We read of illegal miners in South Africa slipping down the shaft to rework the old workings. Then hundreds die when things go wrong. We read of Zimbabwe police killing illegal diamond miners to get control of the workings for Grace Mugabe. Now we read that the shootings at the Freeport-McMoRan’s Grasberg Mine are motivated by a fight for control of access to the illegal mining of mine tailings.
Can we explain these events by reference to the standard theories of responsible mining, sustainable mining, and successful community relations? I suggest that these three events demonstrate the hollowness of these concepts and the limited scope they offer as an intellectual basis of understanding and explaining mining.
Indeed I go so far as to say that these three events establish that the concepts of responsible mining. sustainable development, et al. are no more than trivial sideshows that give rise to capitalist tools for the management and control of those potentially impacted by mining. The tools are useful, there is no doubt of that. For the tools follow logically from the premises of the makers who are implementing their concepts—concepts formulated in over-warm conference rooms by well-paid and well-fed academic lackeys and consultants. The tools are sharpened and honed by much application and worship by and of the priesthood that has developed to groom the altars. But for our purposes, I submit they are but pretty decorations to beguile the gullible—you know the type of over-dressed lady who yessterday said to me: “You know I am spiritual, but not religious. Therefore I will spread his ashes in a wild Indian wind, not bury him.”
We need much more than the philosphy of responsible-sustainable-mining to explain these events that all amount to nominal illegal mining. First let us focus on the mining part: what these people are doing is mining in is most pure & essential form: they are extracting resources where they find them in order to get the means to barter. And they need to get the resources to survive (at least until they die attempting to do so.) They need the resources to survive and procreate in accordance with the most fundamental biological imperative.
Now to the illegal part. Law is ultimately a social construct. What is lawful is ultimately what those with the power to impose their wills say it is. Unless you are French, in which case law is the manifestation of the social contract to agree to live together in a procreative-friendly way. The fellows in the South African mines, or on the Zimbabwe diamond fields, or sniping in Grasberg, see no illegality in what they are doing. Or if they do they have no respect for a system that denies them access to resources waiting to be mined.
Thus if we adopt the philosophy that there is a biological-imperative-based instinct to mine, (whether it be defined as legal or illegal is not relevant,) you must ask, how does the corporate mining industry address these instances of side-bar mining? The most obvious is to brand it illegal and throw the miners in jail. The second is to funnel more funds to local communities so the energy expended on side-bar mining is instead put to more productive use in creating jobs and opportunities. Or, particularly when metal prices are high, and jobs in short supply, find a way to enable the otherwise unemployed to do what I choose to call side-bar mine. Much like occurs at landfills in third-world countries where whole populations make a living scavenging the waste dumps for “valuable” throw-away stuff, so too maybe the mining industry should find a way to let these desperate folk get access to the mining wastes that still constitute a resource to the side-bar miner.
Now this is a topic that would be far more interesting to read about or sleep through at a conference than another of those sanctimonious & platitude-filled presentations on responsible mining and sustainable mining. Unless of course some community relations genius can bring illegal mining productivity into the fold of the concept of sustainable. For those tailngs could be a resource to side-bar miners well after the main ore body is worked out.
