I THINK MINING

  Day one: 1/1/11 if you count by day, month, year.  Or 11/1/1 of you go by year, day/month, month/day.  Etc.  A rainy and cold day in this part of California. And a supper party with old friends who live just across the road.   She is the best cook in all the world.  We ate home-made paste with a light green sauce of liquified asparagus and three different sausages grilled outdoors on the barbecue.   Lots of South African wine to wash it all down. 

We discussed politics as it affects mining.   No vast insights, but many details.  What is all boiled down to is the impact of the upper class on decision-making as it affects the benefits of the middle class.  We were all professional engineers working as consultants to the mining industry.  None is poor; none deprived; all with good health schemes.   Are we upper class or part of the disappearing middle class?   Clearly not upper class–too many debts and obligations not met.   Clearly not lower class. –poverty is not an issue and weight loss is a problem .   But disappearing middle class?  A scary thought! 

  We bemoaned the absence of infrastructure development: the absence of bridge building; no creation of high-speed rail systems; no new dams; and a decaying infrastructure the replacement of which would keep engineers busy.  The consensus was that such civil engineering works are not needed or beneficial to the upper class, hence are not undertaken, in spite of promised stimulus packages.

We noted that America is not producing the goods needed to build new civil works.  Even quarries are having a hard time opening or continuing their existence.  Surely, we asked, you cannot import for the sustainable future as we have imported in the past?  Surely, we asked, even the poor cannot benefit or be served if we only serve hamburgers and donuts, but fail to make? 

  The cynic opined that these gloomy opinions were based on a perspective of the legal, above-ground economy only.  The cynic opined that there are at least two more, unmeasured economies, both probably bigger than the official one.  The first is of course the drug economy which does not appear in official statistics.  The second is the economy of undocumented transactions such as occur when the illegal immigrant comes to clean the house, do the washing, and build a beautiful new island in a redecorated kitchen.

  We talked of sons in the Navy who note that ninety percent of those they started with in the Navy now work for contractors servicing the armed forces.  The result is that more defence budget money flows to the private sector than flows into the pockets of enlisted men and women, straight, gay, or bi.   We bemoaned the power of the civilian-military-industrial complex to promote eternal war as a way to make increasing and perpetual profit.

We reflected sadly that we have been at war longer than than the Boer War, or World War I, Word War II, or Vietnam.  Now we understood how a society can survive through long and reportedly terribly years of war: they are not affected or benefit financially.  Or maybe just enjoy the gory, the battles, death, and the concept of victory.

  Thus I returned to a book I finished today:  The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman.  (Subtitled: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.) It intertwines the story of George Price, Darwin, and the quest for a mathematical equation to explain evolution.  If you are willing to delve deep into the mathematics of covariance, this book is for you.  It all stems from Darwin’s observation:

Mr J.S Mill speaks, in his celebrate work Utilitarianism of the social feelings as “powerful natural sentiment” and as “the natural basis of sentiment for utilitarian morality”…But..he also remarks “…the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired.”  It is with hesitation that I venture to differ from so profound a thinker, but it can hardly be disputed that the social feelings are instinctive or innate in the lower animals; and why should they not be so in man?  Several thinkers believe that the moral sense is acquired by each individual during its lifetime.  On the general theory of evolution this is at least extremely improbable.  The ignoring of all mental qualities will, as it seems to me, be hereafter judged as a most serious blemish in the works of Mr. Mill.

We debated hence on how this observation affected mining.  Is the morality of environmentalism and its consequence instinctive or innate?  Is a moral sense of decency that leads to concerns about potential negative impacts of mining “acquired by each individual during its lifetime?”   Is the miner prompted by “a sentiment for utilitarian morality” when he develops a contentious new mine? 

  Deep stuff and I would have to be more awake and less inebriated to do this discussion and its implications justice.  All I can say is that this is a great book.  So I end on a heart-felt wish for a good new year.