In this episode

When it comes to how industries are portrayed in pop culture, mining companies probably wouldn't make the Top 5 list of the villains everyone loves to hate - but they might make the Top 10. From science fiction tentpoles like Dune, Avatar, and Star Wars to TV shows like The Expanse and True Detective, and even fantasy franchises like The Lord of the Rings, characters and companies that mine are often depicted in a less-than-flattering way.

In this second season premiere episode of Why We Mine, host Robin Stickley delves into the sticky stereotype with the help of geologist, mining futurist, and podcast host Emily King. They discuss why the perception is so pervasive, and how the mining industry can change the narrative. Robin also speaks with the leader of a “real life” mining town, Mayor Robin Smith of the District of Logan Lake, British Columbia, to learn how her community has benefited from mining in the past, and how that partnership will continue to pay dividends for decades to come — despite what you might see on the silver screen.

Transcript

0:00:04
Robin Stickley: Pop quiz, or should I say pop culture quiz? When you think of mining in movies or on TV, what comes to mind?

00:00:12
Clip: Moria, you fear to go into those mines. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep.

00:00:21
Robin Stickley: Yes, there's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. You might also think of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

00:00:28
Clip: It ain't no trick to get rich quick.

00:00:29
Clip: If you dig, dig, dig with a shovel or a pick.

00:00:31
Robin Stickley: And there are plenty of other examples like Dune.

00:00:34
Clip: How many men do you have?

00:00:35
Clip: Full crew, 26 men. But sire, we can't leave all this spice.

00:00:40
Clip: Damn the spice. Get out of there.

00:00:42
Robin Stickley: Star Wars.

00:00:43
Clip: I'm going to Mandalore.

00:00:44
Clip: That planet has been ravaged, plundered and poisoned. There's nothing left.

00:00:50
Robin Stickley: And the Avatar franchise.

00:00:52
Clip: Their damn village happens to be resting on the richest Unobtanium deposit within 200 clicks in any direction. Look at all that cheddar.

00:01:00
Robin Stickley: And the one thing they all seem to have in common, they don't exactly portray the mining industry in the best light. I'm Robin Stickley and this is Why We Mine presented by Teck and it's my pleasure to officially welcome you to season two of the podcast. Over the course of the next six episodes, we're going to explore some of the biggest challenges facing the mining industry and our society as a whole, with a focus on themes like trust and transparency, sustainability, critical minerals, reconciliation, and much more. In this season premiere episode, I'm excited to explore a question that's nagged at me for a long time. Why does the mining sector always seem to get a bad rap in pop culture? Is there a reason or is it just a convenient stereotype? And what can the industry do to change the narrative? Let's dig in.
 
Our first guest of the season is a geologist, entrepreneur and podcast host herself. Emily King is also a self-professed sci-fi and pop culture junkie and mining futurist based in Florida. Emily, welcome to Why We Mine.

00:02:24
Emily King: Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited about our topic today.

00:02:28
Robin Stickley: Me too. Emily, you wear a lot of hats. You're a geologist, you are the CEO of Global Venture Consulting, and you're also the host of On the Rocks podcast, which I thought that had one meaning to it. And then when I listened, a fantastic podcast by the way, I understood the double entendre of on the rocks, which is great.

00:02:48
Emily King: Yeah, I'm a bourbon girl, so we oftentimes imbibe a beverage while we chat about the mining industry.

00:02:55
Robin Stickley: And what was the genesis of that? It was kind of a during COVID way to stay connected to people?

00:03:00
Emily King: Yeah, I actually launched another company that I run called Prospector, right as COVID was hitting North America. So I thought, well, I'll just start doing COVID cocktails with friends of mine from the industry and record it, and now we've been going for almost four years now. So we have a lot of fun. I aim for a different bourbon or whiskey for every episode, so I've grown quite a collection.

00:03:22
Robin Stickley: So we're going to chat about mining and pop culture today. I'm excited to dive into this with you. There's not a lot of understanding about mining in movies in TV, but the truth is Hollywood really does have a tie to mining.

00:03:36
Emily King: And I find it's not necessarily a positive tie when you do find it, but it's very prevalent, especially in science fiction and I'm a sci-fi geek. It certainly is not as integrated into Hollywood as I would love it to be. Oil and gas and other industries have done a much better job of integrating their industries into those storylines and characters I would say.

