Pages

Friday, November 4, 2016

How Colombia's Failed Peace Treaty Could Wreak Havoc on Its Diversity-Rich Ecosystems

Because it is not regulated, illegal mining is highly polluting, Sanchez told me, leaving waterways laced with the mercury and other chemicals used to separate the gold from the rock. “The environmental destruction wrought by these machines is starkly evident—desert-like riverside landscapes and pools of mercury and cyanide used in processing gold,” wrote Nadja Drost, a Bogotá-based journalist who has investigated gold mining and armed gangs in Colombia, in 2011. (In Peru, mercury produced by the illegal gold mining industry led to a large-scale health emergency, with more than 40 percent of villagers in the Madre de Dios region sickened by heavy metal poisoning.) In 2012, the FARC's profits from gold mining surpassed those of the drug trade.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-colombias-failed-peace-treaty-could-wreak-havoc-diverse-ecosystems-180960983/?no-ist

No comments:

Post a Comment