Dr. Anne Wagner was a constant mention in our planning for “On the Road: People Bridges to People,” the first project for America, The Diversity Place.
Environmental scientist, former president of Women’s Mining Coalition, was key to planning ‘On the Road’
By Albert C. Jones
America, The Diversity Place
QUESTA, New Mexico — Anne Wagner was a constant mention in our planning for “On the Road: People Bridges to People,” the first reporting and marketing campaign of any sorts for America, The Diversity Place. Deeds of the past were remembered and working relationships established, through bridge work, now sequence to the next chapter.
The drive from small-city Las Vegas to Questa, where the mine is located on the western slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, offers cattle grazing — a few too close to the shoulder of State Highway 518 — fashionable adobe houses, strained, dilapidated out-of-use commercial buildings. That prominent snow-covered peak under blue skies miles ahead looks like a picture postcard: “Mountain Tops of New Mexico.” The winding highway climbs from 6,424 feet at the start in Las Vegas to just over 7,600 feet at Questa.
Our first communications with Wagner was through email. She was found on the Women’s Mining Coalition Web site and several other hits also came up on Google.
“A manager who worked here ten years ago — it’s been almost that long — met two of the founders of the Women’s Mining Coalition (WMC) at a meeting,” Wagner said in the Chevron office at Questa. “They were recruiting people to go to their annual Fly-in in Washington. He came back and said, ‘You would be a good candidate and I think you ought to get involved with this group. Give them a call and see what it’s about.’ I did and I have never looked back.
“It’s an opportunity to do a couple of things,” she said about WMC. “It provides the opportunity to educate people in Washington about the importance of mining to this country. It’s an opportunity to network and meet women who work in the mining industry from a variety experiences and locations and the exchange of information and the learning you get from interacting with other people in the industry. That, to me, has been as big a benefit as being able to go back to Washington to educate decision-makers or people who support decision-makers on why we need mining in the country.”
Two days started with dustings of snow while in Las Vegas, New Mexico, but the highway was mostly clear of snow and ice on Friday. The farther north we drove the more evidence that the snows of winter had come and lingered. We had planned to come to Questa forty-three days before while in Phoenix, but snow storms to the north, around Flagstaff, and a weather system that extended into northern New Mexico and southern Colorado changed our plans. We went east and then south, as they sing, “deep in the heart of Texas.”
The Town of Taos, with its motels, shopping strips, gas stations, restaurants, more pueblo and adobe architecture, is twenty-five miles south before you get to Questa. We stopped for an hour in Taos, but did not hear the mysterious hum, not knowing the source, that some around here are able to hear. It’s the sound of “time immemorial” is just a thought of what that hum could possibly be.
Anyway, Wagner, who has a doctorate in environmental science from New Mexico State University, is among perfect examples of constructing “People Bridges to People,” how these bridges occur and work for us. The Questa Mine, operated by Chevron since its merger with Unocal in 2005, produces the silvery metal molybdenum, an alloy that gives steel flexibility and high-grade stainless steel its character.
Molybdenum is also used in pipeline steel and pollution-control equipment. Wagner is manager of Environmental and Public Policy here. News that Chevron had plans to build the largest concentrating solar photovoltaic installation in the country on a mine tailings site at Questa came with us.
America, The Diversity Place is expected by the guard in his security kiosk. You watch a short video on mine operational safety and are given a quiz before you can go into any facility.
“My primary area of responsibility is ongoing compliance and permitting, making sure we are operating within all environmental guidelines and regulations, Chevron guidelines,” Wagner said at the start of the interview. “We try to minimize our impact on the environment and address those issues. Then I also have a public policy role which includes tracking regulatory changes, tracking legislation.
“Basically I am responsible for tracking state legislation that could impact the mine operations or the environmental piece and making sure the right people know about pending changes or what those changes are,” she said. “Of course, there is support from a variety of people from either within the corporation or outside folks. There is a sense of teamwork here. It’s a good place to work”
The news release said “the concentrating solar photovoltaic installation will have about 175 solar panels on 20 acres of land producing one megawatt.”