00:03:58
Robin Stickley: So it's not overly well represented and when it is represented, it's often you're the bad guy.

00:04:04
Emily King: We're always the evil guy.

00:04:06
RRobin Stickley: Why is that, do you think?

00:04:08
Emily King: Well, I think where it tends to show up in storylines is a new society or a country needs raw materials, and it just seems like typically the bad guys in a lot of these scenarios are taking advantage of areas in order to profit. So I think it's also a lack of understanding of what mining looks like and feels like today. It's still really like an 1800s coal miner, dirty face, the Gold Rush reality TV show folks think that that's really what the whole industry is like, and we're light years beyond that.

00:04:42
Robin Stickley: So true. We really haven't kept up with what it looks like, but the consumer isn't that close to mining really.

00:04:49
Emily King: Right. So I think people in general are disconnected from mining and how it benefits our world and our economies. So it is hard to show that in film, on a screen, but I think at least when they're referencing the need for raw materials, there could be a positive aspect of that, right? There's this recognition that yes, you need these things, right? You need Unobtanium for superconductors, you need to mine asteroids and foreign planets if you're going to build an industry in space. So why aren't those aspects portrayed positively? It's still always the evil space mining company doing all the work.

00:05:27
Robin Stickley: It's always the evil space mining company. Even children's references honestly aren't overly kind.

00:05:33
Emily King: No, and that's another pet peeve because I do have an 8-year-old daughter and she and her friends all love rocks and stones and gemstones. So clearly the innate interest is there. They also all love big machinery and things that blow up and move big dirt around. All the same things that are fun for kids in the construction industry and even engineering. They're all present. We have to choose as an industry to get in the arena and champion having characters and storylines that are more accurate and more present.

00:06:05
Robin Stickley: Emily, in our pre-interview, you said something that really stuck with me. You talked about the fact that minds are not unlike factories. And when I thought about that statement and in the bigger picture here of pop culture and I thought about movies that involve a factory town, things like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or even Laverne & Shirley even came into my mind, these are all portraying an image of hardworking people, making an honest living.

00:06:32
Emily King: I think it goes back to a little bit of a lack of understanding of what a mine looks like and what a processing facility looks like. That they do look very similar and they operate under very similar requirements and standards in a lot of cases. But I think it's a great point. Why can't you have more stories that aren't even focused on mining? No one's asking for a whole long IMDB list of mining themed movies, but take normal stories and just set them in a mining context or a mining facility context. I think it's a great point, and I don't know where the disconnect is other than just a lack of awareness.

00:07:09
Robin Stickley: And so is it on the industry entirely to try to shift the perspective here and have those conversations? I get the feeling that sometimes mining is looking for solutions within mining instead of looking out.

00:07:25
Emily King: Yeah, we definitely have a bubble. We love to talk to ourselves quite a bit about how nobody understands how important we are and wonderful we are. It's never going to be more important to anybody else than it is to us to tell our story and to get our story out there. So are there other stakeholders who should have a seat at the table and do you have an incentive to have a positive and accurate story about mining out there? Absolutely. But are there any stakeholders who have more incentive than us? No, it's on us. So we as an industry have to be the ones driving what's going to help us communicate with folks.

00:08:11
Robin Stickley: I saw something come up on my phone yesterday that I snapped a photo. The headline said something about mining is just as cool as space exploration, but we just don't get paid that kind of attention.

00:08:23
Emily King: And that's again, part of what I think is so interesting is mining is way more prevalent in space and science fiction. I mean everything from Dune, when you think about spice on Arrakis, it's mining, it's massive mining machines that are going through scooping up. Again, not quite a positive experience, but it's there. And even in the Star Wars stories, whether it's in the books or in the movies, Mandalorian steel and the role that plays in various storylines. The lightsaber crystals come from a specific crystal cave. And there's all these kinds of themes running through to Avatar with Unobtanium.
 
Again, very similar story to Dune where it certainly is not a positive storyline where the local indigenous people are really displaced and having to fight back against the mining companies. But it is out there. It's referenced and it's presented as high-tech, relatively, right? It's showing cool stuff like some of the first uses of drone technology in science fiction were mapping caves and looking for things very similar to what we now use with our industry. So there's a lot of cool overlap there that is a great place to build on I think.

