CHANGE

Click on the fifth picture—

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/randy-olson-photography

I also heard the author of this story on NPR, speaking of the insanity of the gold mining trade. I think he said that these trucks are 14 feet high to accommodate work in the mine, and he was amazed at how they appeared in the photo- that without knowing that, you wouldn’t be able to imagine the scale of the photo, and the expanse of the mine. This mine is a crater in the earth visible from space. And to mine enough gold for the wedding band around your finger, miners move 250 tons of waste material (literally waste rock and material that cannot be used in any way).

Here’s an excerpt from this eye-opening article:

“For all of its allure, gold’s human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world’s richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It’s an invitation to destruction. But there is no shortage of miners, big and small, who are willing to accept.

At one end of the spectrum are the armies of poor migrant workers converging on small-scale mines like La Rinconada. According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world’s gold and support a total of 100 million people. It’s a vital activity for these people—and deadly too.”

Read the full article here:

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text

Hear the interview here:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99113470

Trackback URI | Comments RSS