Construction is scheduled for spring 2010 and completion by the end of the year.
“Number one, we are very excited about the solar project,” Wagner said. “We look at turning an industrial site, essentially a mine site, into a solar facility. We think that’s — the catch-phrase is brown to green — an exciting opportunity for us and Chevron Technology Ventures Company. It’s an emerging technology that is being developed.
“Questa is a good place to put solar because it has some good solar resources,” she said. “The sun shines so many days out of the year, winter and summer. Because we are at elevation and not a lot of humidity, there is not a lot of haze to dilute the sun.”
While we were The Diversity Times, a monthly newspaper operated by a marketing and communications company in Murray — Utah, The Diversity Place — Wagner played a pivotal role in our hope of executing a project far-reaching beyond our home state.
We started a company on a premise, how to complete the enclosed appositive, the noun phrase with verb and the rest of the syntax. Eventually we came to the understanding that Utah, The Diversity Place, is everybody. That understanding would lead us to thinking and seeing, really, nationally and globally. That we might be a national company transformed into a global enity will not come as a surprise.
In Utah, The Diversity Times had developed ties to the mining industry. When the loss of life happened in the collapse of the Crandall Canyon Mine in August 2007 — first six trapped miners and then three rescue miners in the second collapse — we covered the memorial observance — “A Celebration of Heroes” — led by Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. on the grounds of Canyon View Junior High School.
Karl Malone, who for years before his retirement, was legend in the National Basketball Association for being on the receiving end of Stockton-to-Malone passes, designed plays that led to the Utah Jazz scoring thousands of points during their careers. What John Stockton started Karl Malone finished. The heralded and common occurrence of Stockton-to-Malone now bears the name of a car dealership in Sandy, Utah: Stockton to Malone Honda.
It was a heartfelt Malone who came Sept. 15, 2007 from Louisiana to comfort the community in Huntington during their time of grieving. He held babies, kissed grandmothers and posed for pictures with scores of people. Malone proclaimed them all heroes.
Thousands came from places more than just in Utah, came to “A Celebration of Heroes.”
The month before, Thurl Bailey, another former Jazz great, was keynote dinner speaker at the Utah Mining Coalition’s annual convention in Park City. There, it was the first time we met David A. Litvin, then president of the Utah Mining Association. Bailey, an inspirational singer with a soulfully nuanced baritone, Bailey donated his speaker’s honorarium and proceeds from album sales that night to the miners’ families relief effort.
he Diversity Times’ link to the mining industry further grew after we established a working relationship, as a student recruitment tool, with the School of Mining Engineering at the University of Utah. We had also met Dr. Michael K. McCarter, professor and chairman, at the Utah Mining Association Convention.
Distribution points for the newspaper included several school districts and all the colleges, Provo to the south and Ogden to the north. The Diversity Times was also delivered to recreation centers, senior centers, the Utah Cultural Celebration Center in West Valley City, and to an assortment of faith-based organizations — as many locations that allowed us to build upon a diverse and multicultural readership.
Educators liked The Diversity Times. Our business plan — Utah, The Diversity Place, is everybody — was working. We had ad placements from all the institutions of higher learning in the state that advertised, including the College of Eastern Utah’s Western Energy Training Center (WETC) in Helper, Utah.
We received an invitation to come to WETC from Dr. Robert Topping, then the interim director. Michael Styles, then a director in the Office of Ethnic Affairs, and Barry A. Hamilton, assistant state conservationist for field operations for Natural Resource Conservation Service in Price, Utah, also attended the meeting. WETC was developing a process to take coal mine tailings and process it into briquets.
WETC also had a training program to fill technical positions in power plants that were becoming open because of the retiring workforce. They wanted to attract students from throughout the state. Gov. Huntsman had been given a tour of the facility the month before our tour and presentation.
After launch of The Diversity Times in June 2006, we started sending media kits out throughout the United States to chief executive officers on the Fortune 500 list and a long list of prestigious colleges and universities. By the time we published the final issue in February 2009, more than 5,000 media kits that included copies of The Diversity Times had been sent nationally and internationally.