00:09:35
Robin Stickley: It's funny, when you talk about the technology of mining, to me that's one area where public perception has not stayed in line at all. I was talking to a couple gentlemen who work for MineSense and they were so enthusiastic telling me all about these lasers that their company is using and essentially it decreases waste. But they were so into it and it was great to listen to them talk about it, but in going out into the world, I jumped into a cab 10 minutes later and the gentleman asked me what I had been doing. I told him a little bit, and when he talked about mining, he said something about coal. Fair enough. Nothing wrong with what he said, but again, I just don't think we've kept up at all with the reality of what it looks like.

00:10:13
Emily King: Yeah. And I think that comes from maybe thinking that people don't care first of all, or that the more we allow them in, the more criticism and we're going to get more folks saying that we shouldn't be mining in certain areas or looking for ways to poke holes in plans perhaps. But I think the more high-tech we can show people that we are, the more they'll see that that technology comes from a place of trying to be good stewards of the earth and trying to bring innovation into places where we can reduce impact to local communities and different stakeholder groups and maximize benefit for investors. Because that's a whole nother group out there that needs to understand what we're doing. Are the folks that are investing or that we want to invest in our sector, like look, we are cutting edge. We are doing cool stuff. We are good people who love the environment. That's important for the capital markets to hear as well.

00:11:03
Robin Stickley: To say nothing of attracting a younger labor force. When you talk about tech, that's I think where you hook a younger generation, right? Speaking of younger generations, we cannot have a conversation about mining and pop culture without talking about video games. And specifically Minecraft, my 7-year-old doesn't play it, but we did just finish somewhere around here in the living room is a Lego Minecraft setup that had spiders and trap doors and all the cool stuff. I honestly don't know that much about it, but I think the influence there is significant, wouldn't you say?

00:11:35
Emily King: Yeah. We just recently started allowing our daughter Madeline to play, not against other people, but just her because some of her friends have older siblings and they were showing it to us, and I had heard a ton about it, even at mining conferences, like, oh, we got to focus more on Minecraft as a draw. And they do. The kids love it and it's amazing, they come and they ask questions. I actually pulled out rock samples for her and her friends a few weeks ago because they were showing me the different minerals inside of Minecraft, and they were like, "How do you find this in the real world? What does it look like in the real world?" And I was asking them, "How do you know where to mine for different things in Minecraft? Are there surface expressions? Are you looking for signatures of some kind?" I mean, I was curious, how do you even know?
 
But it did make me think how cool would it be to start to integrate a little bit more of that into Minecraft, like an add-on to add geologic mapping at the surface, get the kids to start looking for here's where the copper is, here's where the diamonds are, here's where the iron and steel are. But they explained to me, oh, you have to mine this and then put it through a smelter. You have to melt it down. It gets really hot, and then it turns into this. And I started saying, well... And they're like, "No, no, you don't understand. That's not how it works with mining."

00:12:44
Robin Stickley: That's not how it works. My mom, the geologist, that's not how it works.

00:12:48
Emily King: No, of course, we're in that 8-year-old phase.

00:12:51
Robin Stickley: The brand connection thing though could be real, couldn't it?

00:12:54
Emily King: Yeah.

00:12:54
Robin Stickley: I mean, there's an opportunity there, it seems to me.

00:12:56
Emily King: Yeah, and I think just gamification in general. I just got back from a trip to Kazakhstan and the company that I was over there working with ERG, they have gamification things for their younger employees to do on their company app in order to earn points and coins that they can then cash in for corporate swag. That along with all of the remote management of autonomous vehicles at mines, essentially, it's all like playing a big video game. Which certainly in a completely different industry, the US military has focused on a lot for attracting a young workforce. How they can incorporate this interest in gaming and technology into recruitment, and I certainly think that that's a big avenue for us to focus on as an industry.

00:13:43
Robin Stickley: It's been really great chatting with you, Emily. I want to just wrap up by asking you, what can mining do to change the way that it's portrayed in pop culture?

00:13:53
Emily King: I would love to see the industry come together and create an industry group that pulls together stories from people inside the industry and promotes them into popular culture. I really think that we have really interesting people who have led interesting lives doing crazy things all over the world. It really is such an adventurous and cool industry that if the industry just said, we're going to put out an open call, send us your stories and then let's work with agents, let's work with literary agents, TV, movie agents to get those stories written and integrated into popular culture. It doesn't have to be that hard.
 
