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I lost
my appetite for shark’s fin soup when I learned how the
shark was skinned alive and thrown back into the sea.
But not entirely, for it tastes good. Some of the good
and precious things in this world—including such wonders
as the Pyramids of Egypt and the
Hanging Gardens
of Babylon—have a cruel history. It seems that
civilization is built on blood for the most part. But
time and the hunger for precious, wondrous things blurs
the history of the process.
I don’t
think many women—and men, for that matter—felt like
throwing away their diamond tiaras, tie pins and rings
after seeing the movie Blood Diamond, starring
Leonardo DiCaprio, which dramatized the mining of
“conflict diamonds” by armies to fund civil wars and by
corrupt governments to maintain themselves in power in
Africa. The images on the silver screen couldn’t dim the
radiance of a perfect gem. (However, animal activists in
New York were known to throw paint at the ermine and sable of high-class women.
The lot of pearl-divers is no picnic either.)
 Now,
it’s not only the “black gold” that is oil which bothers
environmentalists, it’s gold itself, and I’m looking
askance at my gold lighters (acquired long ago), the
gold crucifix and bracelet that I no longer wear. I
suddenly remembered the phrase about sacrificing
humanity “on a cross of gold” after reading an article
about the global gold mining industry.
According to a series in The New York Times and
International Herald Tribune, mining companies have to
move 100 tons or more of earth to secure just one ounce
of gold. The gold is so hard to get at that companies
routinely use millions of gallons of cyanide to separate
the gold from the rock.
As
Boston Globe columnist Derrick Z. Jackson put it: “Even
without cyanide, the 100 tons of earth left behind is
what one of the articles calls ‘mining’s
multibillion-dollar environmental time bomb.’ Sulfides
in the rock, exposed to the elements for the first time,
become sulfuric acid, which create a chain reaction of
freeing the dangerous and heavy metals of lead, mercury
and cadmium. According to the Environmental Protecion
Agency’s 2001 Toxic Release Inventory report, metal
mines, concentrated in Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Alaska,
are the nation’s top polluters, accounting for 45
percent of all toxic releases.”
As the
English saying goes, “No gold without dross.”
In the
wealthiest country in the planet, “500,000 abandoned
mines were found so toxic even in disuse that 40 percent
of all Western headwater streams are polluted by heavy
releases, killing wildlife.” Russ Schnitzer, the western
field coordinator of Trout Unlimited, was quoted by the
Los Angeles Times as saying, “If no further action is
taken, we will have a Western watershed devoid of
trout.” Would anyone be alarmed by the thought that a
gold band for an engagement or wedding is worth several
trouts? What’s fatal for the fish is a living memento
for humans.
The
Deadly Midas Touch
It isn’t
only the
US
environment that’s afflicted by Goldfinger: over
two-thirds of the world’s mining is done in developing
countries with hardly any regulation. This is often done
with the help of the World Bank.
Let
Derrick Z. Jackson tell it:
Barrick Gold (the mining company) wants to—get this—move
three glacier-like ice fields in the
Andes. In
Indonesia, the American mining company Newmont is on
trial for allegedly dumping mercury and arsenic into bay
waters. (That, on top, of tsunamis.)
In
Guatemala, local residents have been fighting a new
mine, asking why a Canadian company was lent $45 million
by the World Bank for a $261-million gold mine project
that would bring only 160 jobs to an impoverished
region. In several countries in Africa, including the
Congo, gold mining has been a multiple curse, with
workers operating in sometimes deadly conditions,
government officials and warlords fighting over spoils
left behind by foreign firms and local people being
displaced. The New York Times reported that the World
Bank would lend Newmont $75 million for a mine in Ghana
that would displace 8,000 people for 450 full-time jobs.
That
can make one look at one’s gold wedding band, as I have,
and wonder whose pain, whose polluted water, whose
prosperity goes into that gleaming symbol.
I
wonder, however, whether Mrs. Jackson would allow
Derrick to tuck away his wedding band, the shining
symbol of their togetherness.
For
millennia, gold has stood for majesty, as well as
wealth, and, if there’s any objection to that, Balzac
had long ago provided the answer: “Behind every great
wealth is a great crime.”
But that
isn’t always true. It’s not easy work gaining or
extracting gold, although Henry David Thoreau once said,
“It is not enough to tell me that you worked hard to get
your gold. So does the Devil work hard.” In the case of
gold mining, it’s not the corporate types who work hard
at getting the gold, it’s the workers—and they don’t get
to own it. For gold no less than for diamonds, the
workers have to submit to tight, even brutal, security
checks, lest they hide the small stones and nuggets
inside their stomachs or rectums.
Gold,
however, is nontoxic, unless accumulated in large
amounts, when it displays symptoms similar to heavy
amounts of metal poisoning. Death only comes to fish and
humans who are caught stealing what they have worked for
by security people.
Symbol
of Purity
Gold has
been highly valued by man since prehistoric times. It’s
said to be the first metal mined by man. In historic
times, it was, of course, one of the gifts of the Magi.