Somewhere along the way we were made aware of MINExpo International 2008, the quadrennial exhibition scheduled for Sept. 22-24 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. Right away we began planning to do a special issue for MINExpo International. The timing couldn’t have been more in our favor and the synergy was there.
The Utah Mining Coalition’s Annual Convention was in August 2008 in Park City. Dr. Michael Young, president of the University of Utah, was the keynote speaker. Dr. Michael K. McCarter received an award at the convention.
We also did a cover story on McCarter ending consecutive terms as chair of the School of Mining Engineering. For more than 25 years, McCarter was the professor of note in the education of mining engineers trained in Utah. The “Heroes Among Us” monument to the fallen from the Crandall Canyon Mine collapse was dedicated in August 2008.
Jodie Monaco, public relations and communications manager for Boart Longyear at its global headquarters in Salt Lake City, wrote a story for us. Boart Longyear, a 100-year-old global organization providing drilling solutions to the world’s minerals, environmental and infrastructure industries, had launched a world-class training and development program focused on recruitment, training practices, safety and careers of nearly 10,000 employees worldwide.
Wagner wrote a column with a Questa, New Mexico dateline. “What would you say to a career that offered fantastic pay and benefits in a collaborative atmosphere while providing significant personal development opportunity?”
We had enough copy and photos for the special issue. Ad placements came from ten companies in the mining industry, including Breaker Technology Inc. (BTI) of Thornbury, Ontario and the Chilean Trade Commission from its Los Angeles office, Morton Salt in Chicago, Monsanto Soda Springs in Utah, and Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold in Phoenix, among others. WETC also advertised.
Wagner’s column was crucial. We needed a national voice to blend with our local copy.
Producing what we considered a successful special issue, we took a dozen bundles of The Diversity Times to MINExpo in Las Vegas for distribution. There, we reported on WETC being at MINExpo and got quotes from several other universities with mining schools. Many came from Africa and eagerly answered questions about career opportunities in the mining industry on their continent.
“It depends on where you are located,” said Joseph Ebo Hewton, managing director of Johaze Ltd. and vice chairman of the Ghana Association of Road Contractors. “In my country, there are career opportunities in exploration, actual mining and health and safety. In nearby Liberia, there are good opportunities. Their needs are for assaying, which is cleaning minerals. Gold and iron ore are brought from Liberia to Ghana for cleaning. There is no one here from Liberia, but I am representing their industry.”
With much optimism and positive economic outlook, more than 35,000 attended MINExpo from all over the world. Then one month later the bottom fell out of the U.S. economy and commodities prices dropped. One year later there were layoffs throughout the industry, including at Questa.
When prices will rebound and those jobs come back remains uncertain. Drawing attention to mining careers was the reason for our initial contact with Wagner. Reciprocity is the reason now.
“I think it’s still positive,” Wagner said about career outlook in the mining industry. ‘I think there’s going to continue to be opportunities in mining. Hopefully there will continue to be opportunities in the U.S. Certainly there will be opportunities in mining worldwide. There is a variety of jobs available in mining everywhere from professional engineers to environmental specialists to accounting professionals to support, as well as being a miner.
“Mining is more than just removing rock from the ground,” she said. “It really encompasses everything from the exploration and locating the minerals, which is really the focus of geologists, to developing a mine, operating it. Then at the end of it, because it’s a finite resource, you have to be able to close the mine in an environmentally responsible way. Most locations have significant regulations now that there are standards you have to meet. There are practices that are expected before closure of a mine. There is a breadth of job opportunities, career opportunities, when you think about the lifecycle of a mine.”
Of course, there are mining careers in management of environmental public policy and community outreach.
What will be the evolution of the Green Economy is a question in which many are seeking answers.
“You know, I don’t know,” Wagner said. “On the front end of it, most green technologies take materials. It seems to me there will be opportunities to provide those materials.”
