Vale, the Brazilian mining company responsible for two deadly dam collapses since 2015, has another dam that’s at “imminent risk of rupture,” a government audit warns.
The Xingu dam at Vale’s Alegria mine in Mariana municipality, Minas Gerais state, has been retired since 1998, but excess water in the mining waste that it’s holding back threatens to liquefy the embankment and spark a potentially disastrous collapse.
Liquefaction also caused the collapse of a Vale tailings dam in 2019 in Brumadinho municipality, also in Minas Gerais, that killed nearly 300 people; the 2015 collapse of another Vale dam, in Mariana in 2015, caused extensive pollution and is considered Brazil’s worst environmental disaster to date.
Vale has denied the risk of a collapse at the Xingu dam and says it continues to monitor the structure ahead of its decommissioning; regulators, however, say the company still hasn’t carried out requested measures to improve the structure’s safety, and have ordered an evacuation of the immediate vicinity.
This article originally appeared in Mongabay.
Featured image: Vale’s Xingu mining complex in Mariana. Image by Google.
A dam holding back mining waste from Brazilian miner Vale is at risk of collapsing, a government audit says. The same company was responsible for two tailings dam collapses since 2015 that unleashed millions of gallons of toxic sludge and killed hundreds of people in Brazil’s southeastern state of Minas Gerais.
The retired Xingu dam at Vale’s Alegria iron ore mine in Mariana — the same municipality where a Vale tailings dam collapsed in November 2015 in what’s considered Brazil’s worst environmental disaster to date — is at “serious and imminent risk of rupture by liquefaction,” according to an audit report from the Minas Gerais state labor department (SRT), cited by government news agency Agência Brasil. The SRT did not immediately reply to Mongabay’s emailed requests for comment; it also did not answer any phone calls.
In the May 20 audit report, only released last week, the SRT said the Xingu dam “does not present stability conditions.” “It is, therefore, an extremely serious situation that puts at risk workers who perform activities, access or remain on the crest, on the downstream slopes, in the flood area and in the area on the tailings upstream of the dam,” the document says.
In a statement, Vale denied the imminent risk, saying the dam “is monitored and inspected daily.” It said the structure’s conditions and safety level remain unchanged, rated level 2 on a three-point scale.
The 2015 collapse of the Fundão tailings dam belonging to Samarco, a joint venture between Vale and Anglo-Australian miner BHP Billiton, killed 19 people in the village of Bento Rodrigues, burying them in toxic mud, and flushing mining waste into rivers that affected 39 municipalities across two states. The mining waste eventually flowed more than 650 kilometers (400 miles) from its source to the Atlantic Ocean.
The district prosecutor’s office in Mariana told Mongabay that the Minas Gerais state prosecutor-general has requested the National Mining Agency (ANM) to assess the real risk of the dam rupture. “Any irregularity in the change in the classification of the structure will be evaluated after the inspection carried out by the ANM and, if necessary, with subsequent investigations,” the district prosecutor’s office said.
The ANM rated the Xingu dam’s safety at level 2 in a September 2020 assessment, after requesting Vale to improve the structure. Vale has fulfilled part of the request, but has sought a deadline extension for other repair works, without major changes in the structure, according to the ANM’s website.
In its most recent inspection, on May 5, ANM identified structural problems where no corrective measures had been implemented, according to its website. By then, the ANM considered the potential environmental impact “relevant” and the socioeconomic impact “medium,” given the concentration of residential, farming and industrial facilities located downstream of the dam.
Vale ceased dumping mining waste in the Xingu dam in 1998, but keeps workers on site to monitor the dam’s stability until it’s fully decommissioned. The decommissioning plans is in place but hasn’t been carried out yet, according to Ronilton Condessa, director of the Mariana mining workers’ union, Metabase. No timeline has been given for the decommissioning; a similar structure, the Doutor dam at Vale’s Timbopeba mine in neighboring Ouro Preto municipality, will take up to nine years.
