| | | POOR PEOPLE DESTROYING AMAZON
A modern gold rush is destroying the Amazon
Amarakaeri Communal Reserve: September 2016 to September 2017
Source: Planet; Imagery Analysis by MAAP and Amazon Conservation
The cost is easy to see from satellite images. Illegal mining has turned more than 600 square miles of pristine Madre de Dios rainforest into a treeless, toxic wasteland, a Peruvian government official told me in 2016.
 
La Pampa region: December 2016 to October 2017
Source: Planet; Imagery Analysis by MAAP and Amazon Conservation
Upper Malinowski River: October 2015 to October 2017
Source: Planet; Imagery Analysis by MAAP and Amazon Conservation
"It's a perfect storm," said Luis Fernandez, the executive director of the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation. "High prices of gold, tremendous poverty, high biodiversity and very vulnerable tribes that aren't used to outsiders. And so it's like the Wild West."
In his years with the US Environmental Protection Agency, Fernandez noticed how mercury poisoning and deforestation trends spiked every time the price of gold jumped. He watched the population of sleepy Puerto Maldonado explode and dozens of illegal gold shops pop up, some of which release as much mercury as a coal-fired power plant.
Kids play near a camp of illegal gold miners in the Madre de Dios region of Peru.
So along with his colleagues at Wake Forest University, he built the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation, the very first research center in the jungle to study the effects of illicit gold mining on everything from human health to deforestation impacts.
He said he wonders whether these precious landscapes may be lost forever. He dreams of a day when "green gold" will be traded with ethics similar to conflict-free diamonds.
But gold is a much more complicated market to regulate. A full crackdown would drive tens of thousands of subsistence miners into hunger, while the cash-strapped Peruvian government struggles to control a $2.6 billion black market, according to a 2016 report.
In the meantime, as global markets roil and the price of gold stays high, the healthy Amazon disappears ... an ounce and an acre at a time. |
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