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Value of Gold Vs. the Value of Water and Food
Amazay Lake to be used as a tailings pond for gold mine - where are our values?
Date: 1/7/2009 3:21:25 PM ( 15 y ) ... viewed 3071 times
Gold is one of those things that we have placed an artificial value on: we CAN live without it.
Diamonds are another - they are unneccessary for life or even for prosperity. To a girl, best friends have more actual value than diamonds do.
It would be helpfull to the human race if gold were available to anyone who had a use for it, such as dental fillings or other health applications. Unfortunately, gold has been placed beyond the reach of people for use in practical applications due to the artificial value we have placed on gold in the financial markets, and where gold is used to stabilise and back up currency values. Gold works as a currency reserve because it is rare and the amount of gold in the world is well known and verifyable ["quantifyable"]. Gold has been priced beyond it's value for practical health applications.
Water, however, does have a practical value, even though it regularly falls from the sky. If money came from the sky like water does, it would have no value - strange world. Water's practical value comes from the fact that we cannot live without water. Clean drinking water is becoming more scarce as the human race continues it's "march of progress" in industrialisation, and as global warming changes the climate patterns and depletes glacial reserves that keep rivers flowing throughout the year.
Fish also have an obvious practical value. A lake full of large healthy fish can help keep an entire community alive for 100s or 1000s of years. Cold water trout are some of the best food in the world.
With those values in mind - practical, artificial, and currency values - it seems ridiculous to allow a gold mine to destroy an entire lake of pure clean cold perfect water, complete with a healthy underwater living biosphere with fish in it.
Further study of this particular situation makes it seem downright inhumane - "Water is Our Gold" is the banner-like chant of the native peoples of Amazay Lake. The local native people will get some temporary value in the form of a few jobs, perhaps some economic activity in the area from things such as a motel and restaurant, but compared to a lake full of clean water and healthy fish it isn't comparable, or acceptable, to sacrifice Amazay Lake so a gold mine can go ahead.
The term "sacrifice" is no stretch either - Taseko Mines is pushing to move forwards with a gold-and-copper mine near Amazay Lake, near Peace River, in British Columbia [Canada], and their proposal is to use Amazay Lake as the dumping pond for the mine tailings. There is no pretense of trying to save the lake or it's fish, it is simply being sacrificed as a convienient place to put the toxic mine tailings which will contain arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium, chromium, and other heavy metals, and other chemicals. It was simply being accepted that Amazay Lake would be dead, and in fact toxic to any birds or animals that might drink from it. It's value to the surrounding area's biosphere would be a negative one.
This is just one of the proposed gold and/or copper mines in the northwest area of B.C.; there are eight others in the works in that area, a pristine and remote natural area called the Stikine River, due to the high price of gold during this economic downturn. Markets and economies fluctuate, but the value of water and food remains the same in that we use them every day, we need them every day. Other tailings ponds would be created in the area, full of toxic heavy metals and chemicals.
Sometimes, though rarely, things work out 'in favor of the fish', so to speak. The mining corporation involved tried to trick investors into thinking things were hunky-dory, until it was found out that the concerns of the local native populations had been left out of the cost calculations. In the words of the corporate spokesman - "the social and ecological implications of proposed mines in Northwest BC" - would add $3Billion to the cost of the mine, and that sum had been left out of the original proposal that investors were given.
So, the value of a freshwater fishbearing lake finally equates to the values of a commercial mining operation, but not until someone put it into dollar values. And there is no gaurantee that the Amazay Lake mine, or some of the others, will not go ahead. The comparitive values of gold and water are not any more realistic or sensible just because one project was stalled because of the omission of some figures.
We still have a ways to go in learning the true values of our world.
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Links:
Article referanced for above post:
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/2252
"Amazay, The Film" -
http://www.tsekehnay.net/
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