I think sometimes as an industry, we have a tendency to, we're going to need two years of symposiums and panels to figure this out. It's like, no, let's go talk to that industry. Hey, movie industry, hey TV industry, how can we work with you more? How can we engage with you? I think it's as simple sometimes as coming together and saying, "All right, let's put a team together and pick up the phone and call the people who know how to do this really well." That's not us. We're not movie producers. We're not TV show directors. We don't know how to make cartoons, but we can certainly talk to those folks and figure out how we could do a better job at working with them.

00:15:11
Robin Stickley: Send us your stories. That's great. Emily, this has been an absolute pleasure. We know how incredibly busy you are, so we want to say a very special thank you for your time and your insight today.

00:15:21
Emily King: Thank you so much for having me and so excited to have you all working on this podcast. I'm a big fan. So again, thanks for the invitation.

00:15:28
Robin Stickley: That was geologist, podcast host and pop culture aficionado, Emily King. Up next, we sit down with the mayor of a real life mining town to find out how pop culture and reality don't always line up. Stay with us.
 
You're listening to Why We Mine presented by Teck. I'm your host, Robin Stickley. On this season of the podcast, we're focused on the issues that matter most to the mining industry and the people who depend on it, everyday people who care about a more sustainable future for themselves and their communities. If you like what you're hearing or you've learned something, please give us a follow on your favorite podcast platform. We'd also really appreciate it if you could leave us a review. Now, back to the show.
 
It's pretty clear from my chat with Emily that the typical narrative about mining may not be the most balanced, accurate, or up to date. So I wanted to find out what life is really like in a mining town. Could it be as dusty, dirty, and run down as Hollywood would have me believe? Well, who better to ask than the leader of an actual mining community? It's my honor now to introduce the mayor of the district of Logan Lake, British Columbia, Robin Smith. Logan Lake is just a stone's throw from the Highland Valley Copper Mine. Welcome to the podcast, Your Worship.

00:16:49
Robin Smith: Thank you, Robin. Good morning.

00:16:51
Robin Stickley: Good morning to you too. Two Robins are better than one. I feel like that could be the alternate name for our podcast today.

00:16:55
Robin Smith: I like it.

00:16:56
Robin Stickley: Right? It's great to see you. Tell us a little bit about Logan Lake for people who are listening who are perhaps not as familiar.

00:17:03
Robin Smith: So we're located in the middle of the sort of southern interior right between Kamloops and Merritt, and we're definitely in a unique place because we can sort of go wherever we want to in just a matter of a few hours, whether it's up north or out to the Okanagan or even over to the States or Alberta. We're well situated and in a good location for that sort of thing. But of course, we do have the mine just out our back door.

00:17:29
Robin Stickley: You look almost like what I would think of as a tourist destination or a resort community. There's so much going on there and it's beautiful.

00:17:36
Robin Smith: Yeah, we've been actually hearing that a little bit more the last little while because we've really been concentrating on building our outdoor amenities, and we've typically been known as a place for camping, fishing, hiking, outdoor trail riding, ATVing, and all of those things. So we've sort of been building on that and just doing better what we always have been doing.

00:18:01
Robin Stickley: When you talk about it, I don't immediately think mining town, but that's obviously very much a part of your history.

00:18:09
Robin Smith: Yes, it sure is. Logan Lake was originally built by the mine way back in the day, but I think that over the last 40 to 50 years as mining's evolved, so has our community and we've changed a lot. It's about a 15 or 20 minute drive to get to the mine site from Logan Lake. So it is a little ways down the road. So I don't think that people typically look at Logan Lake and they sort of drive around and they don't necessarily make that connection immediately anymore, although we do have mining equipment in the center of our community.

00:18:45
Robin Stickley: I was going to say, when I roll up into Logan Lake, are there any kind of tangible, obvious reminders of your ties to mining?

00:18:53
Robin Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So we have a truck and a shovel, a haul truck and a shovel right in the middle of our Rec Center parking lot. So if you're driving through the community of Logan Lake, you definitely have to drive by it. And many, many people like to pull in and have their photos taken, but I think what people don't realize is those in our eyes are actually smaller.

