Here, to offset one injury meant creating another: displacing not only humans and their livelihoods but also their entire cosmology.
What if a lifesaving device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after taking three accidental shocks to the heart from her implanted cardiac defibrillator (ICD). In her debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, Standefer tells the story of her troubled relationship to her ICD—a device she had implanted at age 24 to save her life from a heart arrhythmia, but which has been more complicated than expected. The book follows both her harrowing experience in the American healthcare system and her global journey to the mines and factories where the minerals in her device could have originated, as she wrestles with what it means to save a life. In this excerpt, Standefer reports from Madagascar, where she has been examining a new nickel and cobalt mine cut into the jungle in order to understand her own complicity. She writes in Chapter 5: “I had cobalt in my battery, nickel in my microelectronics.” Though the project’s corporate social responsibility report initially impressed her, Standefer is finding that even the most “responsibly” designed mines comes with impacts to communities and ecosystems that are hard to swallow.
Maroseranana, Madagascar
2014
By the time we crossed past the boundary of the Conservation International area, where people weren’t supposed to cut trees, a steady downpour had settled over the jungle. For hours the forest had been slowly expanding as I followed my guide, Stephan, and interpreter, Mirielle, from sunny river valleys onto the long, muscular shoulder of a mountain, the wooden houses and snack shops growing sparse. Then the trail went to orange ooze. Mirielle and Stephan, walking in rubber sandals, gave up on the drier edges of the trail and marched instead straight into the muck.
Seventy kilometers from here, as the bird flew, stretched the giant gash of the Ambatovy mine. That swath of jungle had been just like this one, except for its economically recoverable nickel and cobalt—and because that jungle was coming down, this one must stay. In theory, by carefully measuring its negative impacts and “ecosystem enhancements,” a company like Ambatovy could break even, achieving a standard of “no net loss.” Only here, in the rainforest called Ankerana—a stretch recently incorporated into the internationally heralded Ankeniheny-Zahamena Corridor (CAZ)—it was the people themselves who had been deemed a threat to the forest. Their age-old practice of tavy, clearing forest with fire in order to plant rice on ash-fertile ground, combined with population growth, had put pressure on dwindling patches of forest, especially as climate change led to bigger storms and droughts, disrupting agriculture. The tavy rotations left land fallow for fewer years than they had in the past, which meant land was less productive, which meant more of it had to be cleared to keep up with the community’s needs. And while population growth can sometimes drive increased efficiency in agriculture, for the Malagasy of the eastern rainforests, the process of tavy was as much a ritual that honored their ancestors as it was either a commercial or subsistence activity.
Before we set off from Stephan’s home in Anivorano—hoping to talk to the elders of a village perched on the edge of the offset—it had never occurred to me that a biodiversity offset could be morally problematic. That a mining company would be forced to make up for the land it wrecked seemed a just thing. And yet the very concept of a conservation offset was predicated on the Western ideal of empty land, the idea that humans are foreigners to forests and not themselves indelible parts of ecosystems. While it was true that Madagascar’s diverse species were increasingly under pressure—and that some of that pressure came from humans—I was learning that human rights cannot be untangled from land rights. Here, to offset one injury meant creating another: displacing not only humans and their livelihoods but also their entire cosmology. Stephan—a tall export-crop farmer and part-time guide with a hooked nose and ears that stuck out—was taking us to Maroseranana, another community that had lost access to the forest where they’d long hunted and gathered. Yet here the loss occurred for the opposite reason: the land would be set aside rather than taken apart.
The way to Maroseranana was a footpath that wound 17 miles from village to village, crossing through their centers, where wood houses on stilts fanned out over hardened ground. In the largest of the villages, some of the buildings stood two stories tall, each with a tin roof and a long porch above the road and a bright coat of paint. In the smaller villages the homes were woven from strips of bamboo and ravinala. On long wood tables beside them, women sold dried fish like flat disks, shriveled and swirling with flies, while flocks of skinny chickens ducked and darted beneath their feet. We passed zebu, bony humpbacked longhorn cattle, who sprang suddenly into mating on the road beside us, a boy jumping into the herd to whip them onward with a slender stick. We passed broad brown rivers and old cemeteries. We passed a man standing on a bamboo raft piled high with bananas, negotiating whitewater rapids with a pole. We walked through rice fields gleaming bright green beneath a cover of rain, and through thick forest humming with bugs and birdcall. Slipping by on the trail were porters: shirtless men climbing the mountain in stained shorts and ball caps, each with a fat green bamboo pole balanced on either shoulder. The poles were longer than the men were tall and thick as their legs, and on each end hung plastic crates full of empty Three Horses beer bottles for refill in the city, lashed to empty gas canisters. Into this country went only human legs, the skinny zebu, and the occasional motorbike. To see what must be carried out, to see what must be carried in—to see the legs, shining with muscle, that walked back and forth for a living in the mud, barefoot or wearing jelly shoes—stunned me. The men chewed chunks of sugarcane as they passed, spitting the fibers on the road.
