I mean that literally.
The History Channel, which used to host educational content, has apparently chosen to do something quite different. In my opinion, they are glorifying environmental destruction. For another opinion, check out ellemadame.blogspot.com for the opinion of someone who has been there. Here she is, visiting one of the ecologically-destroyed sites in the Las Cristinas area of Bolivar State in Venezuela:
For reference, that was once a deep forest, full of biodiversity and just plain beautiful. Not anymore.
I started out my professional life as a mining geophysicist. I had just earned my PhD, and with my dissertation advisor had started a company to provide electrical geophysical services to mining companies in the US and Canada. This meant that I used geophysical methods to search for undiscovered mineral resources - mainly porphyry copper deposits in the southwestern US, Alaska, and western Canada. When successful, this geophysical exploration led to large-scale mining done in a very controlled fashion so as not to damage the water table or the local environment.
Are you reading this by using a light? You can thank a copper mine that you have wires in your house. Or that your car works.
Also - and this is more important than you may possibly imagine - thank the US Bureau of Mines (now defunct) and the Environmental Protection Agency for insisting that the water you drink does not have cyanide or mercury in it.
I subsequently joined the US Geological Survey, and several years later accepted an assignment from the US Geological Survey to provide technology transfer to Venezuela - and with my wife we wrote a book about this. I was the chief of the USGS science technology mission to Venezuela - paid for 130% by the Venezuelan government (the extra 30% went to overhead so that US taxpayers actually got some payback).
When we arrived in Venezuela with our family, the southern half of the country was literally unmapped - only 1:250,000-scale SLAR (side-looking airborne radar) images existed for the jungle-covered southern half of Venezuela. Those maps were so bad that you could see "splice errors" - where two radar strips laid out together would mis-match a point on their edges by 3 kilometers. In the three years we were there we mapped the Amazonas, and completed a mineral resource assessment of the country (see also http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/b2124) that showed it to be incredibly endowed with mineral resources, including gold, diamonds, rare-earth elements ("REE's"), iron, and bauxite.
As I continued showing and training the Venezuelans how to use geophysical and geochemical methods, and built a full mineral resource estimate for the southern half of the entire country, I began to see an unanticipated consequence of our good intentions. I had not anticipated that something like the EPA would not exist in Venezuela. I had also not anticipated the consequences of massive political corruption on a country and its economy.
So-called "artisanal miners" were being driven into the jungle by the collapsing economy of Venezuela. Why was the economy collapsing? Two political parties, deliberately designed to look like the Democrat and the Republican parties in the United States, had taken turns for over 30 years to loot the country of far more than it was producing in oil wealth. Political corruption got so out of control at the time that it was literally bleeding the country white. Wealthy women in Caracas thought nothing of flying to Miami for the day to go shopping. They loved the fact that everyone spoke Spanish with Cuban accents, "...and Miami is so CLOSE to America!" But the average people not in on the corruption circle lost their jobs in droves - the economy was collapsing at a rate of several percent per year, driving poor people desperate for food into the jungle to do whatever they could to survive. After all - that's where their grandparents came from, and they panned for gold and fed their families.
That was before hydraulic pump technology became available.
This is ALL described in The Book - which helps the average American understand why the Venezuelan people had become so desperate that they elected Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela. They had SEEN what the pious, American- and European-educated elite had called "democracy" - and wanted no more of it. Paternal socialism - where the poor people discarded to the hillside slums actually were helped to live and to eat - was a huge improvement by comparison. For the first time, someone cared about the people who were not rich and educated in America. Chavez grew up the son of poor school teachers - in a dirt-floored hut in Western Venezuela.
The result of the consequent artisanal mining - glorified in the "History" Channel series Bamazon, has been the destruction of the great Amazonas forest on a truly colossal scale.
And it happens incredibly rapidly.
One day I was walking a jungle trail and was amazed to see a brightly-colored, brand-new hydraulic pump sitting by itself in the middle of the trail. This thing weighed at least 200 kilos - more than 600 lbs - and I wondered how it got there. The next day I returned with my Venezuelan counterpart to show him. Where the pump had been we now gaped at a water-filled hole in the ground. This hole was about 2-3 meters (6-10 feet) deep and at least 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter. The hydraulic pump was nowhere to be seen - we learned later that six mineros slung it on ropes from a pole and moved it by cutting a new trail through the jungle to a new site.
The hydraulic pump had been used to water-blast the soil out from under the ancient 50-meter (160-foot-tall) trees that had stood there just a day earlier. They were now fallen over - and dying - around the perimeter of what the Venezuelans call "agua negra" - black water. This water was still and black - and because it was not moving naturally through a drainage, it would now host malaria-carrying mosquitoes for the next several centuries.
