Vivid Opinion June 2004

Regulars
OPINION
A plague of gold mines ñ
from Australia to Romania

by Ruth Rosenhek
June 2004

As someone involved in campaigning both locally and globally to halt the atrocities of large scale open pit gold mining, last week I visited Romania's oldest village, Rosia Montana, to see with my own eyes where yet another Canadian company, this time Gabriel Resources, would like to build Europe's largest gold mine.

American naturalist Aldo Leopold is well known for his dictum, ìa thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise."

My first thoughts upon walking up the hills surrounding the valley of Rosia Montana were, ìThey must be out of their minds to want to put a goldmine here in this strikingly beautiful and ancient country. This is a rare and endangered magical place deserving of the utmost respect.î

It would clearly be wrong, not only by Leopold's definition, but by most anybody who would come to visit Rosia Montana that this is not a place to be destroyed in the name of corporate profit.

To get this project off the ground, Gabriel Resources needs to dislocate 2,000 villagers. Then destroy the small mountains that I see in the distance with four open pits, waste rock mounds, tailings ponds and the rest of the devastating infrastructure required for a project such as this.

Ironically, Romania is best known worldwide for the January 2000 cyanide spill into the Danube River which wiped out the entire river system, endangering people's livelihoods and drinking water sources.

Peering down from atop the steep hills, the village nestled into the valley stirs the romantic within me. In the village, as I walk along the rock and dirt pathways, it reminds me of the towns I visited 35 years ago in rural Italy and France. Yet here the culture, the ëold way' still survives. As a traveller looking for relics of the past, this has high tourism value: two oxen pulling a plough, a man hauling a wobbly cart up a hill with his weekly provisions, a village where nobody speaks English, a small church surrounded by a patch of forest and cemetery, clean drinking water pouring from a spout at the intersection of roads that barely accommodate cars.

Later, I travel further to the east where I sit atop a high mound floating on the breeze with the clouds, a small scale, seemingly abandoned copper mine immediately to the north of me, a lush partly treed valley below me to the south. Several houses dot a village nestled in the crease barely visible from where I sit. This is where the proposed tailings storage facilities for the Rosia Montana gold mine would be located covering 800 hectares of rolling hills, forest and village with cyanide-laced wastewater ponds.

On my last day at Rosia Montana, we descend 30 metres into the Roman gold mining shafts. These hand-chiselled corridors bring chills to my spine. Imagine a slave-like population working down here day after day, carrying out load after load of ore on their backs. Five levels of shafts that date back 1900 years.

It astounds me that a gold mining company would want to destroy these ancient relics of its very own history; nowhere else in Europe is there a display as such left to see. I wonder if the more senior companies such as AngloGold and Newmont are aware that a junior company like Gabriel Resources plans a project that would destroy their own industry's relics.

A blatant disregard for human rights, a disregard for the environment, a disregard for the historical Roman archaeology and even a disregard for the industry itself.

It brings to mind what British scientist and writer James Lovelock says about the psycho-spiritual malaise that we are facing in these times of gross environmental and social destruction: ìIt's as if the brain decided it were the most important organ in the body and decided to mine the liver.î

Indeed, these large scale extractive industries are destroying the strands of the biological fabric on which we depend. The desire for profit and control override the respect for each other and the Earth that is necessary if we are to survive into the next century or the next millennium.

The risks we take environmentally, socially and archaeologically are huge in light of the fact that over 80 per cent of newly mined gold each year goes towards jewellery fabrication ñ rings, bracelets, earrings and so on.

With thousands of tons of gold reserves in the world's central banks, there's enough gold to cover demand for primary metal at the current levels of use for close to two decades. If our consumption of gold jewellery were significantly reduced or if industry put its minds to recycling gold from computers and mobile phones and other technological instruments that contain gold, then we would not need to mine any new gold for the next century.

Our motto in Australia is ìWater Is More Precious Than Gold.î Here in Romania , I would go even further and say, ìLife Is More Precious Than Gold.î

Please help us to halt these gold mining projects.

Take action at www.rosiamontana.org and www.rainforestinfo.org.au