We saw the blades of turbines spinning on wind farms in Wyoming and going through the Columbia River Gorge. As the news release stated, electricity produced by the concentrating solar photovoltaic installation “will be sold to Kit Carson Electric Cooperative through a power purchase agreement.” One-megawatt is enough to provide electricity to 300 homes.
Concentrating solar photovoltaic is “an emerging technology that is being developed,” Wagner said.
“There are environmental careers, I see, that are never going away,” she said. “You have to understand your impact on the environment. You have to manage those impacts on the environment — ensure compliance with environmental regulations. At the closure, a lot of the closure pieces are about reclamation and monitoring and mitigating environmental impacts and restoring the land to a productive use.
“The message is we have done the ground work,” Wagner said. “We have done the basic science, so that when we can move forward with the reclamation projects, we have a lot of the information we need to move forward.”
Part of the conversation with Wagner was about living in northern New Mexico.
“I also work with the folks who do community outreach programs,” she said. “Here at the mine, we have a community grants program. We have an employee committee that’s made up of hourly and staff. They get together on a quarterly basis and review grant applications that groups, nonprofits, have submitted for funding. They decide who gets the funding for that quarter.
“We award a lot of grants to groups trying to make the community better,” Wagner said. “What’s nice about it, it’s not just one or two people deciding who gets the grants, but it’s made up of a cross-section of the employees, which, in turn, represents a cross-section of the community. We also have a scholarship program for Questa High School. We award at least two scholarships for kids to go to college. That’s a nice program to be involved with.”
The picture postcard we noticed on the drive coming here has made an impression on Wagner that has kept her here.
“Well, you have seen how beautiful it is,” she said. “I like living in rural New Mexico. It is fun to visit the city, but it’s nice to be in a small community. There are lots of opportunities to go hiking. Whatever your outdoor interest, you can pretty much do it here.
“The people I work with are wonderful,” Wagner said. “I enjoy working here because of the people. I ended up with just different opportunities that led me being in northern New Mexico. I can’t say I had a plan to come to New Mexico or northern New Mexico. My husband and I have been in northern New Mexico since 1990 and we love it here. It’s a beautiful place to live. We like what we do.”
Her husband, John Harrington, is professor of tree physiology and superintendent of Mora Research Center, New Mexico State University.
She began here mining career as a “revegetation” consultant in 1994.
“When I first started working here at the mine, it was as a revegetation consultant,” Wagner said. “In order for the mine to meet new state regulations which were passed in 1993, we had to identify what vegetation grew around the mine. The mine and tailing facility have two different ecosystems. We had to understand what the surrounding ecosystem is and begin the planning process to figure out what the reclamation plan should be once we close the facility to be able to restore the land to a productive use. At the mine site, that will be forestry.
Wagner grew up in Dodge City, Kansas, a town noteworthy in history for great cattle drives and being a link along the Santa Fe Trail. She went to Fort Hays State University, north in Hays, majored in botany, graduated, then served two years in the Peace Corps in Ecuador.
“I liked science,” she recalled selecting a major, “looked at engineering, but I wasn’t cut out to be an engineer. Science, I liked to understand how things worked. Focused on plants throughout my educational career and I kind of morphed into environmental science. Plants don’t bite like animals, which is why I ended up in botany and not zoology.”
Mention of the Peace Corps brought back memories.
“It was interesting,” Wagner said. “It was challenging. It was something I’m glad I did it, but I don’t know if I would have the guts to do it now. It was a good experience. I was a forestry volunteer in South America for two years.
“It was primarily doing agro-forestry,” Wagner said. “I worked in a nursery. It was part of their extension service. We were additional people on the ground as part of their extension service. We worked with landowners. Like many Third World countries deforestation had a big impact. The thought was to plant trees and, in some cases, trees that were useful as fire wood or supplementing another crop. A lot of it was inter-planting trees with the crops they were growing, which improved the productivity of the land.”
Wagner trained in the Andes for her Peace Corps assignment and was assigned to work on the Central Coastal area of Ecuador.
Dr. Anne Wagner stands in front of pictures of women miners on a conference room wall in the Chevron office at the molybdenum mine in Questa, New Mexico.