The Missing Ethics of Mining

In 2008, I visited this area as a contractor for an agency of the World Bank. I had recently written a doctoral dissertation about artisanal mining, while working as part of a United Nations environmental research and technical assistance group whose aim was to address mercury pollution. Artisanal miners are the world’s largest remaining users of elemental mercury, a potent neurotoxin whose industrial use is declining in every other sector. In the course of our project, however, we also observed two new disturbing trends in mining. First, the number of artisanal miners was spiraling uncontrollably, tripling and quadrupling in lockstep with the steep rise in the price of gold after September 11, 2001. Second, many of the places we were studying were subject to increasingly tense—and frequently violent— land-use conflicts between local artisanal miners and foreign industrial mining companies. Because our remit (and funding) was limited to studying the environmental effects of mercury from artisanal mining, we had no mandate to examine these conflicts. While I had read about coexistence interventions being applied by the World Bank and other international development agencies to these conflict areas, this was my first occasion to experience them directly.
http://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/2013/the-missing-ethics-of-mining-full-text/