The night before, I’d lain in bed in Fetraomby—another village on the path—miserable and feeling guilty for being miserable. The blanket on the bed was wet, left precisely in the place where the tin-and-thatch roof dripped onto the bed when it rained. The smell of mold overwhelmed; the night was cold without a cover. However I’d romanticized this form of reporting when I chose to go, it trafficked in spikes of joy and jags of despair. I was rapidly discovering the limits of Mirielle’s English—something I hadn’t known how to test—and so carried the loneliness of being unable to enter the worlds of those around me. At dusk in the wood-framed shops, kids had twirled on the posts of the storefronts, candlelight glanced off the faces of pretty women, a man danced barefoot with a square package he’d received. I could only imagine their worlds; I could not overhear. In the version of this journey I carried in my head before setting out, I’d assumed I’d be able to connect with individuals, to flesh out the calculus of what it took to make a defibrillator, to arrive at conclusions about whether, when my battery buzzed low, I should get another one. Yet at night, in bed, finding answers felt like a vision that could slip away into frustration, and it terrified me. It wasn’t just 11,000 miles that separated me from these people. It was also language and culture, skin color and economics. As I lay in bed, a cold fear filled my body: that it had been a waste to send me here. The technology in my chest remained invisible and untranslatable to everyone I met.
To ask what it took to make a defibrillator—and whether it was worth it—was in some way an attempt to put a finger on the scale. The quest to understand how my life was connected to others’ offered a sort of accountability, and thus a salve to my guilt. It gave my life a brighter purpose. But if asking the question might make my own life closer to “worth it,” this could only work—I thought furiously—if I nailed the interviews, if I noticed the essential details, if I understood people. If I could see the truth at the center of things, and tell the story that mattered. It could only work if I did it right.
On the road to Maroseranana, we walked mile after mile soaked with sweat and rain, slipping in calf-deep ooze, my raincoat sopping all the way through and my hip beginning to tweak, until finally we slid and sloshed down the arm of the mountain and turned a corner to see, out of nowhere, a clean white cloth banner pulled taut above the road: TONGASOA ETO MAROSERANANA. Welcome to Maroseranana.
In the lower right-hand corner, the logo of the mining company.
It was only another minute to the company’s complex, perched on the outskirts of town. The concrete building was a crisp and unsullied yellow, with firmly shuttered windows and flowering shrubbery at the front door. A satellite dish angled off its roof. When Mirielle told me we were staying there—moving toward a green row of guesthouses—I laughed out loud. Of course. The mining project I’d come to scrutinize would be, unbeknownst to them, housing me. I laughed at the brand-new bunk beds with bright sheets and new mosquito nets. I laughed at the flat-screen TV locked in a cabinet next to our dinner table, at the empty bottle of J&B Scotch beside it. I laughed—after days of pooping in bamboo stalls roiling with maggots and cockroaches—to see the upright porcelain toilet, which automatically discharged some kind of cleaning liquid into itself. I had taken a lurching bus from the capital to the coast, caught a ride in a packed and sputtering car up a washboard road, ridden pillion on a motorbike in the mud, and walked 17 miles into the jungle in the rain only to find myself, a white Westerner, afforded a fine toilet and a stiff drink. Of course it was the property of a mining company. Their display of wealth, gaudy in the context of these villages, at that moment filled me with relief. It was 2:00 p.m. but felt like 4:00—my legs were collapsing under me—and so I did the only thing you would expect of a white American in a jungle: I ate a giant spoonful of Nutella, stripped to my underwear, and climbed into bed.
In the morning we ate mufugas—fluffy, oily little disks of rice flour with pockets of sweetness—and drank a dark, complex coffee. Then the three of us walked up the muddy road from the compound into the village, past the sheet-metal church with a pair of zebu horns hung over its door, past the plant nursery labeled with the mining company’s logo, past wooden homes on stilts. The sun was out. Clotheslines hung bright with color.“A long time he has wanted people to ask questions about Ambatovy,” Mirielle said, nodding her cornrowed head. The president flashed a big white smile at us each time he passed.
