I don’t think I can ever buy or wear gold ever again.
Not when that piece of gold touching my skin might have cost someone his or her life.
Wearing gold suddenly feels worst than wearing fur.
Here is the life-changing story that I read on National Geographic that highlights the shocking human cost to every gram of gold.
“ The Real Price of Gold By Brook Larmer
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/01/gold/larmer-text ”
Or at least read this on how to buy gold and diamonds that are not obtained in a cruel way: http://www.thegreenguide.com/greenguide/buying-guide/jewelry
Summary:
Buy recycled (not newly mined) precious metals.
Do NOT buy African / Myanmese diamonds and gems.
Wear pearls instead : Pearls: Pearls have a relatively low impact on the environment. Cultured (or farmed) pearls have even been used to clean water and reduce heavy-metal pollution.
Here are the excerpts that really shook me:
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…..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……
Rosemery Sánchez Condori is just nine years old, but the backs of her hands are burnished like aged leather. That’s what happens when a girl spends time pounding rocks under the Andean sun. Ever since Rosemery’s father fell ill in the mines of La Rinconada eight years ago, her mother has worked 11-hour days collecting rocks near the mines and hammering them into smaller bits to find flecks of overlooked gold. On school holidays, Rosemery sometimes helps her mother on the mountain. It is child labor, perhaps, but for a girl whose family is living hand to mouth, it also qualifies as her proudest achievement. “Last year I found two grams of gold,” Rosemery says, almost giddily. “It was enough to buy my schoolbooks and uniform.”
In small-scale mines around the globe, searching for gold is a family affair. Of the world’s 12 to 15 million artisanal gold miners, an estimated 30 percent are women and children. On the mountain above La Rinconada, men disappear into the mines, while their wives sit near piles of discarded rock, swinging four-pound mallets in a syncopated rhythm. With no child care at home and a need for extra income, the women in their long traditional skirts and bowler hats sometimes bring their children along. It is the uncertainty of the mines’ lottery system—and the perfidy of many men here—that compels the women to come to the mountain. At least they know that the six or eight grams of gold they find each month, worth about $200, will go to the family—not to the dingy bars and brothels that line the town’s red-light district.
Only gold, that object of desire and destruction, could have conjured up a place of such startling contradictions as La Rinconada. Remote and inhospitable—at 17,000 feet, even oxygen is in short supply—the town is, nevertheless, growing at a furious pace. Approaching the settlement from across the high plains, a visitor first sees the glint of rooftops under a magnificent glacier draped like a wedding veil across the mountain. Then comes the stench. It’s not just the garbage dumped down the slope, but the human and industrial waste that clogs the settlement’s streets. For all its growth—the number of mines perforating the glacier has jumped in six years from 50 to around 250—La Rinconada has few basic services: no plumbing, no sanitation, no pollution control, no postal service, not even a police station. The nearest one, with a handful of cops, is an hour down the mountain. This is a place that operates, quite literally, above the law…..
The more unforgiving lottery may be the one miners and their families face just trying to survive in such a dangerous and despoiled place. Life expectancy in La Rinconada is a mere 50 years, 21 years fewer than the national average. Fatal mine accidents are common, often caused by crude explosives handled by inexperienced or inebriated miners. If the blast doesn’t kill, the carbon monoxide fumes may……
The raw sewage and garbage on the overcrowded streets are minor nuisances compared with the tons of mercury released during the process of separating gold from rock. In small-scale gold mining, UNIDO estimates, two to five grams of mercury are released into the environment for every gram of gold recovered—a staggering statistic, given that mercury poisoning can cause severe damage to the nervous system and all major organs. According to Peruvian environmentalists, the mercury released at La Rinconada and the nearby mining town of Ananea is contaminating rivers and lakes down to the coast of Lake Titicaca, more than a hundred miles away.
Residents around La Rinconada suffer the brunt of the destruction. Rosemery’s father, Esteban Sánchez Mamani, has worked here for 20 years, though he rarely enters the mines these days because of a chronic illness that has sapped his energy and raised his blood pressure. Sánchez isn’t sure what the ailment is—his lone visit to the doctor was inconclusive—but he suspects it originated in the polluted environment. “I know the mines have taken years away from me,” says Sánchez, whose hunched frame makes him seem decades older than his 40 years. “But this is the only life we know.”
The family’s fate now depends on the ore that Sánchez’s wife, Carmen, hauls down from the mountain. Sitting on the floor of the family’s stone hut, Sánchez spends most of his days pounding the rock into smaller pieces, keeping the gold-flecked shards in a blue coffee cup. Rosemery does her homework on a sack of rice, peppering a visitor with questions about life outside La Rinconada: “Do you chew coca leaves in your country? Do you own alpaca?” Though just a first grader, she has decided that she’d like to be an accountant and live in the U.S. “I want to go far from here,” she says.
Rosemery tags along as her father delivers two sacks of ore—the weekly haul—to the tiny mill above their home. This is part of the endless routine, but each time Sánchez can’t help hoping he’s hit the jackpot. At the very least, he hopes there is enough gold to keep his two children in school. “I want them to study so they can leave this place,” says Sánchez, who never completed the seventh grade.
Together, father and daughter watch the miller perform his ancient art. Using his bare hands, the man swirls several pounds of liquid mercury into a wooden pan to separate the gold from the rock, dumping the mercury-tainted waste into a stream beneath the shed. Thirty feet downstream a young girl is filling up a plastic bottle in the rancid water. But inside the miller’s shed all eyes are focused on the marble-size silvery nugget the miller produces: its mercury-coated exterior hides an unknown quantity of gold.
Stuffing the nugget into his pocket, Sánchez trudges up the hill to a gold-buying shop. The merchant, one of several hundred in town, burns off the mercury with a blowtorch, releasing the toxic gas through an exhaust pipe into the cold, thin air. As the merchant works, Sánchez paces the room, his frayed gray cap in hand.
After ten minutes, a tiny kernel of gold emerges from the flame. Sánchez frowns. It weighs only 1.1 grams, about one-thirtieth of an ounce. The merchant peels off a few bills and, with a shrug of his shoulders, hands Sánchez a sum that, once the miller’s fee is deducted, leaves the family with less than $20.
“Better luck next time,” the merchant says.
Maybe next month, or the next. Eking out a living sky-high on a glacier, Sánchez knows that luck is all he can ever hope for.
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