Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places

By Christopher Pollon

• A global exposé of the business of mining—a flashpoint for crucial questions around climate change, the clean energy transition, environmental protection, and Indigenous rights.

• Author takes an insightful and fair approach that acknowledges realities and trade-offs—not a defense of mining or an anti-mining screed, it can be read by everyone from environmental activists to those in the mining business.

• Told through engaging storytelling; a rare book on the subject written for general readers, not experts (most books about mining are academic or technical).

• Author has reported on mining for decades. He has doggedly covered the global mining beat for most of his career.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greystone Books
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781771649131

Book preview

Cover: Earth rests on a pile of shattered rock. A blurb by Wade Davis, author of The Wayfinders, reads: “A harrowing and ruthlessly honest account that serves as a moral reckoning for our industrial age.”Title page: Christopher Pollon. Pitfall. The Race to Mine the World's Most Vulnerable Places. The David Suzuki Institute and Greystone Books logos are at the bottom of the page.

Look around you: Everything that’s not grown is mined . . . That’s why they called it the Stone Age—because it’s when they started mining! And mining is what made our lives better than what they had before the Stone Age.

Nautilus Minerals vice president

JOHN PARIANOS, quoted in The Atlantic

I believe the decarbonizing of the global economy is going to create the greatest investment opportunity of our lifetime.

BlackRock chairman and CEO

LARRY FINK, in his 2022 letter to CEOs

Contents

Map

Key Locations

Introduction

The City With a Heart of Gold

I . FOUNDING SACRIFICE ZONES

1. The Richest Island on Earth

An American Foray Into New Guinea

2. Nice People Behaving Badly

Guatemala and the Canadian Mining Juggernaut

3. The Plunder of Inner Mongolia

What It Takes to Be a Rare Earth Superpower

II. BUSINESS AS USUAL

4. Chasing White Gold

How Bolivia Tried (and Failed) to Mine on Its Own Terms

5. High and Dry in the Andes

Mining in a Water-Scarce World

6. A New Scramble for Africa

Adventures in Last-Frontier Cowboy Capitalism

III. WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

7. Tailings and Trade-Offs

What Resource Independence Really Looks Like

8. Ever Deeper, Ever Darker

The New Frontiers of Conflict

9. Feeding the Monster

Consumption and the Bumpy Road to Accountability

Afterword

That’s Batshit Crazy—a Case for Leaving Gold in the Ground

Acknowledgments

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Introduction

The City With a Heart of Gold

THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN FOR PEOPLE who have rarely, if ever, stopped to consider where all of the metals we use come from, and at what cost we enjoy the benefits. It pulls back the curtain on an industry that is invisible and everywhere, all at once.

Mining is a natural subject for me to write about because it’s the reason my family ended up in North America. Were it not for the race to exploit the gold and nickel deposits of Northern Ontario in the early twentieth century, I would not be here. My mother’s and father’s parents were part of a mass migration that saw the Italian diaspora leave Europe, fanning out across the globe. The countries many chose to move to—former colonies like Brazil, Canada, Argentina, and Australia—all had one thing in common. There was work in the mines.

My grandfather, Vittorio Abramo Dottori, was the archetype of the European immigrant peasant miner. A veteran of World War I, he fled the horrors of prisoner of war camps and an oppressive social caste system with the hopes of something better. He sailed alone from Genoa to Halifax in 1925 with forty dollars, making a beeline for the sprawling Timmins gold camp of Northern Ontario and getting hired on at the Bestel mine, near the present-day town of Cobalt. From what I can gather, Bestel was a short-lived, primitive, small-scale gold mine where my grandfather worked as a mucker—a job description akin to being a human mule. After subterranean rock had been blasted with explosives, his crew would go underground, load the broken rock onto trolleys, and bring it to the surface. It was brutal, dangerous work at a time when there was next to nothing by way of safety or enforced labor standards.

Vittorio was a transmigrant who gravitated to a resource frontier because there was work, like so many modern migrants who flock to mining zones around the world today. The Italian neighborhood known as Moneta, which built up around the Sacred Heart Catholic Parish on Timmins’s Pine Street South, got its name from a common query of the day: Why did you leave Italy, such a beautiful, warm place, for the cold and blackflies of Northern Ontario? Moneta—Italian for money—was the answer.

