White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Shakespeare Said It: ‘All That Glitters Is Not Gold’

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“There's gold in them thar hills,” goes the old saying. There’s also human blood and nerve damage in that gold. And there's dying animals and destroyed rivers.

The greatest gold rush in all of human history is on. It's not a pretty, a romantic or a benign business. Indeed, it's a catastrophe for the environment and for human and animal health.

The high price of gold – it has tripled since 2000 – is such that every gold-bearing plot of land and river is being ravaged in more than 70 countries. As many as 50 million of the world’s poorest people now depend on  this kind of plunder for a living.

It's the mining equivalent of subsistence farming, but it's lethal in the cruelest ways. Mercury is used to identify the gold (2 grams of mercury for 1 gram of gold) to which it adheres. With each use, some of the mercury is washed away and vapor escapes into the air. In another variant of this practice, cyanide is used to leach gold out of ore in vats or ponds. Either way, two deadly substances are released without control into the environment.

The problem isn't with the deep mines of Australia, Canada, South Africa and the United States – the  hard-rock mines. It's with two other categories of mining that use mercury or cyanide: alluvial and artisan.

Alluvial is working a river with pans and sluice tables, which are primitive devices that trap gold granules in a blanket or grease. Artisan – a term used by the United Nations and environmental groups — uses bigger machines and expensive “shaker tables,” which process earth by the ton rather than the bucket. These can be found in surface gold deposits in rivers and farther away. This is a mechanized version of finding gold that is not deep in the ground.

While artisan mining may conjure images of dedicated craftsmen coaxing gold out of rock with love and skill, don’t be deceived. The activity is savage and brutal; the plundered rock and soil is left to wash away, causing death and destruction over many years.

The Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, and its cohorts at the U.N. Development Program and the World Bank, consider cyanide to be the lesser of the two threats. Maybe. But I've seen great piles of mining spoil which the cyanide has rendered lifeless. Nothing lives in it or grows on it.

Certainly, mercury is the largest of the real-and-present danger of subsistence mining. In Indonesia, men stand in rivers with their hands in buckets of water, muck and mercury, according to one Associated Press report. The BBC also has reported promiscuous use of mercury in Indonesia and Peru.

From China to Romania, in much of Latin America and throughout Africa, there is extensive mining on the surface — and that means mercury use. Miners in these countries are well aware of the dangers — miners often are. But the economics of their lives dictate that they mine until it kills them, or the food chain collapses and their families are poisoned, or the operation has to move to a pristine area to be repeated.

The economic life that sustains also destroys.

The United States and the European Union have restricted the export of mercury. But that's only  increased the price, while there appears to be plenty in international trade – enough for the nomadic miners of those 70 or so countries.

I have to declare a personal interest in alluvial gold mining at its simplest: panning and sluicing. My father, whenever his many little business endeavors failed, headed for the beautiful Angwa River in Zimbabwe, both before and after World War II, to look for gold. He mined it with picks, shovels, pans and sluices. The activity was so minor it left no lasting mark. In those days gold fetched $35 an ounce, hardly enough to sustain him and his family, but better than nothing. Now it's about $1,600 an ounce.

My father loved that river. He often spoke about its beauty and tranquility. I've been reviewing photographs of it today: a ravaged moonscape of pits and waste piles. Crime is unchecked, murder is common.

Shakespeare said it: “All that glisters is not gold.” Indeed not. – For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

My Papa Done Told Me

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My friend Ken Ball and I have a something very special in common: Separately and continents apart, our fathers kept us out of deep mines.

My father was a mechanic, who worked in mine maintenance, mostly gold mines known as hard-rock mines, all over southern central Africa. Ken is the scion of a long line of coal miners in Pennsylvania.

Whenever there is a mine disaster, like the tragedy this week at the Upper Big Branch coal mine in West Virginia, Ken and I think of our fathers and thank them.

I dropped out of high school. Soon, I got a job in journalism, but journalism, then as now, can be a fickle business and the pay lousy.

After 18 glorious months of cub reporting, I found myself in Zambia getting by in construction work because my gig as a very junior foreign correspondent had gone south.

I was offered a job at fabulous money as a trainee miner in the Zambian copper mines. They paid what was called the “copper bonus” and it had, from the mine owners’ point of view, gotten out of hand.

The defense buildup in the United States had pushed the price of copper beyond all expectations. Copper capitalism was all the rage.

I was already spending the money in my head, bonding in that machismo way that miners have. The typewriter would be traded for a jack hammer. I’d be a man’s man with a pocket full of “copper bonus” money to prove it.

I wrote my father and told him that job insecurity and money woes would soon be over, I was “going down the mines.”

My father had a faltering grip on spelling and grammar, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t express himself elegantly. I believe that writing, like musicality, is innate.

If hard-mining is about the judicious use of dynamite, my father’s response letter was as explosive.

Its gist was: I’ve never stopped you in your folly, especially in leaving school. But for God’s sake, don’t go down a mine. Those places aren’t for human beings. I’ve been forced to work on them most of my life, and I can tell you that mines are no places for human beings. Please don’t do it.

Just about the same time, in the late 1950s, in faraway Pennsylvania, Ken Ball was getting about the same advice from his father. Ken finished his schooling and went on to a distinguished career in science and engineering. I went back to the newspaper trade.

The basic dynamic of mining is at odds with safety: It is to extract as much ore or coal as possible with as little cost. Safety is the usual casualty. Owners skirt the rules for profit. And miners skirt them for much the same reason: bonuses.

Because mines are almost always company towns, it’s hard for individual miners to blow the whistle on dangerous practices if everyone is winking at the regulations.

More government regulations are simply more rules to ignore. The most positive safety enhancement is an old one: an active union.

Upper Big Branch is a non-union mine and the worst accidents tend to be in non-union mines.

Unions are good at enforcing irksome work rules. Arguably, there may be no reason for teachers to unionize. There’s a good reason for having a third party in the mine: safety. Miners have no loyalty to government inspectors, but they do to their own union.

A safe mine is an oxymoron. The earth is as lethal as the sea. When you start moving it around, there is treachery down below.

Things are much better than they were years ago; better equipment and rules, which if implemented, help. But the history of King Coal is not pretty. In America alone, more than 100,000 men — until recently, it was men only — have died in the unforgiving earth to keep us warm and their families fed.

For the miners in Appalachia, it’s a special way of life: church, a mobile home, television, tattoos and close relations within small communities. It’s also a way of life, a culture and work that, in the age of keystrokes, makes a man feel, well, like a man.

As for my father, about three months after he cautioned me off the life below ground, he fell down a goldmine shaft and broke his back.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate