“The footprint [of gold-mining] is much bigger than just the area of forest that’s lost,” Aide adds. To get at gold in the lowlands, the forest is razed to make way for mining pits, roadways, and miner settlements. Miners then blast away the surface soil, with what is essentially a big fire hose, and process the run-off with harsh chemicals to extract gold from the slurry.
“A lot of this is happening around or within protected areas in the tropical lowland forest,” Aide says. And those chemicals spread far beyond the mining sites through waterways and the air, polluting one of the world's most biologically rich regions. It takes much longer for a forest to regenerate after mining activities than it would from other anthropogenic uses.
http://www.psmag.com/nature-and-technology/gold-mining-wiping-out-south-american-forests
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