Every year in August and September, the people of Ust’-Avam, a remote indigenous community located in the Taimyr region of the Russian Arctic, toss nets into the Avam River to catch tugunok fish, an important traditional food. This year, the community stopped fishing early, around the start of the month. There were no tugunok to be found. Nor could locals find the fish at other common sites along the river basin fed by Lake Pyasino, which lies just a few miles north of the industrial city of Norilsk.
Gennady Shchukin, a member of the Dolgan ethnic group, has little doubt about the culprit: In late May, a reserve fuel tank at a power plant near Norilsk burst open, flooding local waterways with an estimated 23,000 tons of diesel oil. The spilled oil drifted for miles, turning part of the Ambarnaya River that feeds Lake Pyasino bright red. Norilsk Nickel, the Russian nickel mining company responsible for the spill, says it acted swiftly to contain the pollution. But Shchukin worries the contamination is far more widespread than the company claims, and that his people will be living with the consequences for years.
We expect that the river was poisoned for a long period, Shchukin told Grist in Russian via a translator. Maybe for several years there will be no fish in these rivers, and in the lake. This is very difficult, of course, for indigenous people.
But Shchukin isn’t sitting idly by. Last month, Aborigen Forum, a group of Russian indigenous activists and leaders that Shchukin heads up, launched a campaign to raise awareness of Norilsk Nickel’s impacts on their communities and to demand restitution. Rather than focus on an obscure Arctic mining company, Aborigen Forum is appealing to someone more likely to grab international headlines: Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla.
Nickel is a key ingredient in the cathodes of electric car batteries, allowing them to store more energy more cheaply. Tesla, and other EV makers, need lots of it. But Aborigen Forum wants Musk to commit that his company won’t buy any nickel that can be traced to Norilsk until the Russian megapolluter cleans up its act.
We don’t want the next industrial revolution of electric cars and clean energy developed for the price of indigenous peoples’ rights and traditional lands, said Dmitry Berezhkov, a member of the Aborigen Forum network and the coordinator of a social media campaign to get Musk’s attention. We think if Tesla could elaborate strategy and rules for itself in the field of human rights and indigenous peoples’ rights with regards to nickel, it could be a good opportunity to influence the general nickel market.
On September 7, the Saami Council, an NGO representing a group of indigenous people who live in Finland, Norway, Russia, and Sweden, put out a statement in support of Aborigen Forum’s appeal. Indigenous rights organization Cultural Survival, meanwhile, is currently gathering signatures on its own open letter asking Tesla not to associate with Nornickel, which it delivered to the Palo Alto, California-based company on September 16. More than 70 indigenous, clean energy, climate, and mining justice organizations around the world have already signed on.
Observer Media Group 2020