Abstract Over the last few years, the idea of ‘sustainable mining’ has, thanks to industry sponsorship, been working its way into the agenda of many international processes. There is now a push in many countries to invite in multinational mining companies with the idea that there is a ‘new, sustainable mining’ that is different from the old, bad practices of the past. Yet what has actually changed in the industry to match this shift in rhetoric? From the perspective of mine-affected communities, nothing seems to have changed. Their land is still being taken from them without giving their free, prior and informed consent, and they are suffering the same ill effects on their ways of life, health and environment. This paper will illustrate, using case studies from the Philippines and West Papua, how under this rhetoric, the mining industry ‘emperor’ has the same old naked ambitions. This paper intends to look at how ‘sustainable mining’ is perceived from the viewpoint of mines-affected communities and their supporters. Ideally a representative of such a community should be writing this, but as this was not possible, I am writing this as a member of the editorial board of Mines and Communities (MAC). (MAC is a network of organizations across the world seeking to empower mining-affected communities in their struggles against damaging proposals and projects. More information on Mines and Communities, including the members of its editorial board, can be viewed at http://www.minesandcommunities.org.) Many of the communities MAC works with are made up of indigenous (or first, aboriginal) peoples, who have been unfairly disadvantaged by mineral development on or near their land. The paper will therefore concentrate to some extent on the issues of indigenous communities.

ABSTRACT The Natural History Museum Vienna is one of the most important museums of natural history in the world. Its collections date back to the year 1750, when the Emperor Franz Stephan of Lorraine (Franz I. Stephan) purchased (from Italy) what was then the largest and most famous collection of natural history specimens. The meteorite collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, has the longest history of all comparable collections in the world. In the second half of the eighteenth century, soon after the foundation of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1750, the Viennese curators began to collect meteorites. Although the first curators neither believed in the extraterrestrial origin nor accepted—in several cases—the written and witnessed histories of these allegedly “heavenly” stone and iron masses, they preserved them in the Natural History collection. Among the first acquisitions were the historical important meteorites Hraschina (Agram), Tabor, Krasnojarsk (Pallas iron), and Eichstädt. These and other well-documented specimens from the Vienna collection were, for example, used by E.F.F. Chladni for his seminal treatises of 1794 and 1819, respectively. The central figure in the early history of the collection is Carl von Schreibers (1775–1852). After the fall of the Stannern meteorite in 1808, he availed himself of every opportunity to acquire meteorite specimens. His continued interest in meteorites laid the foundation for the Vienna collection to be of the historical and scientific importance it is today. Due to the efforts of Schreibers, who also is regarded as founder of meteoritic science in Vienna, and his successors, the Vienna collection became the largest and most extensive in the course of the nineteenth century. In terms of the geological and paleontological collections, early expeditions and collecting campaigns were mainly targeting exotic animals and plants, while paleontological objects were welcome but subordinate. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the paleontological collections were—literally and figuratively speaking—systematically enlarged. Internationalization and diversification became the focus of the collection strategy. The paleontology collections at the Vienna museum also became important in the Darwinian view of evolution.