When Law Becomes Complicit: Mining Regulations and the Systematic Destruction of Nature -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka

These days, mining is not a mere field of extracting minerals. It extracts silence from the law. From the rainforests of the Amazon to the cobalt belts of Central Africa and the nickel frontiers of Southeast Asia, ecosystems are not just degraded; they are systematically dismantled. Rivers are poisoned, forests are erased, and whole ecological systems are reduced to industrial sacrifice zones. Yet the most disturbing truth is not the destruction itself. It is that much of this destruction is perfectly legal. In principle, the law exists to limit power. In the real world, mining law serves quite often the opposite purpose: It legitimizes harm. Governments issue permits, framed as “environmental approvals,” while environmental impact assessments, the so called first line of defense are consistently watered down to bureaucratic ceremonies.

These assessments often underestimate the impact of the environmental damage over the long term; they leave out cumulative effects and often rely on data generated or funded by the very corporations they are intended to supervise. Not environmental protection becomes available, but rather environmental choreography, a show that the regime pretends to follow an illusion of containment while extracting proceeds unchecked. This is not regulatory failure. It is regulatory design.

Mining laws in numerous jurisdictions are based on a fundamental contradiction: they are built on the rhetoric of wanting sustainability, but underpin structural primacy to extraction. Legal frameworks frequently enable companies to externalize environmental costs, deforestation, biodiversity loss, water contamination while absorbing gains. The outcome is a system in which destruction is not a law breaking exercise; it is indeed its rightful consequence. Thinking a little before it comes to liability structures we might ask. Fines aimed at environmental damage often have minimal significance (relative to corporate revenues).

Cleanup duties to a certain extent delayed, compromised, negotiated with or evaded altogether. Some companies file for bankruptcy, passing down toxic liabilities that governments and in the end, citizens are burdened by. The law, as often as not serves more to price it, the law does not discourage harm, but to punish it is to put a dent in it. Even more troubling, however, is the de facto normalization of what is perhaps termed “legalized ecological risk.” Mining permits are given on the belief that harm to the environment can be mitigated or eliminated or offset. However ecosystems are not spreadsheets. A watershed that is devastated can’t be meaningfully “offset” by planting trees elsewhere. A tainted river, by financial compensation, does not heal.

Reversibility that is the very premise of many regulatory regimes is a legal fiction, however, collapses when it comes to ecological reality. This contradiction has only been exacerbated by global demand for critical minerals, fueled by the shift to green energy. Lithium, cobalt, and nickel are now portrayed as key to fighting climate change. But the quest to ensure these resources will echo the extractive logic that led to the crisis in the first place. Without a new paradigm for mining governance, the ‘green’ transition will most likely make the damage geography even more fragmented, not less so.

Yet fundamentally, we find this failure is not the absence of law but the direction of law. Mining law too often exists as a mechanism to facilitate investment, secure supply chains and attract capital. When environmental protection does show up, it is secondary conditional, negotiable, often subordinate to economic imperatives.

That is how law becomes complicit: not by failing to act, but by colluding with extractive interests. What would it mean to reverse this alignment? First, environmental limits, not flexible guidelines, must be treated as strict legal boundaries, that are in a position of being non negotiable. Some ecosystems primary forests, critical watersheds, and biodiversity hotspots should simply be off limits for extraction altogether. Second, the burden of proof must be transferred. It should not be sufficient for communities and regulators to prove in its wake that something bad happened; companies must demonstrate, with independent and reliable proof against this damage, that they will not wreak irreversible devastation. Third, there has to be reformatory change to the liability rules. Fines should be substituted for tough, enforceable commitments that accurately represent the extent of ecological degradation, including long-term monitoring and protection under financial guarantees of restoration. And finally regulatory failure itself must be responsible.

When environmental approvals deliver predictably to ecological collapse, the problem isn’t just corporate misconduct, it’s institutional responsibility. Laws that facilitate destruction are not neutral as well. They are instruments of policy, and they need to be judged for it. The uncomfortable truth is this: despite laws, ecosystems have not been destroyed. They are getting destroyed because of it. Until legal systems face their own role in this process, mining will continue to function on a dangerous delusion that so long as destruction is accepted, it is warranted. But legality is not morality, and regulation is not protection. A legal system that authorizes the destruction of nature fails to do so. It work and it comes at the cost of the planet.

Fransiscus Nanga Roka

Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya Indonesia