Environment: Placing value in all the wrong things

Before you say 'I do'

By Derrick Z. Jackson The Boston GlobeSUNDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2005
BOSTON
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/30/opinion/edjackson.php

We may need a divorce from gold wedding bands. Gold is getting so much harder to mine around the world that the environmental and social costs make the final product a symbol more of avarice than love.

According to a recent series in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune on the global gold mining industry, companies now move 100 tons or more of earth just to secure one ounce of gold. The gold is getting so hard to get at that companies routinely use millions of gallons of cyanide to separate the gold from rock.

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 deadly heavy metals of lead, mercury and cadmium. According to the Environmental Protection 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.

Last year, the Los Angeles Times did a feature on the nation's 500,000 abandoned mines. Most of them are are so toxic even in disuse that 40 percent of all Western headwater streams are polluted by heavy metal releases, killing wildlife. Russ Schnitzer, the western field coordinator of Trout Unlimited, told the Los Angeles Times "If no further action is taken, we will have a Western watershed devoid of trout. . . . The history of the West is coming back to haunt us."

That is in the wealthiest country on the planet. Over two-thirds of the world's gold mining, often with the World Bank's help, is done in developing countries with far less oversight. Barrick Gold 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.

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. It makes a leading researcher on the culture of weddings wonder, too.

Vicki Howard, a professor of economics and English at Hartwick College in New York, is completing a book on the wedding industry and has written extensively on the culture of rings. It may seem that the American tradition of the double ring marriage ceremony has been around forever, but it has been around only for the last half century. It came about, she said, as a confluence of American prosperity after World War II, increased domesticity of husbands and the jewelry industry's ability to play on them both.

"Instead of separate social lives in lodges and union halls, men were in backyards barbecuing, doing fix-up projects, living that suburban white middle class ideal we saw so much of on TV shows like 'Leave It To Beaver,"' Howard said over the phone. "The ring in a sense symbolized acceptance of the changing gender roles at the time."

But just as some people have been questioning "conflict diamonds" mined by armies to fund bloody civil wars or corrupt governments in Africa, Howard said that as more reporting about waste of gold mining comes in, the more people may be compelled to think about an alternative to gold bands. It is increasingly hard to justify them as a symbol of togetherness when their production tears so many people apart.

"The fact someone is going to wear a ring is so unquestioned, I don't have any hopes that it will change anytime soon," Howard said. "But if people think about what it took to extract the gold for their ring. You never know. Consumers have immense power to change things."

(Derrick Z. Jackson's column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.)