Anecdote: falciparum plasmodium, the so-called "cerebral malaria", can leave you in a coma in as little as two hours after the onset of the first massive headache. It kills. It is also resistant to all prophylactic drugs available in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government no longer reports two kinds of national statistics:
I mentioned that the bodega-owner also sold mercury. This is called "asogue" in Venezuela, and is used to amalgamate with the dust-grain-sized gold into "sponge" - which the miners typically cook on stoves in their shanties. They literally cook it in sauce pans to get the mercury to boil off and leave the gold. Guess where the mercury goes? Yep - they breathe it. You might want to check out Minamata Syndrome.
Shortly after we arrived in Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela, for our three-year assignment, a Venezuelan friend, a geochemist with a Doctorate of Science from the Colorado School of Mines, dropped a report on my desk. "Read this and get it back to me by tomorrow," he said. "If anyone learns that I gave this to you, I will lose my job," he added. The report documented the fact that the Caroni River, where our town drew its water supply, already was showing methyl mercury levels 7 times greater than the maximum permitted by the EPA in the United States. River fish had up to 1,200 times the maximum FDA limits in their flesh. The report said that secret government estimates, based on import data, suggested that 70,000 liters of mercury were dumped into the Rio Caroni drainage every year. A liter of mercury weighs about 33 kilos (~70 lbs).
We drank no more tap water for the rest of the three years we lived there. We also avoided eating river fish.
Here's an example of how hydraulic mining is done:
Note the guy on the left with the hose - that's what is used to undercut the soil and knock over the great trees. The guy in the lower center is standing in a hole with his feet guiding the suction-pump stream to a bolus of mercury. The pump in the upper right takes the mercury and gold results and runs it over a "grizzley", or shaker-table, where the heavy components drop out and get trapped in wooden riffles. This is later gathered and "cooked".
Here's what the results look like from a distance; note that the amount of damage seen here from my helicopter can be caused in just a week's time:
The scale in this image is approximately a kilometer (0.61 miles) on a side.
So... what is gained by this kind of hydraulic mining in the jungle? Gold. How does gold feed the human population? It doesn't - except like cocaine, rich people spend money on it and a tiny fraction of that filters back to the artisanal miners. Unlike platinum, it can't even be used in catalytic converters. It's used to coat some electronic components, but also used to flag to everyone that you are married. And to quickly squirrel drug money in a compact form out of a country.
The History Channel, which used to host educational content, has apparently chosen to do something quite different. In my opinion, they are glorifying environmental destruction. For another opinion, check out ellemadame.blogspot.com for the opinion of someone who has been there. Here she is, visiting one of the ecologically-destroyed sites in the Las Cristinas area of Bolivar State in Venezuela:
For reference, that was once a deep forest, full of biodiversity and just plain beautiful. Not anymore.
I started out my professional life as a mining geophysicist. I had just earned my PhD, and with my dissertation advisor had started a company to provide electrical geophysical services to mining companies in the US and Canada. This meant that I used geophysical methods to search for undiscovered mineral resources - mainly porphyry copper deposits in the southwestern US, Alaska, and western Canada. When successful, this geophysical exploration led to large-scale mining done in a very controlled fashion so as not to damage the water table or the local environment.
Are you reading this by using a light? You can thank a copper mine that you have wires in your house. Or that your car works.
Also - and this is more important than you may possibly imagine - thank the US Bureau of Mines (now defunct) and the Environmental Protection Agency for insisting that the water you drink does not have cyanide or mercury in it.
I subsequently joined the US Geological Survey, and several years later accepted an assignment from the US Geological Survey to provide technology transfer to Venezuela - and with my wife we wrote a book about this. I was the chief of the USGS science technology mission to Venezuela - paid for 130% by the Venezuelan government (the extra 30% went to overhead so that US taxpayers actually got some payback).
When we arrived in Venezuela with our family, the southern half of the country was literally unmapped - only 1:250,000-scale SLAR (side-looking airborne radar) images existed for the jungle-covered southern half of Venezuela. Those maps were so bad that you could see "splice errors" - where two radar strips laid out together would mis-match a point on their edges by 3 kilometers. In the three years we were there we mapped the Amazonas, and completed a mineral resource assessment of the country (see also http://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/b2124) that showed it to be incredibly endowed with mineral resources, including gold, diamonds, rare-earth elements ("REE's"), iron, and bauxite.
As I continued showing and training the Venezuelans how to use geophysical and geochemical methods, and built a full mineral resource estimate for the southern half of the entire country, I began to see an unanticipated consequence of our good intentions. I had not anticipated that something like the EPA would not exist in Venezuela. I had also not anticipated the consequences of massive political corruption on a country and its economy.
