Prohibit gold mining? Totalitarians would love that

[searcher]

The Gold Rush Threatening the World’s Greenest Country​

Fast-paced Surinamese men carrying sports bags heavy with gold rush through the entrance of one of the gold shops in the centre of Paramaribo, the capital city of Suriname. The lookout, a man in sunglasses and shorts, watches from the parking lot, his hand resting on the crossbody bag fastened across his chest. Inside, Chinese, Portuguese, Surinamese, and Dutch can all be overheard as kilograms of gold change hands. No one asks the men where the gold was mined before they leave the shop, bags now heavy with cash.

At the counter, Harry Souza*, a muscular Brazilian man, shows off his tattoos and a small metal bucket full of gold bars of different sizes and colours. There are even some “sponges,” another name for the amalgam of mercury and gold that comes straight from the mines and looks like a luxurious coral reef. “The redder it is, the higher the quality,” says Souza. “The greener or blacker, the less [valuable].” In a backroom of the gold shop, a blowtorch is spitting flames, and Souza heads back to burn off the surplus mercury under an extractor hood. The amount of gold left behind in the bucket weighs around one kilogram—a market value of more than US$62,000 (price in September 04).

Read the rest:

The Gold Rush Threatening the World’s Greenest Country

Suriname’s waterways and trade winds carry mercury, a toxic metal used in gold extraction, to regions far removed from the country’s gold mines

dialogochino.net

 

[nickndfl]

Send 8n a few modetn conquistadors to get it done.

 

[searcher]

The case for leaving gold in the ground​

At Barrick Gold Corporation’s 2021 annual general meeting, I was waiting in an online queue with a few other journalists when my turn came to ask a question to chief executive Mark Bristow, who at that moment presided over the second-biggest gold mining company on Earth.

“At a recent mining conference, you were talking about ESG [environment, social and governance issues] and said, ‘Everyone uses metals from mining every day, but it’s an unloved industry, and we’ve got to change that.’ My question is, how is Barrick currently working to change that?”

Mr. Bristow thanked me for my question, and promptly instructed me to look around my office. “I don’t know where you live, but wherever you are, if you just look around yourself, and you take away everything that has been created through mining, you’ll feel very exposed.”

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Opinion: The case for leaving gold in the ground

We already have plenty of this precious metal for its practical uses, yet we pay a heavy environmental and social price to extract more. Could we agree that enough is enough?

www.theglobeandmail.com

 

[Someone_else]

Everything that is not grown, or mined...