Today I’ll be discussing further the political conflict which occurred in light of the Pascua Lama project.

The Environment Secretary of Argentina, Romina Piccoloti, had passed a new law which prohibited the mining in and around glaciers, and in periglacial environments, which would mean legal issues for the Pascua Lama project. Argentina’s president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner vetoed the law, outrightly going against cryoactivism, which sparked outrage from both environmental activist groups and the director of the Argentine Institute for Snow Research, Glaciology and Environmental Sciences (IANIGLA). Mining was important to Argentina, as it provided jobs and gave tax revenue to the government, which made it essential for the country’s economic development.

The priority placed on mining over the protection of glaciers demonstrates how different stakeholders view the significance of glaciers in the world. In these cases, we must ask, are the ecosystem services provided by a glacier (rivers supplied by glacial meltwater) more important or is the economic value of mining more important? Or are they both important in their own ways? Perhaps there is a measure of the value of both systems which needs to be explored further.

The impacts of the damage to glaciers are complex and stakeholders that need to be considered include the people around the glaciers that rely on them for water and the ecosystems that are built upon the glacial meltwater. The long-term and short-term effects (economic, social, environmental) have to be intensively studied. The value of these impacts is difficult to quantify and compare to the economic benefits that would have come about from mining.

As the world’s first public glacier law was vetoed by Argentina’s president, the IANIGLA director, Ricardo Villalba, fed the media with facts about glaciers in Argentina and their significance, educating the public. This education allowed everyone to be equipped with the relevant knowledge to make informed decisions, and public opinion has been shown to push policymakers to act.

However, the technical names like ‘rock glaciers’ and ‘periglacial environment‘ were taken by politicians who were in support of mining and warped to propose laws which gave more freedom for mining. These politicians took periglacial environments to mean the perimeters of glaciers, which is wrong, but it was difficult to explain such differences to these politicians. This is an example where ‘misinformation’ can be harmful, if people were to believe that this definition of ‘periglacial environment’ was true, it would have driven the glacier law to be very much different from what it is today.

After much debate, a new glacier law was enacted, which was funnily enough stronger than the one vetoed.

There are many instances when environmental conservation comes into conflict with economic interests. One such example would be the Three Gorges Dam in China, where it was built to harvest hydropower, greatly affecting the environment.

Today, the Pascua Lama project has been completely shut down, but if the environmental disagreements with the project had not been so strong, who knows how badly the environment would have been impacted.

References: Glaciers: The Politics of Ice by Jorge Daniel Taillant