ABBOTT STRATEGIES
5178 Agate lane
Victoria, B.C. CANADA
V8Y 2L9
Tel: 250-888-9406
Web: abbottstrategies.com
Email: rob.abbott@shaw.ca
We want to hear from you – your thoughts about business strategy and sustainability, questions you’re trying to answer, ideas you want to bounce off someone. Think of us as a resource to help you learn more and do more.
In framing any decision, do the following:
- Think about your children – take the long view.
- Protect natural capital.
- Don’t wait for someone else.
- Don’t wait for regulation.
- Encourage others to follow.
- Talk about what you’re doing, and why.
- Don’t be "top down" or "bottom up", be both.
- Encourage, and reward, your colleagues and stakeholders.
- Swim upstream.
Sustainable Mining Now
It is often said that “If it’s not grown, it’s mined”, a telling reference to the fact that human society is more dependent than many might like to think on mining. Indeed, virtually every electronic and mechanical device in a home or office; school or hospital; plane, train or automobile would be difficult or impossible to create without the products of mining. And so it is that my friend and colleague, Gord McKenna of BGC Engineering, and I have a very particular interest in contributing to a dialogue about the evolution of the mining industry – an industry that is increasing resource extraction geometrically – such that we better reconcile the need for the products of mining with the need for natural capital assets and the flow of life-sustaining ecosystem services provided by nature. Very shortly we will be publishing our new book, Sustainable Mining Now, that we hope will spark real dialogue within the industry globally about how to think about, and achieve the seemingly impossible: sustainable mining – mining that creates financial and social wealth and wellbeing in a way that does not undermine or otherwise damage the aesthetic and productive capacity of natural capital for present and future generations.