Mining provided precious jobs, but it came at a cost. By 1949, Vittorio’s lungs were consumed by silicosis—known as the miner’s disease, an often-fatal condition related to the black lung disease that afflicts coal miners—the result of breathing in the fine dust underground. Twenty years after becoming a Canadian citizen, he left the mines for good. He had survived untold wounds in frontline WWI battles but did not survive long enough in Canada to see his two young children grow up. My widowed grandmother went on to establish the Venetian Hotel in South Porcupine—a boarding house for transient gold miners—but my generation of the family did not work in mining, with two notable exceptions. Vittorio’s granddaughter, my first cousin, was a trailblazing bank executive who went on to serve on the board of one of Canada’s biggest mining companies. And I have spent two decades as a journalist writing about natural resources, including the environmental and political conflicts that surround the extraction of metals. So mining is still in the family blood, but it’s also become a subject that my extended family cannot easily discuss around a dinner table.

When I returned to Timmins in 2014 for the first time in many years to attend the funeral of my grandmother, the Venetian Hotel had been long demolished. What’s more, the Timmins motto, The City With a Heart of Gold, had taken on an ominous new meaning: Goldcorp, then one of Canada’s biggest gold mining companies, was building a new open-pit mine on the site of a former underground mine, now on the edge of the city. Giant berm walls were built from waste rock around the edges of the pit, forcing the demolition of the Shania Twain Centre, built to commemorate Timmins’s most successful export to the world other than gold. (She hadn’t had a big hit in years, so I guess that was okay.) As far as I could tell, the citizens of Timmins, now a nondescript city of about 45,000, were taking this new development in stride. The city began its life as a blackfly-infested mining camp, and it seemed fitting that its trajectory would lead back in the same direction. The company argued that the mine was an improvement since much of the open-pit area had been fenced off for decades. When the gold was exhausted, they said, the hole would fill with water to form a four-hundred-foot-deep urban lake surrounded by hiking trails.

Strange portents converged while I was there. On my second day in town, the tailings dam at the Mount Polley mine in central British Columbia, not far from where I live, burst its banks, releasing over 6.5 billion gallons into one of the world’s last great salmon rivers during the summer sockeye migration. It would become infamous as Canada’s worst environmental mine disaster in history, with footage of the debacle beamed around the world. I had covered a mining beat for years, in part because there was so little competition, but suddenly it was the biggest environmental story in North America and I was caught flat-footed on the other side of the country. Few people thought my mining beat was very interesting before, but that was about to change.

Mount Polley was a turning point. The close collaboration between the provincial government and the company that owned the mine was glaring to the point of being embarrassing. From the beginning they worked together in damage control; at one point B.C.’s minister of mines compared the spill to a natural event, like an avalanche. In the years that followed, the company won over CAD$100 million in a court settlement with their engineer contractors, while taxpayers covered millions in cleanup costs through tax refunds and various government expenses. The executives in charge and their board of directors have yet to pay a cent in fines. After the fact, the government approved a permit to discharge liquid effluent into the same waters that received the spill.

I remember standing near the rock berm that would separate the open pit from downtown Timmins, shell-shocked by the news about Mount Polley and thinking: If mining companies have the power to do this in Canada, a G7 nation and one of the richest, most stable democracies on Earth, what are they up to in the poor, more lawless corners of the world?

By this point, being a mining reporter had started feeling like being a doctor condemned to perpetually describing a patient’s symptoms in great detail without ever diagnosing the underlying malady. The same narratives repeated over and over: similar abuses inflicted on the land, water, and people living closest to the extraction, with massive outrage from environmentalists and Indigenous advocates, often with no meaningful comment or action provided by companies and regulators. For an industry that’s so critical to our civilization, it’s not a popular beat, even in Canada, where mining is considered a foundational business, something Canadians think they do better than everybody else (kind of like hockey). In North America, the purpose of most mainstream mining journalism is to inform investors of new regulations, conflicts, and anything else that might affect the value of stocks. None of this has stopped me from traveling across the Americas and Asia to cover mining stories—almost always documenting conflict—to the point that I started to joke that my fieldwork had become a sort of masochistic disaster tourism: always visiting stunningly beautiful, mostly intact natural landscapes on the cusp (or in the process) of being destroyed by distant, invisible forces.

The general public in the world’s wealthier nations does not appear interested in what is happening in the remote locations, far from cities, where most mining takes place. Part of the disconnect is that metals are ubiquitous and invisible all at the same time, unlike fossil fuels, which most of us buy directly. We are equally oblivious to mining’s immense benefits and to its massive social and environmental costs.

