Good agreements make good neighbors

A mine, a conflict, and small-town trust

The Stillwater River above the mine, this past March (John Clayton photo)

At my first Montana potluck, in 1990, the dishes included wild trout, garden vegetables, and fresh salad. The lamest contribution – a casserole made with canned soup – came from the recent transplant from Massachusetts. Me.

My embarrassment gave me an early lesson in the diversity of talents and perspectives in small towns – and the exhilaration of combining them. I liked to hike, but my new friends might prefer horses, mountain bikes, or four-wheelers. I was toying with grad school but knew nothing about home repair; they might not have gone to college but had useful real-world skills.

Back East, I realized, I’d lived in a bubble of people too similar to me. That homogeneous environment may have been comfortable, but in a small town, I would be confronted by different perspectives. I would grow.

In a tiny community surrounded by lots of widely-ignored public land, my new neighbors and I also had opportunities to work through our differing political perspectives . Having lots of opinions in the same room led to two things, I found: First, conflict. Second, better solutions. Not always, but often enough that it was generally worth working through the conflict.

A decade later, I had an opportunity to write about an initiative where this politics had higher stakes. The Stillwater Mining Company wanted to expand its platinum-palladium operations. Two environmental groups, the Stillwater Protective Association and the Cottonwood Resource Council, were concerned about water quality, traffic, and other impacts. The groups were suing the various agencies in charge of permitting the expansion for failing to do their jobs. The mine’s engineers expressed confidence that they had followed the law and would be vindicated, although the process might delay the expansion by up to five years.

Instead of going to court, the two sides started talking to each other, with no regulators or lawyers in the room. In the resulting Good Neighbor Agreement, the environmental groups – both affiliates of the Billings-based Northern Plains Resource Council – gained unprecedented data transparency and other operational changes. The mine gained cachet as a green investment while accomplishing its expansion without delay.

Conflicts and tensions remained. But the Good Neighbor Agreement offered an innovative, productive structure to work through them directly. Each side moved away from zero-sum philosophies, and away from using the law’s requirements as a baseline. Instead they asked what they wanted and how it might be accomplished.

I was writing in the agreement’s early days, when nobody was sure it would work. I’d been commissioned by a nonprofit that hoped to encourage these approaches nationwide. Ironically, the nonprofit itself was beset by internal conflicts, and my case study, which I'd thoroughly enjoyed writing, never got meaningful circulation. My life moved on.

A year or so ago, I got an email from Teresa Erickson, the recently-retired head of Northern Plains. She was writing a history of the Good Neighbor Agreement and had come across a draft of my work. She wanted to quote from my research. I happily agreed.

Thus I was invited last Thursday to the 25th Anniversary celebration of the Good Neighbor Agreement. Teresa autographed her book for me. An audience of about 80 people listened to a panel discussion on this history. The diverse panel had surprising agreement on history’s lessons: success had arisen from this being a small local mining company and established grassroots organizations. Small-town dynamics were the key to building trust.

That local focus may seem at odds with a national picture in which conflict, rather than resolution, seems to be the point. Collaboration has become a dirty word, associated with Neville Chamberlain-style capitulation. And certainly both sides of the Good Neighbor Agreement would say that there are some parties they would never trust enough to collaborate with.

But historically, collaboration has also represented productive problem-solving rooted in diversity. Indeed, this particular Agreement arose out of failures of government. The environmentalists were suing not the mine but the regulators. Mine leaders turned out to be willing to do more than the law required if they could avoid courtrooms.

Today, we seem to be watching the weakening or destruction of numerous federal institutions. (For an example, pick your favorite acronym: NIH, NEH, DOE, PBS, NPR, DEI…) It’s the expected cause and/or the effect of massive failures of government. So what will future conflict resolution look like?

In remote Montana, a 25-year-old small-town initiative provides an intriguing option. Everyone involved said that establishing trust involved an insane amount of work. But as the Good Neighbor Agreement’s anniversary celebration showed, an atmosphere of trust is where solutions arise.

In that spirit, I deeply appreciated what happened after the panel discussion, when a mine employee explained what we in the audience should do next. We should serve ourselves dinner from the stations at one end of the room. Then, instead of sitting back down with our friends, we should pick a new table full of strangers. They too were our neighbors. Maybe we could start down the path of finding them worthy of trust.

Discussion:

• A pdf version of Teresa’s book, A Seat at the Table, is available free here.

• My title calls to Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall,” which is more ambivalent than I’d remembered. A good fence needs to serve a good purpose.