Opinion Sur Joven

Mining is necessary to provide humans with several elements, but it’s not sustainable in time, because it’s based on the extraction of non-renewable resources. A country could crop cotton for 100, 200 or even 1,000 years if the necessary steps are taken, but it couldn’t export gold intensively for such a long time for a simple reason: at some point there will be no metal left.

According to a book called “Minería. Impactos Sociales y Ambientales” (in English, "Mining. Social and Environmental Impact”), which consists in a compilation of articles published on the email newsletter of Movimiento Mundial por los Bosques Tropicales, in the real world, saying mining is unsustainable is actually not enough, because its impact exceeds by far what people would normally consider to be unsustainable.

Why? Because, according to them, this activity is responsible millions of people’s hunger. According to the book, mining is in the roots of numerous civil wars, dictatorships and foreign armed interventions; it’s responsible for the generalized violation of human rights; it’s responsible for the poisoning of people and the environment; it’s one of the most important, direct and underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation.

After such a prologue, we’d better resort to an expert to explain why mining is the devil of the natural-resource-based industry.

No more picks and helmets

In older times, mining was a synonym of working in underground galleries drilling mountains, with workers holding picks, wearing helmets with lamps and diving into the depths of the Earth. Not anymore.

Although there are still some underground mines, such as the gold mines in Witwatersrand, South Africa (the deepest one in the world), or the copper mines at El Teniente, Chile (the largest one in the world), “today the trend is to dynamite entire mountains to obtain the metal”, comments mining and environment specialist Norberto Costa to Opinión Sur Joven. He’s a “multi-activist” against this activity: he participates in five environmental organizations, including Asamblea Socio Ambiental del Noroeste Argentino (ASANOA) (in English, Social-Environmental Assembly of the Argentine North-West Region) and Red Nacional de Acción Ecológica (RENACE) (in English, National Ecological Action Network), whose acronym literally means “rebirth” in Spanish.

Costa explains the mining business model has changed radically. Since we are preceded by hundreds of years of extraction, to obtain the necessary amount of gold to make a ring today implies dynamiting more than 20 tons of rock.

With this scenario, the situation of mining is different today: the ruling mining type today is the “metal and chemical mega-mining”. The process is basically as follows: each deposit is blasted twice every day of the year; after that, the dynamited rocks are loaded and transported towards the crushing machines that turn them into small particles. The valuable metal or metals are separated from the waste rock using different methods (leaching or flotation), but all of them require toxic chemical substances (cyanide, sulfuric acid, etc.) and a lot of water (about 265 gallons per second).

After obtaining the metals, solid and liquid waste is left. “Solids end up in mine dumps, which are enormous mounds of crushed rock exposed forever to open air, winds, dew, snow or rains, and continue to produce acid drains for hundreds of years”, Costa explains, and he adds: “Liquid waste ends up in enormous artificial lagoons or at open air. The problem is that they contain ‘chemical soups’ and remains of heavy metals that will eternally produce drains towards groundwater”.

What’s more, daily explosions fill the atmosphere with the nitrous fumes of the blasts and enormous amounts of airborne mining dust (with arsenic) that poison watercourses, ruin crops, kill animals and poison the men and women who breathe them.

“An additional problem is landscape alteration -Costa observes- because mountains ’disappear’ leaving enormous craters, such as the open pit at La Alumbrera, in Catamarca province (Argentina), that’s more than 1,2 miles wide and 2,625 feet deep”.

A lot of damage for a lot of money

Mining is a great business, especially because of the high price of raw materials such as gold and copper. That’s why, apart from harming the environment, they generate millions of dollars. But the current global economic situation isn’t the only factor helping mining companies earn astronomical sums of money. There’s also some extra help from the less appropriate ally: the State.

One of the reasons is that some governments, such as the Argentine one, help them with “tailor-made laws that let them take it all away and pay almost nothing for it”, Costa complains, arguing that, at best, they pay 3% of royalties, “though tax-exempted and with tax stability for 30 years”.

In the case of Argentina, they are also provided with electric power and Diesel fuel with subsidized prices, which they also consume in “enormous amounts”: the largest mine in the country, La Alumbrera, needs about 1,320,000 gallons of Diesel fuel a month and consumes electrical power equivalent to 80% of the total use in Tucumán province (with more than one million inhabitants).

Furthermore, La Alumbrera uses approximately 26,400,000 million gallons of water a ay, which leads us to the unavoidable question: What’s the advantage for our society of losing vital resources such as water and energy to have them brutally consumed by mining companies?

Such a tremendous absorption of resources influences the energy policies of the countries as well. For instance, since the electric power of the system is insufficient in Argentina, the government has announced a nuclear plan to reopen nuclear power stations. Apart from implying a risk –which has already been proved by Chernobyl-, they will require the exploitation of opencast uranium mines that will consume more energy, destroy more mountains and require more sulfuric acid leaching.

All this economic and environmental sacrifice for an activity that, on top of it, will render economic results for no longer than 15 or 20 years. That’s why anti-mining activists agree with Costa: “The business management of mining companies focuses on extracting and taking away the metals they’re interested in as soon as possible and as much as they can; and they conceal their real intentions behind false corporate social responsibility practices, manipulating officials and governments and promoting inexistent development”.

The resistance

The disasters provoked by mining don’t go unnoticed by people. Let alone by the people who live near the deposits. And resistance is growing.

“The clearest example of citizen rebelliousness and opposition to mega-mining took place in Esquel (Argentine Patagonia), where the population forced a plebiscite it won with more than 80% of the votes, so the company Meridian Gold had to stop the project. Today, that example is being followed in all affected regions or the ones about to be affected”, comments Costa enthusiastically.

An infinite number of independent organizations of citizens, assemblies, NGOs, clubs, etc., are raising their voices against chemical mega-mining and opposing to it, thus compensating the economic pressure of the companies and their influence on the authorities.

Besides, their efforts are supported by the almighty Internet. There are lots of chain emails and newsletters alerting on abusive mining companies and showing examples of worldwide struggles against this activity.

In Costa’s opinion, the solution is abstract, though unequivocal: “The ‘first world’ has to stop its crazy consumerism race. Those countries have exhausted their resources and now they’re coming for ours, just like 500 years ago, but worse, because now they want everything”.