KEYSTONE — While the Keystone Center is well-known for its work in science education through the Keystone Science School, the organization’s mission touches a much wider area than many residents may know.

From encouraging sustainable forest stewardship here in Colorado to working with NASA to address potential environmental concerns about future missions to Mars, the Keystone Center has its hands in some the world’s most cutting-edge scientific issues.

But projects that take the Keystone Center halfway around the globe can sometimes hit close to home. That was exactly the case with an issue the center finished work on in April — pollution of Papua New Guinea’s Ok Tedi River from the nearby Ok Tedi Mine.

The Keystone Center mediated discussions between villagers along the river and the mine’s owners to reduce the mine’s environmental impact. Mine waste dumped into the river has killed fish — which are critical to the local diet — and caused flooding of cropland along the river.

“There are a lot of similarities that this copper and gold mine in Papua New Guinea has to the problems we have here that are 100 years old,” said Keystone Center president Peter Adler. “These mining issues have long tails.”

But mine-related problems here bring only a fraction of the difficulty of the Ok Tedi situation. The situation has been internationally recognized for its devastation of the environment.

“It’s just one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in the world,” said Keystone Center senior associate Janesse Brewer.

Yet the mine isn’t seen as completely negative in Papua New Guinea. Ok Tedi Mine is a hugely important part of the country’s economy. “It’s a massive sustainability dilemma. On the one hand it’s created tons of pollution,” Adler said. “On the other hand it produces 23 percent of the country’s GDP.”

That’s just the kind of difficult situation the Keystone Center specializes in helping solve. After meeting an Ok Tedi Mine official while attending negotiation training in Australia, Adler decided to get the Keystone Center involved as a mediator between the mine and villagers.

Starting in June 2006, a team of Keystone Center members, including Adler and Brewer, traveled to Papua New Guinea — “one of the last really, really wild places on the planet,” as Adler described it. Helping steer negotiations about the mine’s future, the team had to overcome years of mistrust among the locals while remaining a neutral party. “We do not take positions; we’re brokers of solutions,” Adler said.

With 50,000 villagers being represented in the talks, keeping all parties satisfied was extremely difficult, Brewer said. “It was daunting at times because you know you’re working on a huge issue, but there are no answers,” she said. “There were hundreds of meetings to make sure we were getting to people in the villages.”

After months of talks on the issue, the parties came to an agreement in June that provided $350 million in various forms of compensation for villagers, as well as creating a development foundation to help oversee the funds and act as a local voice advising mine officials about villagers’ preferences.

While the Keystone Center’s final report on the project admits there is no perfect solution to the Ok Tedi environmental dilemma, Adler said the team is pleased with the results of the discussions on both the professional and human levels.

“This whole project was very personally rewarding for all of us,” he said. “These people are really in our hearts.”

To learn more about the Keystone Center and its involvement in the Ok Tedi project, visit www.keystone.org.

<i>Andy Bruner can be contacted at (970) 668-4620, or at abruner@summitdaily.com.</i>