Over the three decades Tom Hethmon has spent thinking and researching safety, companies have adopted increasingly ambitious safety policies to attempt to reduce workplace injuries and fatalities and fight the stigma that mining is an inherently dangerous industry. Hethmon, an academic, consultant and today the vice-president of health and safety for Vancouver-based SSR Mining, spoke earlier this year at the CIM Convention on the topic of zero-harm, that now ubiquitous and, to some, utopian vision of a future where no worker is hurt or killed on a mine site.