MINING IN AVATAR

AVATAR MOVIE BASED ON MINING IN PANDORRA FOR UNABTONIUM		t)
It's enough to make a mining executive grit his teeth or his kids to give him the slient treatment. In a case of art imitating life -- with perhaps a little poetic licence -- Oscar-winning movie Avatar paints big mining companies as the villians of the future. However, real-life executives are not entirely amused by their fictional colleagues being cast in evil roles in what is already the biggest-grossing Hollywood movie of all time. "I gritted my teeth a few times over the manner the mining company was presented," said Charles Jeannes, chief executive officer of Canada's Goldcorp. "I loved Avatar, once you get passed the storyline, I loved the graphics." The storyline of the James Cameron-directed movie, set in the year 2154, involves humans mining a mineral called unobtanium on the planet Pandora. Expansion of the mining colony threatens the existence of the tribe of Na'vi, a humanoid species. Unobtanium Dennis Wheeler, CEO of Coeur d'Alene Mines Corp said he was keen to see it. But, when informed the film's mining company was portrayed as damaging the environment with no regard for the local communities, Wheeler laughed: "Well, that's not futuristic!" He noted that was the perception of the mining industry by many people, even if it was not the reality. He noted his company established a partnership with Alaskan native groups to provide workers for its Kensington gold mine and had done similiar work in Bolivia and Mexico around its silver mines. Gerald Grandey, CEO of Saskatchewan, uranium miner Cameco Corp., appeared resigned to the fact mining companies get a bad reputation driven by environmentalists. "When you get a movie like Avatar -- I have seen it and actually enjoyed it -- I thought it was just unfortunate they defaulted to the easy conflict. It was too convenient to go back to the old stereotypes. "In Saskatchewan, there are 28 aboriginal communities who had never heard of mining ... and now, after 25 years, well over 50 per cent of our employees are aboriginal. "What we've done is ... overcome the peer pressure, the stereotypes, the culture, the welfare dependecy, the drug and alcohol abuse, and one movie can put that back." Richard Adkerson, Freeport-Mc-MoRan Copper & Gold's president, CEO, took a measured approach. "Well I don't consider ... us a whipping boy and I don't consider the environmentalists to be those characters," Adkerson said. "We have a big impact on the environment where we operate. And we spend huge resources to manage that impact and to try to do things in the right way," said Adkerson, who said he wanted to see Avatar in 3-D. Mining Unobtanium on Pandora