Mining: Social and Environmental Impacts

It seems as if our lives our based on a series of deeply-ingrained myths that together function in a way that sets us on a path to serve power and in turn replicate the system that produces us. Often myths like old wives tales or those contained in children's stories are harmless, but the problem with the myths of capitalist society as we know it is that they hide the price that other people pay so that only a few can live a life that sets out to completely obliterate the future.

Mining is one such myth. In the capital cities of the world, the end products of mining are displayed in all the glitz and glamour appropriate for those who can afford to indulge the luxury of adorning their bodies with gold and diamonds. This is to say nothing of fashionable mobile phones which could not be made without the mining of coltan or the tank-like four by fours that housewives use to scoot to the shops, which could not function without the mining of oil. The list is endless, but the point is that in schools, universities and society at large mining is presented as a bastion of the economy and is symbolic of wealth and development.

Rarely does the human cost of mining surface into mainstream discourse and even where it does it is explained away as a necessary evil or, as in the case of reparations claims for past abuses, historic indiscretions which have since been rectified by a caring and humane industry. This makes possible, for example, reparations claims being incorporated into mainstream discourse without causing too much of a stir. Somehow the fact that survivors of asbestos mining who have collectively hacked their lungs out in violent coughing or even just slowly suffocated to death in the interests of shareholder profit does not result in a realisation of the horrible price that mining exacts.

Even if some development benefits are conceded to the mining industry, human society has paid a bloody price in the name of the mining industry and it continues to do so. The only consolation is that the difference between mining 50 years ago and mining today is that the myth is no longer as strong as it used to be because it has become obvious that the resources that mining relies on are finite and that therefore the entire endeavour is inherently unsustainable. And with that realisation comes a broader understanding that society, as social commentator George Monbiot has explained it, has all along been "borrowing from the future to pay for the present".

Mining: Social and Environmental Impacts, published by the World Rainforest Movement, sets out to highlight the "depredatory activities" associated with mining and to show that these activities are unsustainable not only because they exploit non-renewable resources but also because they leave behind them destruction of the environment and society, which is often irreversible.

Ricardo Carrere, World Rainforest Movement international coordinator, writes in his introduction that the hope is for the book to serve as a tool to support local struggles against mining, to generate awareness on the issue and to strengthen campaigns against mining ending in the destruction and degradation of wider forest areas and of local livelihoods and cultures.

The book covers Africa, Asia, Central America and Oceania and its value is that it brings together the impact of mining across a wide range of countries, thus making it possible to see the systematic way in which rights have been violated and the environment destroyed. The section on Africa, which covers the Central African Republic, DRC, Core d'Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Senegal, South Africa and Tanzania, is particularly useful.

All too often coverage of the impacts of mining and the complicity of industry players and international financial institutions in human and environmental degradation tends to focus on mega-projects, like the Chad/Cameroon oil pipeline or the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. When problems are identified it is easy for them to be explained away as exceptions or again, necessary indulgences in the interests of a greater concept of "human development". The value of this book is that it shows just how widespread mining abuses actually are and in so doing makes a small contribution towards breaking down the myth that mining is a global good, perpetrated for the benefit of all.

* For copies contact [email protected]

* Reviewed by Patrick Burnett, Fahamu