Is this natural beauty, rich biodiversity under threat?

Fly over PT Freeport's concessional area in Irian Jaya and you will see a spectacular view below.

The raw beauty of the land; vast, breathtaking rain forests, ubiquitous swamps and tall mangroves, verdant mountains and towering peaks, and alpine tundra covered with glacial ice are just part of what you will see.

Then, when you ascend the 14,000-foot mountain, along the 74- mile-long road on the ridge, you will see the company's heavy equipment in action. There on Grasberg, PT Freeport is doing business, digging through a mountain searching for copper, gold and silver.

At the contract-of-work site, development has been progressing at an alarming pace. It provides direct jobs to 16,000 people -- 2,000 of those indigenous -- and indirect jobs to over 75,000 people.

The huge operation has raised a number of environmental issues which have called for serious attention. The issues that environmentalists often raised are the operation's affect on glaciers, the tailings management and overburdened storage.

Over the years, PT Freeport has been making a great deal of effort to disprove its opponents' charges that its environmental management has not received the same priority as the engineering challenge of establishing the mining operation.

Since the discovery of the Grasberg resources, the perception of PT Freeport has changed from a mine that has about to close to the expectation of extended activities for at least 40 years.

Dames and Moore, an international environmental consultancy recently assigned to conduct PT Freeport's environmental audit, recognizes that this has led to increased commitment in environmental management.

"During the course of the audit, the team recognized a growing realization of the environmental problems and a commitment to address them," the company says.

With support from an international consulting organization, PT Freeport Indonesia's environmental department has developed a long-term environmental monitoring program (LTEMP).

LTEMP includes monitoring the environment, reclamation, recycling and education. It provides the company with vital data on a wide range of environmental impact categories.

PT Freeport Indonesia was already pioneering environmentally friendly industrial activities when it submitted to a voluntary independent environmental audit.

With criteria approved by the Environmental Impact Management Agency and the Ministry of Mines and Energy, PT Freeport selected two companies out of 10 bidders to conduct the audit.

International consultancy Dames and Moore announced in March the results of its audit and Labat Anderson is expected to report its findings in the near future.

Besides the external audit, PT Freeport Indonesia's parent company conducts internal audits to ensure that it complies with Indonesian law.

To provide analytical support for its environmental programs, PT Freeport Indonesia operates a state-of-the-art environmental laboratory at Timika.

The facility is manned by highly-professional staff and equipped with sophisticated technology, including spectrophotometers, a flow injection mercury analyzer and a potentiometric stripping analyzer.

It processes hundreds of samples and performs thousands of individual measurements. Regular samples are taken of mine water, river water, ground water, tailings, soil, plant tissues, and of the fish and shrimp in the area.

Tailings

Currently, about 125,000 tons of tailings and 20,000 tons of natural sediment are washed into the Ajkwa watershed.

Dames and Moore has confirmed in its recent audit that tailings are nontoxic.

Tailings are finely-ground natural rocks from which copper, gold and silver minerals have been removed using standard grinding and flotation techniques. No chemical is used in the process.

On the government's approval, PT Freeport uses the river system to transport the tailings and natural sediment to lowlands, where they are contained and reclaimed.

"The present tailings management system is considered by the team appropriate, given the circumstances that apply," the Dames and Moore report states.

The company has contained about 130 square kilometers between the east and west levees it has built inside the Ajkwa deposition area for the tailings and sediment.

The deposition area is designed to handle a cumulative production of 1.5 billion tons of ore. For that, the company's board of directors have approved US$25 million in capital and US$12 million for annual operating costs.

PT Freeport Indonesia will remove about 2.8 billion tons of overburden from the Grasberg pit in addition to the 420 million tons already extracted.

Overburden is the rock with no economic value that covers the copper, gold and silver ore. This must be removed during the mining process to reach the ore.

All areas affected by mining activities are revegetated under the overburden management and reclamation program approved by the Indonesian government.

"PT Freeport Indonesia has made the long-term commitment to ensure the revegetation of all areas affected by tailings deposition as soon as these areas become available, as well as including the local Irianese people in these reclamation activities," says Bruce E. Marsh, the Vice President for Environmental Affairs.

Environmental groups have, over the past decade, raised concerns that the mine's activities -- heat, blasting and dirt -- have led to the glacier receding.

But computer models, using historical data, photographs and morainal debris, show that the recent recession began 120 to 150 years ago. It is similar to the recession taking place in other equatorial countries, where glaciers are present.

Dr. Alex Wilson of the University of Arizona, after studying recently the glacial environment, concluded that the glacial recession is caused by global warming and is completely unrelated to the operations of PT Freeport Indonesia.

It is apparent that with its recently-conducted environmental audit and increased transparency, Freeport Indonesia has turned a new page in its corporate history.