Gold fever (III): Don't buy gold!

Posted by Javier, Venezuela, Bulla Hoja de Lata, gold, consume, change, sustainability on 1 November 2009

We are right now in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, in the Southwestern border of the Amazon Basin. Soon we will get out of here through a road reaching as high as 4900 m over the sea level, and we will again pass by the gold mines of the Amazon Basin. They are everywhere. We filmed the miners digging holes to get to the gold veins. Sometimes others are directing high pressure water pipes towards the soil to eliminate the trees and create a yellowish mud to be mixed with mercury. In the main rivers entire fleets of dredging boats are removing and pumping the muddy bottom of the water, contaminating everything with mercury. In a couple of days we will film how they had turned aside a river destroying hundreds of hectares of jungle, which are currently just a yellowish desert.

Fishes, dolphins, otters and manaties die. The mercury runs through all the biotic chain, affecting birds, mammals and humans alike. Thousands of roads and illegal campgrounds are scattered in the whole Amazon, creating intense deforestation. Even sadder and worrying, the money often is invested in grabbing public land, which is used in illegal and harmful activities such as logging, cattle ranching, trading with endangered species etc…
Probably the social aspects related to gold mining are even worst. The miners get many skin diseases after being in contact with mercury every day. When burning it to get the gold they breathe mercury, harming their lambs. Indigenous and extractivist communities drink poisoned water, get their livelihoods reduced, and lose their future day after day. Gold mining is closely related with pioneering infra-cities where alcohol, drugs and child prostitution are common. It is always hard for us to cross those areas, and not often we dare to use the expensive Panasonic camera in such outlaw areas.

So Please Don´t Buy Gold. It is not a need, just a stupid cliché that goes back to the origin of the civilizations. No one needs it, it is a pure dangerous childish fancy. Whenever you buy gold you are contributing to increase these problems, being responsible in exchange of just a silly ring or collar or who knows what other senseless stuff. Gold is stained with blood and environmental impacts everywhere, and furthermore it provides small benefits to local communities, if any at all.

Of course the System we have created tries to create the illusion that we can buy clean gold, extracted with environmental care and with consideration for local communities. In general they want us to believe that we can recycle the residues of our consumistic lifestyle, that we can keep our industrial standards if we buy some very dubious and probably useless carbon credits somewhere else, that a mere stamp certifying timber of paper guarantees some kind of magic avoidance of the environmental impacts of forestry…and so and so on.

We need to consume some stuff, but until we are still a childish Society our governments and corporations will just take profit of our credulity and our interest in not being disturbed and live comfortably numb. Since they are generally more interested in controlling the public opinion (to be elected every four years and to sell products respectively) they tell us what we want to hear. And we buy that happily.

Probably the best one can do is distrust and be cynic. No government and no corporation is to be trusted by principle. Radical position??? Probably, but it leads to a safer side. We will still be responsible for our impacts and they will still cheat us when not on guard, but at least we won´t live in a constant childish fantasy.

They can certify that a gold ring comes from a legal company in Canada, but I do not trust that. Probably the standards of that company are not as good as they sell. Probably the same applies to the certifier. Probably part of the gold they are selling may come from other “more unreliable” sources/countries feeding injustice and conflict there. Probably even if the gold is Canadian their benefits and know-how are invested in other areas of the World (such as here in the Amazon), where they use mercury straight to the more pristine rivers that there are on Earth.

I can find some examples here in the Amazon that fuel distrust to these guarantees of environmental and social probity.

-It is common (by the way not only in the Amazon) that a legal concession declares to be able to extract more marketable timber than there really is. If you can in reality selectively extract 2000 cubic meters per year in a certain forest, you tell the Government that the forest permits to sustainably take 5000 cubic meters since there is a lot of good timber in the concession. Those 3000 extra will in fact come illegally from protected areas or any other public land around the concession. The illegal timber receives a stamp of legality and even a potential environmental certifier could be cheated and declare that the forest was properly managed in their scarce visits of a busy expert to the huge concessions.

-Some bans turn to be ridiculous. For instance the proposals of  certification standards for beef or timber in order to  assure that it does not come from the Amazon always derive in a cheat that goes around the law, but we are not informed and we believe we are doing something “right”. The Brazilian beef market is so big that they would use the products from the Amazon and sell the rest of the world the meat from the rest of the country (as it is happening with the remaining Amazonian areas with aftos fever).  With the timber is different: more than half of the Amazonian timber in Brazil feeds the internal market, so a World ban of Amazon timber (even if that would be possible) would finish with less than half of the problem. I bet that that timber would come from somewhere else anyway, as cheap as possible. Law made, cheat invented.

Just as so many are proclaiming everyday, the only way seems to reduce consumption, a certain change in the economic model. Meanwhile distrust seems a very good preventive attitude.

24 comments. Tags: Javier. Location: Puerto maldonado, Peru