00:19:13
Robin Stickley: That's probably eye-opening for people to see and understand that those are actually the small versions of the real thing. Let's fast-forward. You touched on just a few moments ago about how much has changed. Let's fast-forward to the now. Talk to me about how important is resource extraction to present day Logan Lake?

00:19:31
Robin Smith: Both of my parents actually retired from the mine. My husband works at the mine. My father-in-law worked at several mines. My brother-in-law worked at several mines. So our family definitely has been supported by mining for as long as we've been here, and it's definitely been interesting to watch the way that the industry has changed and has evolved. They're really using a lot of technology to extend life of mining and all of those sorts of things, all of those pieces that are parts of today's life that we didn't maybe once look at incorporating those into mining and how they can create sustainability within the industry. And also then within the community.

00:20:16
Robin Stickley: I'm learning about the power of partnerships where mining is concerned. Can you talk to me a little bit about the local government's relationship with Teck?

00:20:24
Robin Smith: Yeah, they're a partner in a lot of what we do and just one of the examples we coordinate with emergency planning. So Logan Lake was the very first fire smart community in Canada, so we were the very first ones to actually get that designation quite some time ago. And then fast-forward to the Tremont Creek fire in 2021. We were successful in being able to protect the community from wildfire during that event. And Teck is always a supporter of Fire Smart and of our student program where we hire students to go within the forest and pile some of that underbrush. And it's actually a program that we run for students on an annual basis.
 
And I'll just go back to the fire 2021, and we had had some planning sessions previous to that event that involved the mine emergency management team and had collective meetings on how we would rule out in terms of communication between ourselves as local government and our emergency crews, and then the mine and their emergency crews and their management teams so that we could make sure that we coordinated what we needed to do to continue to operate the mine through that event.
 
So that's just an example, a small example. There's a lot of other partnerships that we have with Teck and with their management team. They're a partner in our asset management planning and our economic development planning for the future. They're very much a part of assisting us in making sure that we create opportunities to educate our local government and residents on culturally sensitive issues, and they do provide opportunities for education and those types of things as well. So there's many, many different little partnerships that happen between us.

00:22:20
Robin Stickley: And lots of little benefits.

00:22:22
Robin Smith: Yep, absolutely.

00:22:30
Robin Stickley: Mayor Smith, one of the big themes this season on our podcast is trust. What do you do? How do you approach the challenge of building trust and maintaining trust in these relationships between the community and the mining operation?

00:22:48
Robin Smith: I think it takes a long time for anybody to build trust over a number of years, and Teck is very consistent with their message always. They're very willing to share with residents within the communities that they operate, but as well as with the workers on the site. And I think that people understanding where they are at in the process and being able to wrap their head around what that means for them personally and having an understanding of that, I think that over time it does build a certain amount of trust and respect. That's not an easy thing always to come by, and I think that Teck has done a very good job making sure that it's communicating and engaging with community partners.

00:23:36
Robin Stickley: And that's key to the whole process is the transparency, keeping those lines of communications open.

00:23:42
Robin Smith: Absolutely. I think that if we as government can feel like we're a partner in planning for the future of the community with one of the biggest contributors, obviously to our tax base, that means a lot because it gives the residents within the community an opportunity for them to plan for their futures as well.

00:24:04
Robin Stickley: Living in a mining town, do you ever feel a need to defend it or explain it, or is there ever a sense of frustration in wishing people had a better understanding of what it's really like to be in a mining community?

00:24:19
Robin Smith: Absolutely. I've come across people over the years that I sort of shake my head sometimes and wonder, where are you getting your information from? I think I've even heard it said on this podcast that mining today isn't what your grandpa used to do. It's a much, much different thing today than it once was. And the opportunity for lower impact to the land exists because of utilizing things like technologies that didn't exist before. And some of the things that the mine is doing is actually pretty incredible. And I think that maybe some people don't necessarily fully comprehend that it's a much different industry than maybe it once was.

00:25:05
Robin Stickley: To those people who are listening now and maybe have some of those ideas or a negative skew on things, what would you want to remind them about or what would you hope that they might take away or understand?