Last week, Vale announced the suspension of train operations to the Mariana complex where its Alegria mine is located, after an evacuation order from labor auditors. The area in the immediate vicinity of the mine, known as the self-rescue zone, remains evacuated. Work at both the Timbopeba and Alegria mines has been halted.
Condessa said that because the Xingu dam is located inside the mining complex, workers continue to pass by it daily on their way to other mines that are still active.
Vale has scheduled a meeting with workers from the dam for June 16 to explain the current situation, according to Condessa. “The evacuation orders look like a preventive measure, but we still need to see a technical study in order to properly evaluate the risk,” he told Mongabay in a phone interview.
The Minas Gerais state civil defense agency said the evacuation of the self-rescue zone was ordered on a “preventive basis to protect the lives of people living downstream of the dam.”
“In collaboration with the SRT, Vale is taking measures to continue to guarantee the safety of workers, in order to resume activities,” Vale said in a June 4 statement.
A two-and-a-half-hour drive west of the Alegria mine in Mariana is the municipality of Brumadinho. This was the site in 2019 of Brazil’s deadliest mining disaster, when a tailings dam at Vale’s Córrego do Feijão iron ore mine collapsed, killing nearly 300 people. The cause of the dam’s failure was attributed to a process known as liquefaction, in which excess water weakens the dam’s embankment. This is the same risk recently identified at the Xingu dam at Vale’s Alegria mine.
Cyntia Beltrão reports from Brazil on what may be the country’s worst environmental disaster ever, at the Samarco open pit project jointly owned by Vale and BHP Billiton:
Last Thursday, November 5th, two dams containing mine tailings and waste from iron ore mining burst, burying the small historic town of Bento Rodrigues, district of Mariana, Minas Gerais state. The village, founded by miners, used to gain its sustenance from family farming and from labor at cooperatives. For many years, the people successfully resisted efforts to expel them by the all-powerful mining company Vale (NYSE: VALE, formerly Vale do Rio Doce, after the same river now affected by the disaster). Now their land is covered in mud, with the full scale of the death toll and environmental impacts still unknown.
Officially there are almost thirty dead, including small children, with several still missing. The press and the government hide the true numbers. Independent journalists say that the number of victims is much larger.
The environmental damage is devastating. The mud formed by iron ore and silica slurry spread over 410 miles. It reached one of the largest Brazilian rivers, the Rio Doce (“Sweet River”), at the center of our fifth largest watershed. The Doce River already suffers from pollution, silting of margins, cattle grazing in the basin land, and several eucalyptus plantations that drain the land. This year Southeastern Brazil, a region with a normally mild climate, endured a devastating drought. Authorities imposed water rationing on several major cities. Meanwhile, miners contaminate ground water and exploit lands rich in springs. The Doce River, once great and powerful, is now almost dry, even in its estuary. The mud of mining waste further injures the life of the river.
We do not know if the mud is contaminated by mercury and arsenic. Samarco / Vale says it isn’t, but we know that its components, iron ore and silica, will form a cement in the already dying river. This “cement” will change the riverbed permanently, covering the natural bed and artificially leveling its structure. The mud is sterile, and nothing will grow where it was deposited. A fish kill is already occuring. We do not know the full extent of impacts on river life or for those who depend on the river’s waters.
Soon the dirty mud will reach the sea, where it will cause further damage, to the important Rio Doce estuary and to the ocean.
Some resources in Portuguese to learn more and get active:
Editor’s Note: The following is a summary of the proposed copper mining site Copperwood. Like any other mining, the proposed mine will have dire impacts on the ecology, health and human rights of the area, in this case, the Porcupine mountains and Lake Superior. The following text is compiled from the website Protect the Porkies.
Protect The Porkies is a grassroots campaign dedicated to resisting the development of a metallic sulfide mine in extreme proximity to Lake Superior, Porcupine Mountains State Park, and the North Country Trail. There has never been a metallic sulfide mine which did not contaminate water; Copperwood would be the closest such mine to Lake Superior in history; Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake on the planet, representing 10% of the world’s surface freshwater.