As the commodities boom of the early century gave way to post-financial-crash doldrums, I was seriously considering finding another reporting beat. But a series of events changed my mind and set the course for this book. The first was the Mount Polley disaster, which quite literally struck close to home; the second was an unexpected encounter with an executive from a large oil and gas company. The latter occurred at a green business convention in Vancouver, B.C., a few years back, where the CEO appeared as part of a panel to discuss the future of fossil fuels. The event took place at a critical juncture in modern history: climate action was still an aspirational goal for many big resource companies, some of which had not yet publicly acknowledged the existence of climate change, let alone their contributions to the crisis.

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. The spotlight was intensifying too on extractive industries—oil and gas, mining, and more—for Indigenous rights abuses and environmental disasters all over the world.

Raise your hand if you don’t use oil, he began, surveying the crowd.

Silence.

What about copper?

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. I was amazed at how easy it was for the speaker to short-circuit the activists in the crowd. 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 either 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. This is an indisputable truth. The copper he mentioned is one of about 120 elements that are the basis of all known matter on Earth, and one of over thirty metals that are mined all over the world, making most technology, industry, and lifestyle comforts possible. When our planet was born nearly five billion years ago, humanity inherited a finite amount of these elements, which were forged within the molten cores of distant stars (some of our nickel and platinum reached Earth later by way of asteroid, comet, and meteor collisions). Within a single drop of seawater there are forty-seven different minerals and metals, everything from copper to nickel, lithium to lead. Our blood is rich in iron; look at the label of any multivitamin and you will find more than a dozen metals in trace quantities—zinc, chromium, magnesium, and many more—which our bodies require to function.

The base metals, like iron, copper, nickel, aluminum, and zinc, are the building blocks of human civilization; precious metals like gold, silver, and platinum, in addition to their use in jewelry and some industrial applications, are also used as currency. So-called rare metals—including niobium, cobalt, and tantalum—have become indispensable to daily life, as are about seventeen rare earth elements, which among many other things make modern computing possible, not to mention clean energy technologies and batteries.

The bulk of the metals we consume are mined by a relatively small number of large, publicly traded companies that are based in rich countries but transnational in their operations. Since the end of World War II, transnational mining companies have emerged and multiplied, scouring the global south for mineral riches. A large parent company might be based in Toronto or London or Melbourne, but it operates across many national borders, employing a web of smaller subsidiaries. But the number of industrial miners pales in comparison to the number of so-called artisanal miners, people mostly working in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, who are engaged in small-scale mining operations—in many cases with pick, shovel, and bare hands. Today there are about 45 million people working in this informal mining sector for survival, including a large number of women and children; they mine for precious metals and more, in conditions every bit as brutal (or worse) than those encountered by my grandfather in Northern Ontario a century ago. About 90 percent of the world’s miners are artisanal miners, but they only produce about 10 percent of the world’s mining output. By comparison, about seven million people on Earth depend on industrial mining for a living.

Mining is invisible to most of us, but it won’t be much longer. Right up to the mid-twentieth century, our civilization relied on about twelve mined minerals, writes Gavin Mudd, professor of environmental engineering at RMIT University in Australia. But a single modern computer chip needs about sixty different elements to function, and most of them are mined. Humanity now uses most of the periodic table of the elements, from aluminum (Al) to zirconium (Zr).

Mining will become ever more important if we hope to limit the effects of catastrophic climate change. That’s because transitioning to clean energy will be even more metals intensive than the world of fossil fuels. In 2021 the World Bank estimated we would need over three billion tons of metals and minerals to achieve a below 2°C future, and the world has not yet woken up to what this transition will require. Consider transportation, among the largest generators of greenhouse gas: in its roadmap to get humanity to net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Energy Agency says that there can be no sales of new internal combustion engine passenger cars after 2035, and that by 2040, the global electricity sector must have already reached net-zero emissions. The amount of metals—including nickel, copper, lithium, cobalt, and many more—needed to make vehicle batteries, clean energy projects, and storage systems is so staggering, some say it is logistically impossible to realize.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was a gross understatement for the CEO at the conference to suggest the world cannot function without natural resources like copper. We are now mining more than ever before—metals and minerals extraction rose almost fivefold between 1970 and 2017. On our current trajectory, the future will demand we extract much more. And that’s a problem this book seeks to confront: we need even more metals, yet mining is one of the planet’s most polluting and deadly industries. It is by definition unsustainable. As a short-term land use it often leaves permanent environmental liabilities, particularly to water. Agriculture disturbs more surface area, but no industry moves more earth and rock than mining. The production of just seven metals—iron, aluminum, copper, zinc, lead, nickel, and manganese—accounts for almost 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

