Planetary differences

Kárahnjúkar touched off what one player characterized as Iceland’s cold war. A leading conservationist said to me, for instance, that when he walks by a river, he sees an act of God, and that when dambuilders walk by, “they start counting kilowatt-hours.” Told of the remark, a smelter manager sniffed, “They don’t understand business, and they don’t want to.”

One side may as well have been from Venus and the other from Mars. The main guy here from Alcoa, Tómas Már Sigurðsson, a native Icelander with a degree in environmental engineering who considers himself an environmentalist, was upbeat and idealistic. Alcoa’s mission, he said, was to be a good neighbor in the community—while creating the most efficient, safe, and eco-friendly smelter on the planet, by recycling materials and using state-of-the-art technologies to minimize waste and control the sulfur dioxide fumes that are a by-product of smelting aluminum from alumina, a white powder refined from bauxite ore.

He seemed particularly psyched about something Alcoa calls the Sustainability Initiative—under which representatives of diverse interest groups (business, government, the power company, community, church, the environment) devise mutually agreed-on standards for holding Alcoa accountable over time: Did Alcoa raise the region’s standard of living, provide the kinds of jobs it said it would, treat the environment as promised? The Sustainability Initiative had been put into effect at the new smelter in Reyðarfjörður. “A first in the world,” Tómas said—and an industry template for how to approach new communities with the controversial idea of building smelters.

“We’re not just building a factory that will produce metal,” said Tómas, baby-faced, balding, and fit, with high color, a smear of lips, and an open, earnest manner. “It’s a far different level.”

Young and idealistic eco-warriors, meanwhile, rolled their eyes in droll disbelief. They dismissed things like the Sustainability Initiative as little more than a capitalist lie designed to manipulate and co-opt an unsuspecting public—a “greenwash,” as they put it, which is why, in one highly publicized protest action, a band of them dumped buckets of green-dyed yogurty stuff, called skyr (pronounced skeer), on a gathering of aluminum industrialists (including Alcoa’s Tómas), who, not realizing at the time that the skyr was just skyr, were understandably alarmed. “They were trying to say aluminum smelters were eco-friendly!” said Arna Ösp Magnúsardóttir, a local protest organizer who got arrested that day, as she sat at a sidewalk café in Reykjavík, wearing a pink satin pajama top over black tights.