The president of Maroseranana was happy to see us. After talking briefly with Stephan, he leaned toward me, thrusting his hand out. Then he took off down the block, ducking in and out of wooden storefronts, to collect the tangalamena, the town’s council of elders. In his white T-shirt, blue athletic shorts, and salmon-colored flip-flops, he looked more like a coach gathering players for a game. “A long time he has wanted people to ask questions about Ambatovy,” Mirielle said, nodding her cornrowed head. The president flashed a big white smile at us each time he passed.
The Maroseranana administrative building was a wooden structure raised up on a concrete foundation with a sheet-metal roof and chipping yellow paint. Inside its doorway, two typewriters sat out on a water-damaged wooden table, and I thought of the desktop computers and satellite dish down the street.
The mining company had established the Maroseranana field office to attend to the problem of providing alternative livelihoods. As I had felt with my own sore, muddied body, there wasn’t much choice in the way people lived back here; they were simply too far from the nearest economic centers to benefit from opportunities beyond subsistence agriculture. They were dependent on the rice crop the way their parents and grandparents had been. Selling bananas to a larger market required whitewater-surfing a load downstream before they browned; shipping lychees abroad meant first carrying them over the pass on a bamboo pole. Early in the walk, as Mirielle and I had crossed a broad, flat plain fuzzy with banana groves and grasses, she’d pointed out a brown band of water rolling down its center and turned to me, her eyes glinting. “You know why there are holes?” she said. And before she finished, I saw them and knew: the strange divots on the banks, heaps and mounds of sand with grass growing out their exposed tops. Someone had been panning the stream. If you got sick, Mirielle said, or if you couldn’t pay the school fees, or if the crop failed because of cyclones, you could come to get the gold. It wasn’t much, just flecks, but it was enough.
Now—in Maroseranana, at least—there would be no panning, no burning, no cutting trees to build houses, no hunting lemur as extra food. The company paid a young man to walk the conservation area every month, 180 kilometers on foot between the five villages that bordered Ankerana, to understand whether people were following the conservation rules. His job was to educate people about what they could eat that didn’t require tavy. Each of the five villages had a new nursery where they grew seedlings for crops—corn, tomato. The company gave some of the seedlings to children, to teach them to grow them, and paid 15 to 20 people per village to work in the nursery. There were projects raising fish and pigs and birds and bees. Ambatovy had tried to start a big poultry project—distributing chickens that people could grow for slaughter—but some of the hens they handed out were diseased, and the disease spread to the other chickens, killing them.
The men assembled in the president’s office, a blue-and-white room with peeling walls. They sat on wooden benches and stools. They leaned against the doorway. The president carried white plastic chairs over his head into the room. The mayor, wearing an aqua windbreaker and gray suit pants, settled himself at a desk near the front, his fingers threaded together.
We went around the room: The foreman of administration. The number one adviser. A member of the city council. The director of schools. The number two adviser. A man who grew up in Maroseranana but lived in the capital now, working for Airtel, who happened to be back to visit. He haltingly introduced himself in English.
A tiny old man with weathered feet and deep cheekbones, winter cap askew, introduced himself simply, and everyone in the room laughed. “He says he is an old man,” Mirielle translated, smiling.
The complaints were these: Ambatovy did not pay the people working for them enough. They did not build them new schools or a new administration building, although they did put a new roof on one of the school buildings. “Ambatovy helps, but with a limit,” said Mirielle. People wanted a hospital. People wanted a road from Fetraomby so they could export cassava, lychee, coffee, and banana. “People want more than Ambatovy will give,” Mirielle said. “They want things that can benefit the entire community.”
One of the unexpected side effects of Ambatovy’s presence in town, they told us, was that NGOs no longer came to offer services. Yet Ambatovy did not meet the people’s needs. There was no clean water. “There is a big problem if Ambatovy leaves,” Mirielle said. “Before, a man plants rice. Now he works for Ambatovy.”
“Everyone is asking, ‘Why does Ambatovy give to everybody else, but not to me?’ In this way, the community is strained,” Mirielle said. There was much, it seemed, that had been bearable only as long as it was the same for everyone. What the company brought carried with it hard-to-measure losses.