It’s not hard to piece these facts together to see why the proposed mine is an atrocious and criminal idea. In a world which is getting hotter and drier, in which many cities must import water from hundreds of miles away, protecting freshwater is THE battle of our time.
All of the images on this piece were taken from Protect the Porkies.
Metallic sulfite mine would poison Lake Superior
Canadian company Highland Copper Inc. wants to drill under the Presque Isle River to seize minerals from directly beneath Porcupine Mountains State Park, the largest tract of mixed old growth forest remaining in the Midwest.
Unlike the White Pine North Mine (closed 1997 due to environmental concerns) which consisted of ore graded at 20% purity, Copperwood’s ore grade is estimated at only 1.5%, meaning that nearly 99% of mined material will be stored as 50+ million tons of heavy-metal laden waste rock on topography that slopes towards Lake Superior. Toxins of concern include mercury, arsenic, selenium, and lead. The data show that more than a third of tailings dams are at high risk of causing catastrophic damage to nearby communities if they crumble, and there are already multiple instances of serious failures.
Canadian company Highland Copper is a junior exploration company with zero experience opening and operating a mine, which already has a track record of violating permits and degrading wetlands. But they aren’t letting that slow them down: even though they lack key permits related to stream alterations and engineering of their tailings disposal facility, they have already begun their “summer site prep” of clearcutting and wetlands destruction.
Freshwater seas need protection
In addition to destroying 50+ acres of wetlands and forever altering the course of 5 streams, the project would be permitted to dump half a million gallons of wastewater per day into Namebinag Creek, which empties into Lake Superior. Namebinag Creek is also home to populations of Redside Dace, classified in Michigan as an Endangered Species requiring legal protection.
97% of Earth’s water is salt water and thus not potable. Of the remaining 3%, the majority is frozen in the ice caps and thus not accessible. Of what remains, Lake Superior represents a full 10% of the world’s surface freshwater.
There has never been a metallic sulfide mine which did not contaminate local water. The Chopperwood Mine would erect a tailings disposal facility holding 50+ million tons of heavy-metal laden waste-rock on topography sloping towards Lake Superior.
Even if the tailings dam holds, acid mine drainage is a certainty: sulfides will combine with water and air to create sulfuric acid — a.k.a. battery acid — which then steeps over waste-rock and river sediment to leach heavy metals into the environment.
The last old-growth forest
98% of this planet’s old growth forest have been cut. The 35,000 acres in Porcupine Mountains State Park represent the largest tract of mixed old growth remaining in the Midwest.
Let’s be clear: Porcupine Mountains State Park is not just any park. In 2022, the Porkies were ranked by users of Yelp.com as the “most beautiful State Park in America.” But company maps suggest Highland Copper seeks to drill beneath the Presque Isle River and extract minerals from directly under old-growth forest on Park property.
The mine would subject the area to heavy metal dust spewed up from hundreds of meters underground, to catch and carry on the wind for miles in all directions; twice-daily subterranean blasts which are known to disrupt the reproductive cycles of aquatic life; noise pollution and light pollution which will further impact the mating rituals and calls of wildlife. And it’s unlikely that acid mine drainage will turn around upon reaching the Park entrance, only a 15 second drive from the mine entrance road.
Clearcutting enables wildfires
Already Highland Copper has clearcut hundreds of acres of so-called “secondary” forest in preparation for the Chopperwood Mine. But there’s nothing secondary about the importance of such woods— in addition to existing for their own sake and providing homes for countless organisms, forest which is allowed to mature becomes a barrier against wildfires. As trees grow old, they develop thick fire-resistant bark and shed their lower limbs, thus creating a diverse canopy which is difficult to burn. In the dense shade below, mosses, lichens, and liverworts move in, and the ground grows into a moist sponge.
By replacing moist, shady conditions with hot dry desert with increased airflow, right in the middle of the woods, Highland Copper has greatly increased this area’s risk of wildfire. Not convinced? Consider that the Peshtigo Fire, the deadliest fire in American history, started specifically in a logging town.
