Rocks – & a hard place

Mining is one of the world’s most enigmatic industries. We are surrounded by its products from the calcium in your toothpaste to the silicon in your fridge and yet, mining remains strangely invisible to us. We don’t think about its products, processes or people the way we consider other industries. It is this ability of mining to be omnipresent, yet unseen that has, for years, cloaked its impacts. Yet, today, with human-driven ecological degradation and climate change defining the Anthropocene, mining must emerge from its veil of concealment and face us, its consumers, with all its facts. The industry itself consists primarily of digging ore out of the ground, moving it to processing plants, crushing, separating and refining metals and minerals and discarding wastes. The actual digging requires cutting down forests and clearing land, often through explosions, destroying ecosystems and arable soils, frequently forever through all its processes, mining releases 22% of the world’s industrial emissions. Its products, from teapots to tanks, add to the greenhouse gases enveloping Earth now, causing it to warm. As we mine for more and more metals and minerals, we are hollowing out our planet, releasing dangerous pollutants into air, water and soil. These enter our bodies too, poisoning us and, even more harshly, animals and birds who remain innocent of the thrills of telephones and tins. Mining’s harms don’t stop there the global industry, valued at $2,276.8 billion inspires violent conflicts where indigenous and powerless communities are enslaved in dark depths or brutally kicked off their resource-rich lands. The trade in conflict minerals the UN estimates the value of such diamonds, coming on the back of massive atrocities, in Cote d’Ivoire alone as $23 million comes literally covered in blood. Yet, as Times Evoke’s global experts emphasise, there are solutions and mindfulness is key. It is crucial we become more aware of the products we use which demand mining, so we can temper our temptations, aware of their devastations. This is even more important as the world moves to transition materials, including lithium, touted as a wunderkind which powers clean solar panels to electric vehicles. UNEP finds two million litres of water are needed to extract one single ton of lithium — do consider that when you ponder buying yet another mobile phone. Join Times Evoke in exploring mines — you could help restore a hard part of what is truly mine, yours and ours.