Both the Canadian and United States Thanksgivings are now past and we hurry to the Christmas stores and food table. This weekend I partied in Huntington Beach, California celebrating Thanksgiving with the kids, grandkids, and diverse friends & visitors. The Santa Ana winds, blowing fires through Malibu houses, brought us warm, sunny weather that made walking on the beach and playing in the shallow waves a delight.
I bought a new Trek bicycle: brown with leather seat and handle bars. Even at falling dollar values it was a bargain, being last year’s model, and as the young salesman noted, not a popular design. Although like the car in the movie Transformers, the bike sort of chose me.
Thus to conclude on Thanksgiving, I give thanks for friends and family and the ability to ride a new bike down the broadwalk and enjoy the sun and sand with my two-year old grandson who loves to throw a ball into the waves for the many dogs on the beach to retrieve.
Hence we return to the post-Thankgiving world of mining to note the usual: tailings dams bursting in China and killing ten; speculation that Rio Tinto will be bought by a white knight from China, and a strange new posting on mining from sunny California: I refer to kids.mongabay.com. Here you will find a posting supposedly tailored to kids to inform them about mining. Cloying stuff like this:
Mining is generally very destructive to the environment. It is one of the main causes of deforestation. In order to mine, trees and vegetation are cleared and burned. With the ground completely bare, large scale miningoperations use huge bulldozers and excavators to extract the metals and minerals from the soil. In order to amalgamate (cluster) the extractions, they use chemicals such as cyanide, mercury, or methylmercury. These chemicals go through tailings (pipes) and are often discharged into rivers, streams, bays, and oceans. This pollution contaminates all living organisms within the body of water and ultimately the people who depend on the fish for their main source of protein and their economic livelihood.
I suppose this is intended to counterbalance the work of MiHR in Canada and other Canadian government sites promoting the benefits and wonders of mining to kids. For example, one of the MiHR curent projects involves “Mining related educational content linked to provincial curriculum, including hands-on / in-class resources for teachers: including web-based marketing campaign targeting Canadian youth; and summer employment strategy to improve summer employment opportunities for students.”
Personally I must decry all these efforts to influence kids about mining, whether it be by government or private sector advocates. There is something inherently distasteful about the idea and practice of pushing near-religious agendas on kids. I look at my own grandkids aged months to teenager, and know their widespread interests and widespread ignorance and the stream of people and programs trying to tie them up in sectarian interests. It just seems wrong.
Surely we should focus on educating the kids and providing them the intellectual tools to gather facts, judge, and discriminate? We should not be throwing more skillfully-wrought propaganda at them. It debases the ideal of education and negates the objective of objective analysis they should be learning. I cannot believe the mining industry or any California advocate should be trying to influence the kids at an early age with the zeal and superficiality of a priest from a dogma-based religion.
The one thing that I give thanks for thought through all this propaganda is that watching my grandkids, I see they are not influenced by these silly attempts to promote one side or the other of the mining equation. They are bombarded by so much that they seem impervious to the wasted efforts. They seem to have a capacity to focus on what is immediately important to them and to gut-feel their way to a reasonable decision. And that is the way it should be and it is the way most of us do it, at any rate. Just watch the political debate amongst the adults over the weekend about choosing presidential candidates: when I expressed admiration for Romney’s family values, I was soundly attacked by the Republicans present who felt he was too perfect: “Time we had a human being like us in the White House,” was their riposte. Now I am confused about perfection and perfidious. Maybe that is why mining need not strive to be the best of all possible worlds. The kids of all ages instinctively know Candide.
