An Ethical Minefield

It is easy to be critical of the destructive elements of mining. What's more difficult is confronting the necessary and complex role minerals play in all of our lives.

Five years ago, I was sitting in a sidewalk pub in Entebbe, Uganda, when a Zimbabwean refugee told me that Zimbabwe’s president, Robert Mugabe, was preparing to nationalize his country’s mines. At the time, few people working in foreign aid and international development were concentrating on mining and minerals – one had to rely on gossip collected in the street.

Now, hardly a week passes without a front-page exposé covering the mining beat. Whether stories linking small-scale gold mining to the financing of guerrilla activities in Colombia, or revelations that Mugabe pilfers the nationalized mines for personal profit, scandal, corruption, and the devastating human and environmental impacts of extraction are the favoured themes of this new literature.

For many people, realizing the prevalence of mining provokes alarm and a certain voyeuristic fascination. Network journalists relish demonstrating their exploratory prowess by visiting remote peasant miners in Africa, while concerned humanitarians gasp at the harm spread by mining companies. It’s as if the world is just discovering that mining is happening, and shocked that its outcomes are not always peaceful.

U.S. Identifies Vast Mineral Riches in Afghanistan

WASHINGTON — The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.       

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.