MINING

Some of us have become used to thinking that woman is the nigger of the world, that a person of color is the nigger of the world, that a poor person is the nigger of the world. . . . But, in truth, Earth itself has become the nigger of the world.

—ALICE WALKER

 

 

 

PLASTICS ARE OF COURSE NOT the only persistent pollutants made by this culture. The list is long. There are plutonium-239 and other radioactive wastes, many of which will persist for the life of the planet (of course given the velocity and acceleration of this culture’s destructiveness, the death of the planet will probably come sooner than we think, insofar as most of us think about it at all). There are heavy metals removed from the earth and put into living bodies. There is carbon dioxide, which used to simply be part of the air but is now a pollutant, significant quantities of which will not be metabolized by plants or otherwise removed from the biosphere for an extremely long time. Look around your own life—and get out into the land where you live—and find the long-term pollutants produced or released by this culture.

I grew up in Colorado and spent a lot of time in the mountains, exploring ghost towns and the fringes of old mines. I say fringes because I was forbidden by my mom from entering mines for fear they would collapse or I would fall down a shaft. So I spent those days wandering around the tailings: great mounds of crushed rock that a hundred years later still supported no life. In retrospect, the mineshafts may have been the least of my safety worries; the tailings are probably more dangerous than the mines themselves.

Mine tailings are what’s left over after miners dig up the ground and extract whatever they’re going to sell. These previously buried, now-exposed rocks have normally been broken, and range from much larger than a softball down to coarse sand or even fine powder. Some minerals commonly found in tailings include—but are certainly not restricted to—arsenic (especially in gold mine wastes), barite, calcite, fluorite, many radioactive materials (that the earth had previously stored where the earth wanted them: underground), sulfur (and many sulfide compounds), cadmium, zinc, lead, manganese, and so on.¹⁵⁰

Many of these minerals are toxic. That explains the dead zones so familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to go near a mine.

Many of these minerals don’t stay in place, but weather away—their rapid weathering facilitated by their relatively small particle size, which results in greater surface area available for wind, air, and water to affect—into surrounding soil, and more ominously, water. This happens most frequently with the sulfide minerals—especially pyrite (iron disulfide: one molecule of iron and two of sulfur), the most common mineral in the majority of mine tailings¹⁵¹—which are oxidated by chemical processes and by being metabolized by certain bacteria.¹⁵² These processes produce sulfuric acid, which often reduces the pH of afflicted streams and groundwater to less than 3.0. Of course, acidifying streams and groundwater kills the streams, as well as the plants and animals who live in them. As even one pro-mining website puts it: “The presence of these toxic heavy metal ions and acidic pH’s has an adverse affect on every aquatic species found in the stream. In many instances, streams are almost completely void of life for many miles downstream of a mine drainage source.”¹⁵³

As the acidified water slowly gets diluted, the pH rises back above 3.0. You’d think this would be a good thing, but making the stream less acidic causes iron ions (from that original iron disulfide) to, as that same website says, “precipitate out of the water and coat the stream bottom with a slimy orange sludge (iron III hydroxide, Fe(OH)₃, and related compounds). This unsightly sludge, called ‘Yellow Boy,’ tints the stream water an unnatural reddish-orange color and smothers the organisms that thrive on the stream bottom.”¹⁵⁴

Great.

And it gets worse yet. Once miners have dug ore from the ground, they extract from it the gold, platinum, silver, lead, coal, or whatever else they want to sell. Frequently—and it gets ever more frequent with each passing year—this extraction (or “milling”) uses toxic or otherwise harmful chemicals: in other words, the valued minerals are no longer simply separated mechanically, but are separated through processes often involving chemicals. For example, because these days gold remaining in its native state typically occurs at concentrations of less than a third of an ounce per ton—meaning mining corporations dig up and later dump three tons of rock and soil for every ounce of gold—it’s not economically feasible to mechanically separate gold from ore. Instead, the gold is dissolved into a liquid, adsorbed from this liquid onto activated carbon, and then washed away from the carbon using solvents. Because gold isn’t soluble in water, it requires both a complexant and an oxidant in order to dissolve. Many of the chemicals used in these extraction processes are toxic or otherwise harm the land and water, and of course also harm those who require land or water in order to live. In other words, they harm all of us.

Even though the mining industry claims these chemicals are recycled—and they often are recycled to the best of their technological capability, for what that’s worth—the chemicals still often end up in mine tailings or tailings ponds, and from there the chemicals move into streams or groundwater. From there they end up in living beings.

You may recognize some of these chemicals. Let’s start with cyanide. Yes, that cyanide. The one from those World War II movies where a character bites down on an ampoule of hydrogen cyanide and immediately goes into convulsions and dies. The one that, so we hear in all these movies, smells like bitter almonds. The one that prevents cellular respiration, and kills at concentrations of 100 to 300 parts per million (and kills fish and other aquatic life at concentrations in the range of parts per billion). The one that went by the name Zyklon B and was used by the Nazis as an efficient form of mass murder. The one used in gas chambers. The one responsible for many of the deaths at Bhopal.¹⁵⁵ The one commonly listed as a chemical warfare agent. The one allegedly used by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq regime against both Iran and the Kurds (with ingredients provided with the help of the United States). The one the Aum Shinrikyo cult attempted to use to commit mass murder in a Tokyo subway in May 1995. The one al-Qaeda allegedly planned to use to commit mass murder in a New York subway in 2003. Yes, that cyanide. The same cyanide produced routinely—1.4 million tons per year—for use in the production of plastics, adhesives, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and so on. The same cyanide used in mass quantities—182,000 tons per year—to facilitate the extraction of gold from surrounding ores.¹⁵⁶ The same cyanide used to extract about 90 percent of the gold mined each year.