The men spoke quickly, overlapping, and I struggled to catch who said what, struggled to parse Mirielle’s translation before she moved on. Ambatovy’s gifts are not enough for all the people. Why haven’t they built the road? Ambatovy is working in the country because of the government but the government isn’t looking at things.
It was a long way to come only to turn around, but by tradition the tangalamena spoke for the town, and they had spoken. And so that afternoon we picked our way through the mud, back over the pass to a tiny village called Berapaka, located about halfway through the walk to Stephan’s house in Anivorano, where we had begun. In the darkness Berapaka roared with the sounds of yelling children, water hitting the ground, the thump of pestles hulling rice, the rise and fall of humming insects. Smoke from cooking fires seeped out the raffia roofs of the houses. Stars cast a white net in the sky. By flickering kerosene lamp we ate rice and salty hot papaya, a chicken with just shreds of meat on its bones, baby bananas. We drank ranovola, the leftover water from cooking the rice, a bitter, starchy drink.Whatever sustainability Westerners thought we were gaining by cordoning off one forest while destroying another wasn’t shared by those who lived nearby.
Late that night, once Mirielle and I were curled into our beds—flat planks with a mattress of stuffed banana leaves and grass, and only a thin sheet—I heard her shift. “Why doesn’t Ambatovy give aid to Berapaka?” she asked. And I knew we had both noticed the desperation in this town: the blankets we should have had on the beds that night—given to the villagers by the ecotourism organization that employed Mirielle and Stephan—were gone, sold for extra cash; the children were skinnier, their clothing more tattered. The answers I had for her were too easy: Berapaka has nothing to do with Ambatovy. The people here did not lose access to their forests. They did not host an office for the company. They were not resettled by mining. They merely lived in a village through which a few more motorbikes now came and went, on a stretch of mud road that made commerce and the delivery of health care nearly impossible. I had noticed in the meeting with the tangalamena the rarity with which the men suggested that anything was the fault of their government; it seemed they’d never expected their government to offer them health care in the first place, or widen and grade their road, even with the taxes and royalties it would receive from Ambatovy.
They expected more from a multinational mining corporation.
Despite running social and environmental programs to manage their material impacts, extraction companies were not fundamentally in the business of improving the human condition, no matter how many smiling children adorned their corporate responsibility reports. They were good at moving and refining rock; their intention was to profit. The products made from this rock, much later, might improve the human condition in places far from here, but their only obligation in this place was to roughly break even, to satisfy their investors and funders and the Malagasy government. And yet Mirielle’s observation—Why doesn’t Ambatovy give aid to Berapaka?—rent open a question that could not be ignored in the context of global inequality, in countries with a poverty rate like this one.
So much of the argument for resource extraction is the “development” it brings. But development doesn’t exist in the way we act like it does, as a bright monolithic savior, as the inevitable and seamless outcome of large foreign investment. The rising tide only lifts all boats if policy ensures that it does. In the meantime, there are plenty of accidental ways a mining project can make things worse. Big mining projects tend to strengthen the value of the currency anywhere they unfold, making the host country’s exports seem expensive and less attractive on the global marketplace while cheapening imports from elsewhere, cratering local manufacturing and agriculture. The larger the proportion of a country’s money from natural resources, the less democratic that country tends to be; leaders who aren’t dependent on their tax base don’t need to earn popular approval, and they have more reason and ability to stay in power with such an asset to draw on. Foreign actors might notice incentive to prop them up, if it buys access to the “honey pot”; meanwhile, political adversaries might find payoff in a violent coup.
The hope that resource extraction will better the lives of ordinary people isn’t all hollow—nations can, as if by magic trick, turn these one-time-only forms of capital into resources that seed other industries, investing in their citizens in ways that resonate long after the rock is gone. Viewed in its best light, the conservation offset bordering Maroseranana was such an investment, preserving the famed species that could someday sustain a steady flow of ecotourists. The question was whether the promise of mining—like that of medical technology—could hold a candle to its unintended consequences. Whatever sustainability Westerners thought we were gaining by cordoning off one forest while destroying another wasn’t shared by those who lived nearby.
Loss is not experienced in the “net.” Grief is not a mathematical calculation. The improved resources of one community don’t offset the need for subsistence in others. Losses are specific and exact, shapes that can be soothed but not replaced by gifts and programs.
Perhaps the source of the heartbreak was this: however much a Western presence in these towns created strife, it also came with a brief bright hope—that someone, at long last, would be accountable for improving their lives.
Header photo by Peter Wollinga, courtesy Shutterstock.