gold is not only a finacial killer...<G>
WORLD
The gold plague
Pursuit brings them sickness and despoliation
By S. Allen Counter,, 3/25/2001
AMBIJA, Ecuador - A Saraguro Indian mother brings her 1-year-old to a makeshift clinic in a wooden military shack located in a mountain settlement in the southern Ecuadorian rain forest. She hands me the shaking infant.
The mother explains that she has no idea what is happening to her child, whom she carries with her every day on her back as she pans for gold and then burns the sediment in a mercury amalgam to separate out the tiny flecks of gold.
A neurophysiological test of the child's brain function, similar to an EEG, reveals unusual patterns. I draw a sample of his blood, and send it back to a US laboratory for analysis. Results reveal a mercury level five times higher than the amount considered harmful. He has been breathing the vapor of the burning mercury and may already be irreparably brain-damaged.
The woman is followed at the clinic by a Saraguro Indian boy of 14, with flowing black hair and soft smile. As I test his nerve conduction capacity, the boy tells me that he suffers from frequent and severe ''dolores de cabeza'' (headaches), muscle weakness, nausea, and vertigo. His mother tells me that he, too, pans for gold, regularly burning a mercury amalgam to extract the valuable metal. He sometimes even uses cyanide to leach out the most minute particles of gold.
When I get his blood test results, they show a mercury level about nine times what is considered neurotoxic. He will probably develop severe mercury-induced neurological disorders.
Both youngsters are suffering from what is a widespread and ever-increasing malady throughout the South American rain forest, and gold is very much at the root of this evil. International gold mining companies, as well as the many informal prospectors like those I have examined, use mercury to extract the gold from ore, soil, and alluvial sediment. Mercury, of course, is poison.
It is estimated that for every ton of gold collected in the Amazon, about 10 tons of toxic mercury are released into the environment.
Throughout Latin America and other areas of the world, including Africa and New Guinea, gold mining is destroying the biodiversity of the earth, its flora, fauna, and humans. It has devastated many of the last traditional indigenous peoples by both destroying their habitat and corrupting their cultures.
In some parts of South America, entire rivers and streams have become so polluted with the mercury and cyanide runoff from gold mining operations that all living organisms have been killed, and the indigenous children who drink from these rivers have become severely ill.
In other cases, the mercury released into rivers and streams has a more subtle, insidious effect; it settles on the riverbed where over time it is consumed by microorganisms that convert inorganic elemental mercury into highly toxic methylmercury in a process called methylation. The microorganisms are consumed by increasingly higher forms of aquatic life, all the way up the food chain to fish, which are consumed by humans.
The result: severe neurological impairment in humans who eat contaminated fish. This condition is known as Minamata disease, named after an area of Minamata, Japan, that experienced a tragic outbreak of methylmercury poisoning and associated neurological impairment in children as a result of the dumping of mercury into vital waterways by Japanese chemical industries in the 1950s and 1960s.
Gold is probably the most highly valued of the earth's natural elements. Throughout human history, it has been a symbol of power, and an object of greed and worship. Gold also has a long legacy of genocide and ruin; it has led to the devastation of biota, human societies, and entire civilizations. Its appeal is in many ways irrational. In comparison with some other naturally occurring elements such as iron, copper, or zinc, it is essentially a useless metal, with no known biological benefits.
Its present day use in technology for electrical conductivity, as well as in such things as reflector shields and internal components for spacecraft, gives it some practical value. However, most of the gold whose extraction is so harmful to the rain forest and its people is not used in the electronic or aerospace industries, but rather finds its way into the jewelry industry.
In the past, prospecting for gold was a painstaking process that often took years to pay off, and the resultant ecological destruction was much less rapid. What makes this problem so urgent today is that with the use of modern prospecting technology, including satellites, determining where substantial gold deposits are located has become relatively easy. Thus, large numbers of prospectors can quickly descend upon a fragile ecosystem and, with such modern equipment as bulldozers and other machinery, destroy many acres of virgin rainforest in days.
Many of the gold mining operations that are destroying the South American rain forests are American and Canadian owned. Attached to them are the many thousands of informal and illegal gold miners from Brazil who are known as garimpieros.
Other parts of the earth are also being exploited for gold by Europe and South Africa. In South Africa, for example, huge portions of the earth have been plundered, and indigenous peoples dispossessed, in its pursuit. Perhaps there is no more symbolic example of the harmful pursuit of gold than what many Europeans boast to be the largest hole ever dug in the planet, the ''East Rand pit,'' dug for the extraction of gold over the past 114 years by companies in Witwatersrand, South Africa. Many of Southern Africa's largest mineral pits can be traced to Cecil Rhodes, founder of Rhodesia, today called Zimbabwe.
In our own hemisphere, there is the case of the infamous Daniel K. Ludwig who, using an enormous rain-forest-devouring machine that he shipped to the Amazon from Japan, destroyed a section of the Brazilian Amazon rain forest the size of Connecticut.
In a recent visit to the Amazonian rain forest, near the Suriname-Brazil border, I met with my old friend and village chieftain Gazon, whom I had not seen for 18 years. Gazon and his people are descendants of enslaved Africans who revolted in the 1700s and fled to the rain-forest interior, where they established a chain of African villages along the rivers between the Amazon and Orinoco.
Chief Gazon's initial delight at our reunion rapidly faded to sadness as he told me what was happening in his village. The young boys, he said, had been lured away by gold miners, and as a result, abandoned many of their tribal rituals. He lamented that many of the young had come to worship gold, and had given in to the greed and followed the path of the garimpieros.
The young women of the village had also changed in many unfortunate ways, he said, as a result of being spoiled by the money brought in from the gold. Many, he complained, had contracted unknown diseases brought in by the prospectors.
But perhaps most tragic was how infants and children were showing signs of illnesses that could not be cured by the medicine men. Elders in neighboring villages were complaining about similar diseases and medical problems.
''Gold is destroying not only my people, but is also killing the sacred rainforest that has sustained and protected us for centuries,'' said Chief Gazon.
Seventy years ago, an American scientist visiting this area was astonished to learn that the Indians would not touch gold, because, as they told him, it ''drives white men crazy.'' If only that tradition had continued.
This story ran on page E1 of the Boston Globe on 3/25/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
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