It seems that those who put small amounts of cyanide in subways are terrorists. But those who produce it in mass quantities and contaminate broad reaches of soil, water, and air, killing countless living beings, are not terrorists, but rather capitalists, and are counted among the finest and most powerful people on the planet.

Mining industry representatives—whose relationship to truth is as strained as that of representatives of other industries—like to tell us that using cyanide to extract gold from ore is reasonably safe. But at this stage in the corporate destruction of both the planet and honest discourse, it should not surprise us that they are lying.

Above, when I wrote that “gold is dissolved into some liquid, adsorbed from this liquid onto activated carbon, and then washed away from the carbon using solvents,” and also wrote that since “gold isn’t soluble in water, it requires both a complexant and an oxidant in order to dissolve,” my description failed to get to the essence of the process: this articulation makes the process seem clean, even if that “complexant” is something as toxic as cyanide. If the miners are careful enough—and we know they will be—then this could and should be a safe process. Right?

Well, let’s try this description. First, when we’re talking about miners, we’re not talking about Humphrey Bogart, Tim Holt, and Walter Huston protecting their hard-earned treasure by fighting off “cops” who have no stinking badges (nor, and this is more to the point, are we talking about miners who say, and more importantly actualize, the understanding that they’ve “wounded this mountain. It’s our duty to close her wounds. It’s the least we can do to show our gratitude for all the wealth she’s given us”).¹⁵⁷ Instead, we’re talking about huge transnational mining corporations that often bribe local, regional, or national officials, politicians, dictators—whoever has the power to sign pieces of paper that legalize their activities—to give them permits to dig up entire mountains. They often buy off, bully, beat, capture, or kill those who oppose them; or they get their money’s worth from the local, regional, national officials, politicians, or dictators who send in the military or police (with stinking badges) to bully, beat, capture, or kill those who oppose their mines. In the United States and Canada, the preferred tactic is to buy off the opposition (except especially in the case of those of the indigenous who cannot be bought off), whereas in the colonies it’s often more cost-effective for these transnational corporations—and the military and police who serve them—to skip directly to the latter three options: in both the short- and long-run, bullets are cheaper for them than bread, and bullets are certainly (fiscally) cheaper for them than not digging up the earth.

Next, when these huge corporations mine and mill ore, these processes are not quite so spick and span as the technical descriptions make them seem. First, picture a living mountain, its base covered in trees, its top above the tree line. Now, picture this mountain flattened. Picture its guts removed. Picture pits so large that, as one pamphlet puts it, “they could swallow cities.”¹⁵⁸ Picture heaps of extracted ore several hundred feet high and several times larger than a football field. Now, picture spraying a solution containing cyanide over those heaps. Picture the cyanide trickling down, chemically bonding with microscopic bits of gold. Picture this solution draining to a huge rubber blanket beneath this heap. Picture this blanket channeling the cyanide solution toward a large holding pond, where the gold is stripped away, and as much of the cyanide as possible is recovered to be reused.¹⁵⁹

Picture birds landing in this pond. Picture birds dying. Picture every living being who comes in contact with this pond dying.

Picture these heaps being dumped on plains. Picture them being dumped in valleys. Picture them filling these valleys, until the valleys no longer exist. Picture these heaps being dumped anywhere these transnational mining corporations have permits to dump them. Picture governments handing out these permits to transnational corporations. Picture transnational corporations handing money to local, regional, or national officials, politicians, dictators—whoever has the power to sign pieces of paper that legalize these activities. Picture streams below turning to sulfuric acid. Picture all creatures dying. Picture the bottoms of these streams coated with Yellow Boy, and picture the water itself a sickly orange. Picture those humans who live by these streams dying. Picture paid representatives of these mines telling us that these processes are safe. Picture newspapers repeating these claims. Picture paid local, regional, or national officials, politicians, dictators repeating these claims as well. Picture paid local, regional, or national officials, politicians, dictators passing laws making it illegal or impossible (at least through “proper channels”) to effectively stop the gutting of these mountains, the poisoning of these streams, the poisoning of this water, this land, this air, these nonhumans, these humans. Picture paid local, regional, or national officials, politicians, dictators buying off some of those who resist, and bullying, beating, capturing, or killing the rest. Picture the owners and CEOs of these corporations living nowhere near the tailings piles or the acidic orange streams.

Picture this cycle being repeated.

Picture the planet being killed.