But it wasn’t so rare in 2600 B.C. if there’s any truth
to the account that the Egyptian king of the time said
that gold was “more plentiful than dirt.” Indeed, Mansa
Musa, ruler of the Mali empire, was credited to have
caused a decadelong inflation throughout
North Africa
for having given away gold freely while on the road.
Gold had
been exploited since the time of Midas.
That may
be the reason gold has always been a symbol of purity
besides a medium of value (like money) and a symbol of
royalty, secular and religious. Ancient myths spoke of
heaven’s streets paved with gold, as adventurers looked
for a mountain of gold. Humbler humans settled for gold
crowns in their mouths. It’s also said that gold mined
throughout history are still in circulation in one form
or another, which traces the verdadero heirlooms
of our society ladies to Montezuma. A golden salakot
is part of our legend, barter in Panay.
Diamond
may be the only type of ice that makes women feel
warm—it’s a girl’s best friend—according to Elizabeth
Taylor, but gold is also the medal that does the same
thing. You don’t hear of a mountain of diamonds—though
there’s Fitzgerald’s “diamond as big as the Ritz”—but of
a mountain of gold or a pot of gold, not diamonds, at
the end of the rainbow of human dreams.
That’s
why gold is the monetary standard of the World Bank, the
International Monetary Fund and Bank for International
Settlement, which, symmetrically, is the standard of
wealth that makes gold mining an enterprise dear to the
heart despite its revealed despoliation of human lives
and the environment.
Still,
who can quarrel about its uses, let alone its value,
when luxury would be unimaginable without it? There’s
even an expensive liqueur called Goldwasser produced in
Poland
and Germany. Credit cards are called “gold,” 50 years
“golden,” and a well-known rule “golden”—he who has the
gold rules. Our election campaigns are characterized by
guns, goons and, primarily, gold.
“All
that glitters is not gold” is the highest compliment to
this precious metal, even if Rizal said that a carabao
draped in gold would still be a carabao. But, hey, it is
a golden carabao.
Thomas
Moore’s ‘Utopia’
It was
the martyred Thomas Moore who denigrated gold in his
satirical novel Utopia. In that country of
nowhere, gold was used as chains for slaves (whose
presence is a sad commentary for a utopia) and material
for tables and toilet seats. That was why visiting
potentates laden with gold were ridiculed by Utopians
for going about like slaves and toilet seats. Thus was
the symbol of royalty transformed into a sign of slavery
and of purity to impurity, but in the case of the gold
mining industry, its unfortunate men and women are
enslaved by gold, living lives of impurity, swallowing
the dross of an industry abetted by international
financial organizations for an ancient worship.
But
what’s the use of railing against an industry that has
been with us in various forms since time immemorial?
Might as well rail against the abuse of power, avarice
and the acquisitive instinct, of which many extractive
enterprises are but “logical” and “natural”
consequences?
Humans
have a desire for recognition, a frenzy for dominance
and display, just like other animals. Our virtue,
dubious as it is, is that we can rationalize our
behavior and, at the same time, construct a vision of
the good, even moral, life. At any period in history,
there are always exceptional individuals who will
struggle against the exploitation of man by man, or at
least campaign to end some forms of exploitation.
Through
the years, gold mining has become “more humane” since
Midas. As there is a campaign by diamond merchants
against “conflict diamonds,” there is a growing
awareness against “red gold,” red as the color of blood.
Vicki
Howard, a professor of economics and English at Harwick
College in New York, is only slightly hopeful that as
more reporting about the waste of gold mining comes in,
“the more people may be compelled to think about an
alternative to gold bold bands, “as “it is increasingly
hard to justify them as a symbol of togetherness when
their production tears so many people apart.”
Howard
goes on to say that “consumers have immense power to
change things.”
That has
the sound of a consumer boycott of gold things. Trust
American academics to rely on the power of the consumer
when all indications are his or her desires can be
stimulated. Despite the campaigners for animal rights,
we still have to hear about the collapse of the fur
industry. There are synthetic furs, of course, but no
high-toned lady would be caught wearing them. Gold
plates abound, but there’s nothing like the real thing.
Gold
also has industrial uses: doing away with the wedding
band can be symbolic but it will not stop the
sacrificial nature of gold mining for so long as there
are people who need to make a living as best as they can
even under the most difficult, inhuman conditions. The
very gold whose dross is their reward can be made to
make their lives better but some show of conscience on
the part of the mining industry is needed. This probably
goes against the spirit of globalization.
Unfortunately, for so long as humans resolve their
differences through bloody conflict and so long as gold
and diamond can sustain that conflict, there will always
be “blood diamonds” and “red gold.”
The
industrialized countries have to a large extent passed
the inhuman stage of mining in their backyard and now
it’s the turn of the developing countries to undergo the
same experience, which hopefully will also be a
remembrance in time.
When
Schnitzer said that “the history of the West is coming
back to haunt us.” Should he have said that the history
of the West is haunting the East and will haunt it yet
for some time to come?
This
goes against the belief that man is entitled to exploit
the world and its resources for his well-being, but the
question is whether he can exploit them without
exploiting his kin. |
