unwin Brothers Ltd.), p. 4; the first edition in Bulgarian, Spanish and Russian, was published in 1922. Nature Ethics is in part made up of articles published by Kropotkin, between 1894 and 1905, in the journal “Nineteenth Century”.

[2] Jonas H., Das Prinzip Verantwortung, Insel, Frankfurt am Main, 1979; tr. it. Il principio responsabilità, Einaudi, Torino, 1993, p. XXVII.

[3] Bauman Z., Postmodern Ethics, Blacwell, Oxford, 1993; tr. it. Le sfide dell’etica, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1996, p. 54 and pp. 75-80.

[4] Darwin C., The Descent of Man, 1871; tr. it. L’origine dell’uomo, Editori Riuniti, Roma, 1966, p. 133.

[5] Ibidem, pp. 143-147.

[6] Kropotkin P., cit., p. 59.

[7] Guyau J. M., Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction, Alcan, Paris, 1913, (I ed. 1884), p. 87.

[8] Ibidem, p. 92.

[9] Ibidem, p. 102.

[10] Guyau J. M., Éducation et hérédité, Alcan, Paris,1888, p. 55.

[11] Guyau, Esquisse..., cit., p. 115.

[12] Barthes R., La pace culturale, in Il brusio della lingua, Einaudi, Torino, 1988, p. 93.

[13] Whitehead A. N., The Concept of Nature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1920; tr. it. Il concetto della natura, Einaudi, Torino, 1975, p. 38.

[14] Reclus E., La Terre, 1868-1869, now in Reclus E., L’homme. Geografia sociale, (ed. Errano P. L.) Angeli, Milano, 1984, p. 56.

[15] Ibidem, p. 59.

[16] Bookchin M., Freedom and Necessity in Nature: a Problem in Ecological Ethics, in “Alternatives”, n. 4, 1986; tr. it., Libertà e necessità nel mondo naturale, in “Volontà”, n. 2/3, 1987, p. 20.

[17] Douglas M., Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences, Russel Sage Foundation, London, 1985; tr. it. Come percepiamo il pericolo, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1991, pp. 77-87.

[18] Bookchin M., Freedom and Necessity in Nature: a Problem in Ecological Ethics, cit., p. 13.

[19] Park R. E., Human Ecology, in “The American Journal of Sociology”, vol. XLII, n. 1, 1936, pp. 1-15.

[20] Bookchin M., Sociobiologia o ecologia sociale?, in “Volontà”, n. 1, 1982, pp. 70-86.

[21] Catton W. e Dunlap R., A New Ecological paradigm for Post-Exuberant Sociology, in “American Behavioral Scientist”, vol. 24, n. 1, 1980.

[22] Hannigan J., Environmental Sociology, Routledge, London, 1995.

[23] Bookchin M., A Philosophical Naturalism, in “Society and Nature”, n. 3, 1993, pp. 82-83.

[24] Fouillée A., Critique des Systèmes de morale contemporaines, Alcan, Paris, 1893, pp. 9-15

[25] Quoted in Fouillée A., cit., p. 15.

[26] Ibidem, p. 71.


Democracy & Nature,

THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY

Vol. 5, No. 3 (November 1999)