skip to the content

Are there human costs to mining?

A gorilla holds its child

Can you hear me now? Poaching due to mining has led to the destruction of Eastern Lowland Gorillas. Its cousin, the Western Lowland, is shown here at the Pittsburgh Zoo.  (The link in this paragraph is not required reading.)

Your book does an excellent job of covering the environmental costs to mining.  From the destruction of the landscape to the degradation to water and air resources due to pollution, these all have far-reaching environmental impacts.  Environmental Unity tells us that changing one part of the lithosphere through mining will undoubtedly have effects on the other Earth systems.  But what about humans?  We are, after all, a part of the biosphere.

Direct Human Impacts

Mining is a dangerous profession. According to the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, mining employed approximately 717,000 people in 2008. Because of how the statistics are compiled, the most dangerous job type is “agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting” resulting in 551 fatalities in 2009, a fatality rate of 26.0 per 100,000. The second most dangerous job is “mining.” In 2009, 101 miners in the US died. The fatality rate for miners is 12.7 per 100,000. To put this in perspective, if you’re in “educational and health services,” the fatality rate is 0.7 per 100,000. (Click here if you’d like to see the actual US BLS report.)

These dangers are only highlighted every time we hear a news story on a collapsed mine or a mine explosion. We might all remember the amazing Chile Mine rescue of 2010. Did you know that Chile sat atop rich gold and copper reserves? (We’ll discuss the recent coal mining disasters under the “Coal” section of this lecture.)

Humans who work in or live near mines often have to deal with living in degraded natural environments.  From polluted well and surface waters to compromised air quality, human health is often affected.  In “A Closer Look: “Mining and Toxicity” (pp 525 – 526, 5th edition) or “A Closer Look: “Mining and Itai-Itai Disease” (p 461, 4th edition), we learned about how heavy metal poisoning from mining activities affect human populations.  (If you’re interested in this type of research, the field of Environmental Health looks at the intersection of human health and environmental factors.)

Indirect Human Impacts

With our mineral resources becoming scarcer, we find it more and more profitable to mine areas that were once considered unprofitable – and people, it turns out, often make poor choices when situations become desperate.  While the act of mining itself is dangerous, the situation caused by the sudden profitability of a resource can result in tumultuous situations in which people are placed in harm’s way and put in even more unstable situations. (Did you ever watch Blood Diamond or hear of conflict diamonds?)  In January 2009, National Geographic Magazine highlighted the human costs of gold mining around the world:

For all of its allure, gold's human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world's richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It's an invitation to destruction. But there is no shortage of miners, big and small, who are willing to accept.

At one end of the spectrum are the armies of poor migrant workers converging on small-scale mines like La Rinconada. According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world's gold and support a total of 100 million people. It's a vital activity for these people—and deadly too.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the past decade, local armed groups fighting for control of gold mines and trading routes have routinely terrorized and tortured miners and used profits from gold to buy weapons and fund their activities. In the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan, the military, along with security forces of an Anglo-Australian gold company, forcibly evicted small-scale miners and burned their villages to make way for a large-scale mine. Thousands of protestors against expansion of a mine in Cajamarca, Peru, faced tear gas and police violence.

Because these are gold mines, these people are also exposed to high concentrations of mercury, which causes neurological disorders.  The most notable disorder was made famous by Lewis Caroll in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (and later by Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s movie sequel):  the Mad Hatter was mad because hatters of the 19th Century used mercury to felt hats.  This was absorbed into their skin in the same way that mercury is absorbed into the skin of gold miners.  This results in neurological damage which results in shakes, tremors, and dementia.

The deadly effects of mercury are equally hazardous to small-scale miners. Most use mercury to separate gold from rock, spreading poison in both gas and liquid forms. UNIDO estimates that one-third of all mercury released by humans into the environment comes from artisanal gold mining. This turns places like La Rinconada into a sort of Shangri-la in reverse: The pursuit of a metal linked to immortality only serves to hasten the miners' own mortality.

Minerals, Cell Phones, Humans, and Gorillas

This example will hopefully help you to relate the concept of environmental unity to your understanding of mineral resources. While mining does have direct environmental impacts (such as Acid Mine Drainage), the indirect consequences are equally devastating to native peoples, cultures, habitats, and animals.  With little environmental regulation in foreign countries, often the products we purchase that contain foreign-mined minerals have a significant negative impact on the local, native peoples.

Have a cell phone you need to recycle? Want to help? You can help the people and gorillas of the Congo by recycling your cell phone – or not buying the new iPhone 4S until your current phone goes out.  Recently, a few companies have realized the profit in recycling old electronics. Only two years ago, it was common to have to pay someone to recycle your old DVD player, cell phone, or computer. Such fee-based recycling is becoming a thing of the past! Now, companies like Gazelle will actually send you a pre-paid shipping label and pay you for your electronics (if they are still usable and in good condition). Such companies are a growing industry. Gazelle was recently named one of the top 500 growing companies in the US. Here in Indianapolis we have Green Wave Computer Recycling and a recycling center run by Electronic Recyclers International. This just goes to show you that these mineral resources are valuable!

One recent example is the use of the mineral Coltan (Columbite-Tantalite) in cell phones. This mineral is formed from Niobium (also known as Columbian) and Tantalum. This metallic ore is a resource found in eastern areas of Congo. When refined, Coltan becomes pure metallic tantalum, which is ductile, resistant to corrosion by acids, and a good conductor of heat and electricity. These properties make it highly desirable for capacitors in cell phones, pagers, laptops, and automotive electronics (USGS).

Our increasingly smaller and more powerful cell phones, which contains Tantalum, has driven the price of Coltan through the roof, causing people to swarm to jungle areas to mine the mineral. When the miners got hungry, they ate the gorillas, decimating the gorilla population in Congo and helping to finance a civil war and genocide. As more people own cell phones, and more Americans are encouraged to trade in cell phones long before they wear out, more Coltan is needed. You can read the following resources to learn more on the impacts caused by mining this one obscure mineral. As a note, the USGS article also documents how mining in Africa in general has also resulted in human atrocities. (These are not required readings.)

While the environmental effects to mining increase as these “new” mines, the indirect human costs here in the U.S. and globally also increase as the need (and want) for these mineral resources increases.
(The links on this page are not required reading.)

« Page: 3 of 4 »