Now picture a catastrophe. Picture the Baia Mare gold mine in northwest Romania. Picture a dam holding back a tailings pond. A large tailings pond. Full of water polluted with cyanide (120 tons just of cyanide) and other toxins. Now, picture this dam breaking. Picture a twenty-five-foot tall wave of toxic mud and water rushing into the Lapus River, and from there into the Somes and Tisza rivers. Picture this wave crossing the border into Hungary, hitting the Danube, and crossing another border, this time into Yugoslavia. Picture this wave killing nearly everything in its path. Picture the Tisza River being habitat and home to nineteen of Romania’s twenty-nine protected fish species. Picture one hundred tons of dead fish being collected from the surface of this river. Picture otters on the Tisza and Somes rivers eating cyanide-laced fish. Picture these otters disappearing, presumed dead: casualties gone MIA in this culture’s war on the world. Picture the Tisza and Somes rivers without otters. Now picture another spill higher on the Tisza, and this time picture 20,000 tons of sediment toxified by lead, zinc, copper, aluminum, and cyanide. Picture a river being systematically murdered.¹⁶⁰

Picture the owners living elsewhere, and not being poisoned by the effects of their decisions.

Now, picture the Zortman-Landusky mine in Zortman, Montana. Picture spill after spill of cyanide-laced water. Picture once again a tailings pond. Picture a heavy rain. Picture a tailings pond in danger of overflowing. Picture mine operators deciding to pump this cyanide solution out of the tailings pond and onto another plot of land. Picture them not telling anyone about this. Now, picture living in Zortman. Pretend you are thirsty. You walk to your tap. You turn it on. You smell bitter almonds. You’ve seen enough World War II movies to know what this means. You turn off the tap. Your water has been poisoned with cyanide,¹⁶¹ and not by Aum Shinrikyo or al-Qaeda. Instead by capitalists (who, by the way, kill a hell of a lot more people than terrorists). By a transnational mining corporation. Of course.

Now, picture these mine owners. Pretend that one of them is thirsty. He gets a drink of water. Do you think it smells like bitter almonds?

Of course not.

Now, pretend you are a rancher in southern Colorado. Pretend your cattle are on the range. You check on them. You notice they will not drink. You look more closely at the Alamosa River, and more closely still. You notice something different. You can’t quite puzzle it out. And then you understand. You see far less aquatic life than normal.

Life goes on. You keep checking the river. And over time a pattern becomes clear to you. You realize you are seeing a river being murdered. You see no aquatic life: no fish, no insects, nothing.

Somehow this does not surprise you, because you know about the Summitville Mine, a nearly two-square-mile open pit mine: nearly two square miles of toxified landscape high in the mountains. You know that this mine tore open the mountainside, and you know that the absentee mine owners—mainly European investors, although Bank of America invested $20 million when it learned that the huge corporation Bechtel would be involved—did not follow the ethic laid out in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but rather walked away after wounding the mountain. You know that this landscape will remain toxified long after you are dead, long after your own bones have become no longer yours but have rejoined the earth, have become soil, become trees, become those others who live on this land (presuming they still live).

You want to know how severely these absentee mine owners have wounded not only the mountain—which you know they have wounded gravely—but the river. Studies are done. The government—always a better friend to the absentee mine owners than to you (after all, who pays the policy makers to make their policies?)—declares that all aquatic life was killed in a seventeen-mile stretch of the Alamosa River. You know that is not correct. You believe the local alfalfa farmer—who is in no way beholden to the mining corporation—who says, “There were fifty-five miles killed. Usually, the papers just mention the top of the watershed and not the residential areas that were contaminated. It affected our entire watershed including the river, its laterals, and the stock ponds where all life was killed.”

You know, don’t you, that none of the absentee mineowners poisoned. None of them were killed.

On the contrary, they, as always seems to happen, increased their wealth, at the expense of the mountain, the river, you, and your community.

Oh, and by the way, the total value of gold and silver taken from this mine is less than half of what the cleanup has cost so far.

Somehow this doesn’t surprise you.¹⁶²

Did I mention that by far the most common use—85 percent—of gold is jewelry?

These mountains are being killed, these rivers are being killed, these fish and otters and all these other animals are being exterminated, for earrings, pendants, wedding bands, and wristwatches.

Not that it would be okay to kill mountains and rivers, to extirpate plants, animals, and so on, for “more important purposes” like cell phones, airplanes, aluminum cans, coins, automobiles, solar panels, electric wiring, televisions, computers, and so on: there is no reason good enough to destroy a landbase.

None.

None at all.

Cyanide is not the only toxic chemical used to process ore. For example, mine owners often use sodium ethyl xanthate (called SEX by the mining industry; having graduated from the Colorado School of Mines I can attest that this is the only sex that many of these miners will routinely encounter). Sodium ethyl xanthate is toxic in its own right, and under normal conditions it will form carbon disulphide, a toxic and highly flammable gas that is easily absorbed through the skin. It is even more toxic in water. In this case, even the most ardent hedonist will agree that not all SEX is good.

Another would be potassium amyl xanthate, or PAX, which is highly toxic to trout. Yet another is sulfuric acid, which is used an large quantities in some forms of leaching. Since sulfuric acid is created anyway by the weathering of tailings, additional sulfuric acid is the last thing local rivers need.

And so it goes.