Video Discussion 3 - Mining - Google Docs

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Oct 30, 2023

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Mining Video Discussion In the case study of Puno, Peru, we see a good example of how damaging government decisions can be to its citizens. The city of Puno was shut down for more than two weeks due to the Aymaras people protesting against mining and blocking roadways. This protest stemmed from the government selling off their territory without consulting farmers, but the Aymaras people believe that mining will devastate their water supply thus ruining their livelihood. However, the mining rights have been granted for 35% of Punos territory, many of them being foreign companies. A government's responsibility should be to protect and take care of its citizens first and foremost. In this case, we see a government exploiting its land and its citizens for foreign gain, causing local farmers to struggle and accusing them of intransigency. Environmental justice is an all encompassing definition and truly one that exhibits the equal treatment and involvement of all people with respect to the environment and how it’s being regulated. Typically, with environmental justice comes environmental activism because even though environmental justice is pretty straight forward, there are those who hold a lot of power that can cause great injustice. A company with great power was Royal Dutch Shell, an oil company who agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement to avoid trial over its alleged human rights violations in the Niger Delta. Shell was accused of working with and financing the Nigerian military government to calm the peaceful resistance against its presence in the region. This peaceful resistance was known as MOSA (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People)

and its founding member/president was environmental activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa. The MOSA group was committed to using nonviolence to stop the repression and exploitation of the Ogoni people and their land by Shell and the Nigerian government. Despite this peaceful approach, Ken Saro-Wiwa, along with eight others, were executed in 1995. From that $15.5 million, $5 million was put toward a trust fund for the Ogoni people by Ken Wiwa, Saro-Wiwa’s son. This case study, in my opinion, shows that no matter how peaceful environmental activism can be, powerful companies can have a powerful effect over government corruption; similarly to the Aymaras people mentioned above. This doesn’t mean that people shouldn’t continue to fight for what is right, some good may come out of it. While mining can have the impact of altering the day to day normalities of citizens who live nearby, there are those who take action and work to reverse the damaging effects it has on their local community. We often see abandonment with many large scale projects once they’ve exploited all of its resources and with that also comes miners losing their jobs. However, in the case of Chris Farley and the program of Refresh Appalachia, we see farmers and old miners who are working to regenerate old surface mines into active and sustainable agriculture farms. Rather than allowing mining to decimate their region, they are working together to take back the land, repurpose it for farming or to return it as closely as they can to its natural form. The beautiful outcome of regenerating this land for farming is that now these individuals are now able to rely on themselves, rather than the mining industry, for income while also providing a resource and opportunity for others in their community. Sustainability is a big topic in the environmental world. Without it, our resources would be depleted on a much faster scale than they currently are. Creating a more sustainable system of resource extraction is very much possible, especially with the advancements in technology that

we have today. It’s evident from the interview with METSO’s spokesperson that mining utilizes a very vast amount of energy but it’s also evident that there can be more energy efficient changes made in their practices. METSO explains that 2-3% of the world’s electricity goes towards comminution alone, so starting there to come up with ways to reduce that percentage along with other resources such as water usage would be a good start. Practices such as high-pressure grinding, which is a dry-process, reduces the need for water and transporting the materials on large conveyors reduces the amount of needed vehicles to manually move it. To go even further into sustainable practices, developing technology to target actual minerals rather than waste would reduce the amount of ore extracted in general, thus reducing water in the process. These few sustainable options alone prove that these large-scale operations can be done more sustainable and more efficiently, it’s just up to people to want to make that change and to advance forward. In the end, we are only hurting ourselves by hurting the planet.

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