At a time when wildfires are ravaging so many parts of the world, we should be doing everything we can to help our secondary forests mature, not replace them with a desert.
No more dark night skies
On the bluffs overlooking Lake Superior, the Presque Isle Campground at Porcupine Mountains State Park is one of the most popular in the Midwest. As a rustic campground, there is no electricity and no sewage dump. In just a short walk, visitors may reach three stunning waterfalls on the Presque Isle River or go fishing or swimming at the lakeshore.
Unfortunately, the Chopperwood Mine — in addition to subjecting the area to subterranean blasts, air pollution, and noise pollution — would be lit up like a casino all night long, effectively eliminating a clear view of the starry sky not just for the Presque Isle Area, but for miles around, potentially as far as Black River Harbor, another area of outstanding beauty.
In the 21st century, is there anything scarcer than a good view of the stars?
Home of wolf packs and fish
The 1500 acres encompassed by the mine site fall smack in the middle of a wolf pack’s territory, specifically the pack which travels between Black River Harbor and Presque Isle. It is one of only three wolf packs in the region.
A healthy, happy wolf pack is far scarcer than copper, and more valuable too. It is well known that large deer populations may over-browse riverbanks and bluffs around lakes. By keeping the deer population in check, wolves effectively prevent erosion— quite the opposite of Highland Copper, which is actively annihilating wetlands and rerouting streams.
The Anishinaabe Indians — also known as the Ojibwe — have fished the Presque Isle River and Lake Superior for hundreds of years and always been well-nourished. Unfortunately, fish are bio-accumulators of heavy metals, just like the kind which would be spewed from Chopperwood’s exhaust vents and leached from river sediment via acid mine drainage.
Redside Dace — an endangered species
In the 2009 biological monitoring report, populations of Redside Dace were found in both Namebinag and Unnamed Creek — two streams passing through the mine site which are planned to be rerouted. The Redside Dace is an Endangered Species in Michigan, and the Fishbeck, Carr, and Thompson report clearly states:
“Populations of Redside Dace within the Copperwood site should be protected from human-related impacts.”
Reishi provides medicine
Among the inhabitants of the ecosystem directly adjacent to the mine site is the Northern Reishi Mushroom (ganoderma tsugae). Prized for thousands of years in Chinese and Japanese medicine as “the Mushroom of Immortality,” the Reishi grows exclusively on Eastern Hemlock trees. Given that the Porkies hold the largest remaining tract of old growth Eastern Hemlocks — which have been all but eradicated in the East by the woolly adelgid — it is thus host to the largest and purest population of medicinal Reishi mushrooms in the country.
Unfortunately, like fish, mushrooms are bio-accumulators of heavy metals. One day, will mushroom foragers stop picking the Reishi for fear that a medicine has become a poison?
The last wild coastline
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was industrial sprawl. First you build a network of roads, then you build a mine, then you build parking lots for your 100 or so employees, then those employees want to live nearby so they buy up land and build houses, before you know it there’s a sewage system, an electrical grid, and a proposal to connect the Presque Isle Scenic Area to Black River Harbor via highway, right along some of the last wild coastline remaining, and though such a thing was once inconceivable, it now strikes us as perfectly reasonable, because the mine and its infrastructure have already paved the way.
You may think this scenario sounds like fear-mongering, but just look around you and the proof is everywhere: roads already press against the North Shore in Minnesota and Canada and along all the other Great Lakes. None of it happened overnight: such development unfolds not at the pace of a Hollywood action film, but at an ooze over the course of years, decades, lifetimes. Ecologists refer to this as the Shifting Baseline Syndrome. If we don’t draw a line in the sand now, soon there will be nothing left to draw a line in front of.
A temple in hell
As we moderns come to spend our time increasingly immersed in artificial environments — staring at screens and slogging through traffic — pilgrimages into the peace of Nature fulfill a crucial role: walking along the Presque Isle River, breathing deep the conifer-filtered air while listening to the hush of waterfalls— such experiences are sacred to many. Hindus, Christians, Muslims, Buddhist, atheists and animists too — all are welcome in the Universal Church of Nature.