00:25:17
Robin Smith: To be an operating mine in Canada, I think you really have to be incredibly environmentally astute. I think you really have to have a very, very good understanding of the impacts that you're having and the mitigation of those impacts is part of the process. And then returning the land base to the way it once was, or better is actually the long-term goal for the future of any mine in Canada. So I think that some people maybe don't realize that there's a lot of benefits that go along with mining in the industry, and at the end of the day, if you're not growing it, you're mining it. So there's always going to be technologies that you're going to need that depend on metal extraction. And if there isn't metal extraction, then those luxuries are no longer going to be available, and I don't think that's an option for most people.

00:26:08
Robin Stickley: Exactly. And it's interesting, I've heard it said many times, people who are in mining, they're people who care deeply about the planet and about the earth.

00:26:17
Robin Smith: Absolutely. They care very deeply about the environment and many, many times that's why they go into that industry is because they want to be helpers of the environment and they want to recover it back to the way that it once was, or the best that they can do, and in the meantime, be responsible about how they're extracting metals and the process that they're taking to get there. There's a lot of people within the mining industry that are incredible environmentalists.

00:26:46
Robin Stickley: It's funny, as I was doing some of the research for mining and media and pop culture and whatnot, some of the things that pop up on the internet in terms of movies and television shows and the way that mining can be portrayed, there was one scene that came up with Ben Stiller in Zoolander, and he was dressed up with a pickaxe, and the scene was mining, but it obviously was outdated. It's funny to me that we haven't really kept up with where mining is today.

00:27:13
Robin Smith: Yeah. You tell people that they're using automation and they've got trucks that are driving themselves. People are blown away. They can't even comprehend that that's even possible, that you can have trucks that size that are operated by automation, things like that. And I think there's a lot of really, really good work happening in the mining industry.

00:27:35
Robin Stickley: Well, it sounds like life in the district of Logan Lake is pretty wonderful. We'll have to put it on a list of destinations.

00:27:43
Robin Smith: Yeah, it really is. We're really, really proud of the work that's been happening over here the last little while. We're building new mountain bike trail systems. We have a brand new top-of-the-line skateboard park. We've got some improvements happening to our campground right now, with an extension happening over there so we can accommodate more people because we're always full. So there's definitely a lot happening here and there. If you haven't been through Logan Lake in a long time, you absolutely should come back through again because you'll be very, very pleasantly surprised to see the changes.

00:28:17
Robin Stickley: It doesn't sound like it's a secret anymore either.

00:28:21
Robin Smith: No. I used to have to explain to people exactly where we were, and it would always be the question, Logan Lake, where is that? But it doesn't seem to be that same narrative anymore. People have found us and it's worth the visit.

00:28:35
Robin Stickley: All right, I'm planning my road trip. That's it.

00:28:38
Robin Smith: Well, you definitely have to look me up.

00:28:40
Robin Stickley: Absolutely. Mayor Smith, what a pleasure to chat with you today. Thank you so much for your time.

00:28:46
Robin Smith: Thank you very much. It's been my pleasure today.

00:28:50
Robin Stickley: This feels fitting given we're talking about pop culture. Do you remember those memes that took over social media a few years ago? They'd show a profession, a teacher, a musician, a journalist, whatever, and compare with a touch of humor what people think they do versus what they actually do. And to me, that is a snapshot of how most of the world views mining. We have our ideas, we have our opinions, but no real knowledge or experience.
 
I think there are three main reasons. First, most of us aren't close to mines. They're not in my backyard. I'm willing to guess they're not in yours either. Second, we don't see the connection between the raw materials we get from mining and the end product. Our food has ingredient lists on it, but our phones don't. And third, mining doesn't have what I call accurate representation in media. Most Hollywood portrayals are outdated or one-dimensional. So a huge part of the story is missing. For me, that really underscores a clear call to the mining community to say more, show up, be seen, tell its success stories, and open the door to new understanding because people will not care about something that they don't understand. I want to say we all have a lot of learning to do, but I think the unlearning part is important too. This isn't an all-encompassing solution, but it's a start.

I am Robin Stickley, and this is Why We Mine brought to you by Teck. Thanks so much for listening to our season premiere episode, and thanks to our talented production team. Our senior producer is Reaon Ford. Luke Batiot is our sound engineer. And our project lead is Maria St. Aubin. Additional support provided by JAR Audio.