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 being felt most acutely by Indigenous Peoples living closest to the land. Transnational companies will be increasingly drawn into conflicts over questions of land ownership, water access, and human rights. Across the global south—a term I use loosely to refer to low- and middle-income nations in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Latin America—dynamic movements pressing for environmental and social justice are growing, led by Indigenous Peoples demanding a greater say in how their national wealth is developed and shared.

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. That’s because the environmental and social impacts of metal mining will only intensify with time. Over the last forty years, ore grades (the concentration of an economic mineral or metal in a deposit) have declined on average by half for many metals. Lower grades necessitate sifting through ever-increasing volumes of rock to find the metals we need—increasing the volume of tailings waste generated for each unit of metal produced. This, in a world where the environmental legacy of industrial mining is already writ large: tens of thousands of tailings storage dams (and growing)—a significant but unknown fraction at high risk of catastrophic collapse—languish like time bombs above rivers and poor communities across the planet.

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 developing world, much of this in the name of saving the planet from climate change. A term first coined to describe the places ruined by uranium mining and processing during the Cold War, sacrifice zones are landscapes destroyed for the sake of benefits delivered somewhere else.

Stepping back at this late hour from reducing fossil fuel emissions and transitioning to cleaner energy is not an option. By some estimates, humanity has about a decade to get our emissions under control before feedback loops kick in, leading to an irreversible, runaway climate disaster. The best-case scenario, writes David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, is limiting the rise to between 2 and 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100; with continued inaction, we could hit 4 degrees, at which point the prospects for economic growth are virtually nil and large swathes of the global south will no longer support human life. At the same time, humans are exacting a more direct toll on land and sea than ever before through pollution, the introduction of invasive species, and our ever-expanding footprint of farming, logging, fishing, and mining.

Our world’s natural systems, already so compromised, cannot sustain a doubling or, by some estimates, quadrupling in metals mining to meet the predicted demand by roughly mid-century. The world’s 800 million undernourished humans, 100 million of them lacking food due to climate shocks, who depend on scarce water and increasingly marginal lands, can’t afford for all that mining to happen. That’s why even though the world needs mining more than ever, the world needs mining to change. If it is to play an enabling role in saving the planet from climate change, how do we move beyond business as usual to create the world we need? The good news, if you can call it that, is that substituting our cheap-oil-powered industrial civilization with a green model of the same, enabled by a massive expansion of industrial metals mining, will not be possible to implement in time to solve climate change. But the danger is that mining companies, if allowed to proceed as usual, will meet the demand any way they know how.

The pages that follow show how we got to this moment in history, exploring what business-as-usual mining looks like in the global south, how it came to be, and where we are going. They illustrate why the mining industry on its own lacks the capacity to deliver the metals humanity needs without inflicting ever-greater environmental and social harms, and why it is so important to limit the number of holes we dig in the earth to reduce these harms. I look at mining through the lens of what humanity needs and not what global investors and metals markets demand—a subversive framing by design, which reflects the reality that industrial mining is in dire need of paradigm-shifting disruption. Along the way, I identify what I refer to as levers for change—hopeful tools, ideas, and approaches that might lead us forward—as a way to provoke necessary conversations and action.

This book is organized in three parts, looking at the past, present, and future of mining. Its starting point is the post–World War II years, when the quantity of metals we use began to climb and advances in technology made it possible for the first time to produce large amounts of metals relatively inexpensively. The postwar years saw the creation of the World Bank and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; it was also the dawn of an unprecedented new era of runaway resource consumption centered in the global north, in which citizens morphed into consumers.

We are sleepwalking into the future, unaware and woefully unprepared for the expansion of mining that will be required in the near future. What follows is intended as a wake-up call. How do we secure the metals our civilization needs without destroying the environment and violating the rights of the planet’s most vulnerable people?

My ultimate goal is to kick-start a discussion about how we can source the metals we need for the future without figuratively and literally wrecking the place. To spark a conversation that was extinguished the day the CEO silenced the crowd at the Vancouver conference. To relaunch a discourse that never happened, but needs to happen now.

