From “Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places.”
A few years back, I attended a “green business” convention in Vancouver, where an oil and gas CEO appeared as part of a panel to discuss the future of fossil fuels. The executive faced a tough crowd: the room was packed with NGO activists and university students, who by this point were demanding action on climate change.
“Raise your hand if you don’t use oil,” he began, surveying the crowd.
There were murmurs of annoyance from the crowd, but not a single hand went up.
“How did everyone get to this event today? Did any of you drive a car?”
The air was sucked out of the room. Since that day, I have come across many industry variations on this theme. The unspoken implication of this rhetorical strategy — and it’s highly effective — is that the huge environmental and social toll of mining, oil drilling, natural gas fracking, and more, is the necessary cost of modernity. It’s the price we pay for jobs, hospitals, and the materials that allow the average North American to live more comfortably than a medieval European monarch. The insinuation to critics is you need to go live in a cave or shut the hell up.
In these opening comments the CEO stopped a conversation from even starting, but for me his message became the necessary beginning — and ending — for what would become this book. That’s because the world cannot function without mining, especially many of the big mines that currently supply the bulk of the metals our civilization consumes.
Mining is invisible to most of us, but it won’t be much longer. That’s because transitioning to clean energy will be even more metals intensive than the world of fossil fuels. And that’s a reality this book seeks to confront: we need ever more metals, yet mining is one of the planet’s most polluting and deadly industries. It is by definition unsustainable. At least 10,000 tailings impoundments languish globally in varying stages of decline. Agriculture disturbs more surface area, but no industry moves more earth and rock than mining. The production of just seven metals accounts for almost 10 per cent of global emissions.
In the recent past it was assumed that our biggest obstacle to getting the metals we needed was that supplies would simply peter out. Now it’s becoming clear that the conflicts on the ground, in the mining zones with the people living closest to the resources, will be the main source of risk over the coming decades in terms of how much metal we can extract.
Much of our future metals supply will have to come from the poorest corners of the global south, where the impacts of climate change are already being felt most acutely by Indigenous peoples. Transnational companies will be increasingly drawn into conflicts over questions of land ownership, water access, and human rights.
Our world now faces a conundrum; we need more metals than ever before, but at the same moment, we need to find ways to limit the number of destructive holes we dig in the ground. That’s because if business-as-usual mining continues, our inevitable future is to create vast new “sacrifice zones” across the global south including the deep seabed — much of this in the name of saving the planet from climate change.
Excerpted with permission from the book, published by Greystone Books in partnership with the David Suzuki Institute.
