Mining In The Amazon
- SIG UofT
- May 31, 2021
- 2 min read
Just days after the Supreme Court Justice of Brazil ordered the government to protect the Indigenous populations of Amazon against illegal miners, hundreds of wildcat miners attacked the police and raided an indigenous village.
The miners who raided the village of the Munduruku people, one of Amazon’s indigenous villages, set ablaze houses leading to the speculated deaths of two children who drowned while fleeing. This isn’t the first time that miners have attacked Brazil’s indigenous settlements either, further north, a Yanomami settlement has been in violent clashes with wildcat miners who have been suspected to be working within their territory. The 20,000 illegal miners who continue to exploit the land, threaten the rainforest and the 27,000 indigenous people who live on that reserve.
Mining in the Amazon - one of Earth’s most bio-diverse regions - especially when done illegally, has many disastrous consequences for both the environment and the people who live off the land. A study has concluded that 10% of the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2005 and 2015 was caused by these activities. Mining impacts the area’s water drainage and pollutes the water, which threatens the ecosystem, restricting the Amazon’s rainforest recovery. Furthermore, gold extraction requires the use of mercury, which becomes a pollutant that ends up in the water, soil and atmosphere. Traces of mercury then get passed down the food chain ultimately being consumed by other organisms, including the indigenous peoples and other populations. Mercury has irreversible effects on the human body, causing neurological and behavioural disorders and can even lead to death.
While gold is arguably a sustainable store of value that doesn’t corrode and has been a historically treasured metal, consumers should be more wary of its mining process, taking steps to ensure that the gold they're buying wasn’t obtained by an unsustainable way of mining.
To learn more about what we can do as individuals to help stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest visit these sites:
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