Founding

Sacrifice

Zones

PART I

THIS IS THE STORY OF THREE MINES that trailblazed a new era of global mining. As the borders to the poorest countries opened after World War II, new mining frontiers emerged across the global south—both for profit and to impose control over people and land. At the same time, the development of open-pit mining and new technologies unleashed a mammoth thirst for capital, energy, and water. American industrialists led the way, while former resource colonies like Canada morphed into financial havens for high-risk mining exploration. And Communist empires have been no less rapacious when it comes to sacrificing the environment and local people for the sake of metals in the ground. In these founding sacrifice zones we see in microcosm the dysfunction that will play out across the modern history of mining: environmental destruction, political impunity, and a disregard for Indigenous rights, often in proximity to violent conflict. A fundamental question emerges: Is an endowment of metal riches a boon or bust for the people living closest to the resources?

1

The Richest Island on Earth

An American Foray Into New Guinea

VIEWED FROM HIGH ABOVE THE ISLAND OF NEW GUINEA, Grasberg does not look like something human beings could have made. It is a gaping hole in the earth’s crust so vast and deep, the Indigenous Amungme, semi-nomadic horticulturalists who roamed the nearby highlands for millennia, say it influences local weather. Where a fourteen-thousand-foot sacred mountain peak once rose into the clouds, this open-pit copper and gold mine plunges over half a mile deep.

For decades, fleets of bungalow-sized diesel trucks slowly wound up and down the edges of the great pit 24-7, loaded by hydraulic shovels scooping ninety tons on each pass. Having reached the limit of how deep the pit can go, mining at Grasberg has shifted to underground operations, tapping a deposit of gold and copper that descends into the earth like the root of a great tooth. To extract some of the richest finds ever of these metals, an autonomous electric train system has been designed to excavate below the original open pit, which ceased production in 2019. As of 2023 about 200,000 tons of ore are processed each day from two separate underground mines across a forty-square-mile district, employing almost thirty thousand workers (many as contractors), in one of the biggest, richest, most remote subterranean mining complexes in history.

It is an enterprise that my grandfather would not have recognized as a mine at all. What would become known as the Grasberg minerals district was one of America’s first big mining forays into the global south. Home to the world’s largest-ever proven gold reserve and the second-largest proven copper reserve, Grasberg remains virtually unknown to the outside world, even though many of us have unwittingly used Grasberg copper in our daily lives—copper’s unique malleability and ability to conduct electricity make it critical for the wiring in our homes, in our phones and computers, and in our cars and transportation.

Geological processes over millions of years endowed the island of New Guinea with immense riches. Valuable deposits of copper and gold, seams of anthracite coal, offshore and on-land oil and gas: all combine to make this landmass—shaped like a great prehistoric bird hovering about four hundred miles north of Australia—the richest island on Earth. This wealth far transcends the value of what can be extracted. As the world’s biggest and highest-elevation tropical island, New Guinea possesses more diversity of life than virtually anywhere else. Split down the middle by a 750-mile border separating Indonesia to the west and the nation of Papua New Guinea to the east, it is home to more plant and animal species than any other island, amid the largest intact tropical old-growth forests left in Asia Pacific. The warm, shallow seas that rim the great island to the west and south form the heart of the Coral Triangle—the world’s richest complex of marine reefs, home to the highest concentration of marine species. The island’s cultural wealth is equally impressive. With an estimated 1,060 languages in seventeen separate families, New Guinea supports a wider diversity of languages than all of Africa in a land of 12.5 million people, across an island about twice the size of California. Many have under a few thousand speakers, but most remain vibrant, living languages.

Amid this cultural and ecological bounty is Grasberg—a pioneering extractive venture by what has become one of America’s biggest mining companies. It accounts for a large share of the GDP of Indonesian New Guinea.

Grasberg represents a watershed moment in mining history that saw Freeport, a company with roots in Texas sulfur mining, export a modern invention—the open-pit mine. This approach to surface mining would go on to transform not only how our civilization gets the metals it requires but also the way we live. By historical standards, there was not enough high-grade metal at Grasberg to make a mine economical. But open-pit technologies (including the development of flotation to separate target minerals from waste, and better explosives), combined with huge inputs of fossil fuels, have made it possible to literally move mountains.

Open-pit mining, and all the technologies it employs, would make modern comforts and