Somewhere In The Amazon Rainforest

While I sympathize with the miners – this place is quite poor, and people can make in a day what an average worker makes in nearly a month – the magnitude of the destruction is astonishing. There are something like 30,000 illegal miners in the Madre de Dios province, each of whom clears trees and then uses heavy pumps to blast open gigantic pits in the earth. Gold is then extracted from sludge using mercury, which is dumped into the local rivers by the ton. Clearly, this is as toxic as it is unsustainable, and the both rainforest and people’s health – not to mention future – is being devastated for very short term gain.
http://neotropicalbutterflyecology.blogspot.com/2012/04/illegal-gold-mining-in-peruvian-amazon.html