So-called "artisanal miners" were being driven into the jungle by the collapsing economy of Venezuela. Why was the economy collapsing? Two political parties, deliberately designed to look like the Democrat and the Republican parties in the United States, had taken turns for over 30 years to loot the country of far more than it was producing in oil wealth. Political corruption got so out of control at the time that it was literally bleeding the country white. Wealthy women in Caracas thought nothing of flying to Miami for the day to go shopping. They loved the fact that everyone spoke Spanish with Cuban accents, "...and Miami is so CLOSE to America!" But the average people not in on the corruption circle lost their jobs in droves - the economy was collapsing at a rate of several percent per year, driving poor people desperate for food into the jungle to do whatever they could to survive. After all - that's where their grandparents came from, and they panned for gold and fed their families.
That was before hydraulic pump technology became available.
This is ALL described in The Book - which helps the average American understand why the Venezuelan people had become so desperate that they elected Hugo Chavez as president of Venezuela. They had SEEN what the pious, American- and European-educated elite had called "democracy" - and wanted no more of it. Paternal socialism - where the poor people discarded to the hillside slums actually were helped to live and to eat - was a huge improvement by comparison. For the first time, someone cared about the people who were not rich and educated in America. Chavez grew up the son of poor school teachers - in a dirt-floored hut in Western Venezuela.
The result of the consequent artisanal mining - glorified in the "History" Channel series Bamazon, has been the destruction of the great Amazonas forest on a truly colossal scale.
And it happens incredibly rapidly.
One day I was walking a jungle trail and was amazed to see a brightly-colored, brand-new hydraulic pump sitting by itself in the middle of the trail. This thing weighed at least 200 kilos - more than 600 lbs - and I wondered how it got there. The next day I returned with my Venezuelan counterpart to show him. Where the pump had been we now gaped at a water-filled hole in the ground. This hole was about 2-3 meters (6-10 feet) deep and at least 20 meters (65 feet) in diameter. The hydraulic pump was nowhere to be seen - we learned later that six mineros slung it on ropes from a pole and moved it by cutting a new trail through the jungle to a new site.
The hydraulic pump had been used to water-blast the soil out from under the ancient 50-meter (160-foot-tall) trees that had stood there just a day earlier. They were now fallen over - and dying - around the perimeter of what the Venezuelans call "agua negra" - black water. This water was still and black - and because it was not moving naturally through a drainage, it would now host malaria-carrying mosquitoes for the next several centuries.
Anecdote: falciparum plasmodium, the so-called "cerebral malaria", can leave you in a coma in as little as two hours after the onset of the first massive headache. It kills. It is also resistant to all prophylactic drugs available in Venezuela.
The Venezuelan government no longer reports two kinds of national statistics:
- the number of malaria deaths in the country
- the murder rate in the country (el Nacional, a privately-owned newspaper, reports that it is over 10 times the murder rate in Baghdad).
I mentioned that the bodega-owner also sold mercury. This is called "asogue" in Venezuela, and is used to amalgamate with the dust-grain-sized gold into "sponge" - which the miners typically cook on stoves in their shanties. They literally cook it in sauce pans to get the mercury to boil off and leave the gold. Guess where the mercury goes? Yep - they breathe it. You might want to check out Minamata Syndrome.
Shortly after we arrived in Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela, for our three-year assignment, a Venezuelan friend, a geochemist with a Doctorate of Science from the Colorado School of Mines, dropped a report on my desk. "Read this and get it back to me by tomorrow," he said. "If anyone learns that I gave this to you, I will lose my job," he added. The report documented the fact that the Caroni River, where our town drew its water supply, already was showing methyl mercury levels 7 times greater than the maximum permitted by the EPA in the United States. River fish had up to 1,200 times the maximum FDA limits in their flesh. The report said that secret government estimates, based on import data, suggested that 70,000 liters of mercury were dumped into the Rio Caroni drainage every year. A liter of mercury weighs about 33 kilos (~70 lbs).
We drank no more tap water for the rest of the three years we lived there. We also avoided eating river fish.
Here's an example of how hydraulic mining is done:
Note the guy on the left with the hose - that's what is used to undercut the soil and knock over the great trees. The guy in the lower center is standing in a hole with his feet guiding the suction-pump stream to a bolus of mercury. The pump in the upper right takes the mercury and gold results and runs it over a "grizzley", or shaker-table, where the heavy components drop out and get trapped in wooden riffles. This is later gathered and "cooked".
Here's what the results look like from a distance; note that the amount of damage seen here from my helicopter can be caused in just a week's time:
The scale in this image is approximately a kilometer (0.61 miles) on a side.
So... what is gained by this kind of hydraulic mining in the jungle? Gold. How does gold feed the human population? It doesn't - except like cocaine, rich people spend money on it and a tiny fraction of that filters back to the artisanal miners. Unlike platinum, it can't even be used in catalytic converters. It's used to coat some electronic components, but also used to flag to everyone that you are married. And to quickly squirrel drug money in a compact form out of a country.
The Take Away here:
Don't watch the "History" Channel's Bamazon series.
Don't buy anything from a company that advertised there.
~~~~~
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