By threatening this thriving outdoor recreation area with rock grinding, heavy metal exhaust, light pollution, industrial traffic, and acid mine drainage, Highland Copper might as well be burning a temple.
The operation would likely lead to audible rock grinding and subterranean blasts using toxic ammonium nitrate which would be felt for miles around, both on the North Country Trail and in the Presque Isle Scenic Area of the State Park, and possibly even at Black River Harbor. As with the development of Eagle Mine in Marquette County, we can expect non-stop industrial traffic on County Road 519, heavy metal-laden dust from exhaust vents which travels far from its source on the wind. Given that the Copperwood is a metallic sulfide mine, there remain concerns regarding acid mine drainage — irreversible contamination of wetlands and waterways.
Indigenous history
Nawadaha, Manido, and Manabezho— these are the three waterfalls of the Presque Isle Scenic Area, which still bear the names of Anishinaabemanitous.
Long before Michigan, long before the arrival of Europeans, the Anishinaabe fished and foraged these lands. There was a nomadic settlement at the mouth of the Presque Isle River. Later, at that same beach, the Anishinaabe met to trade with French trappers. To this day, park-goers find arrowheads and other artifacts on the shore.
What tribute do we pay to this fine history by allowing a foreign company to contaminate these waters, spew heavy metal dust on the wind, and potentially even drill beneath the River, beneath the old growth, even beneath Lake Superior?
Though the situation may seem dire, there is still time to build opposition:
Highland Copper will not decide whether or not to greenlight construction until 2024, and they are still lacking $250 million required to initiate their project. But in the meantime, they are already clearcutting forest, rerouting streams, and destroying wetlands, so there is no time to lose.
If we as a society do not draw a line in front of protecting freshwater seas and old growth forest, then it means we won’t draw a line anywhere, and that is a very scary place to be as a species. So please, join the campaign today by taking action:
Sign thepetitionand pass it on to others; in 2024, we plan to bring the petition off the Internet and into the real world by hand-delivering it to the Governor’s office.
Reach out to Michigan’s politicians; even if you are not a resident, tell them that the outdoor recreation industry in Michigan is over 10 times the size of mining, and no state which entertains such an atrocious project will receive a single dollar of your tourist money.
And remember, Protect The Porkies is not an organization— we are a movement, and everyone is invited to be a part. We won’t win by following their playbook, but by using our creativity to come up with our own.
DGR conducted its annual fundraiser on Ecology of Spirit. If you have missed it, you can view it here. You can also visit our auction for paintings, books, brownies and conversations. The auction will remain open till October 31.
Editor’s note: The shock doctrine is a concept proposed by Canadian journalist Naomi Klein and is outlined in her book, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, published in 2007. Its central proposition is that the capitalist markets take advantage of moments of tragedy or disaster, such as the pandemic, to propose or impose policies that benefit them. People’s inability to react at these times favors this strategy.
But the shock doctrine is part of a continuum. Civilization has been doing the same thing now that it has been doing for 10,000 years. Civilization traumatizes individuals, communities and cultures, then takes advantage of that trauma to grow and expand. Modern capitalism is civilization attempting to continue to function and sustain itself, while everything (eco-systems and social structures) collapse around it. People do not willingly hand over their personal power and autonomy and that of their community unless they have first been broken as a human being and built up again as a citizen. The shock will continue until we do something about the problem at the core, civilization itself. Or until civilization reaches its inevitable suicidal endgame.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
—Arundhati Roy, April 2020
Just over two years ago when lockdowns were being declared like dominoes around the world, there was a brief moment when the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to hold the potential for much-needed reflection. Could it lead to a reversal away from the profit-driven ecological and socio-economic dead end we’ve been propelling toward?
Arundhati Roy’s call to critical reflection was published in early April 2020. At the time, she was observing the early evidence, on one hand, of the devastating toll of the pandemic as a result of extraordinary inequality, the privatized health care system, and the rule of big business in the U.S., which continued to play out along lines of class and race.
She was also writing with horror at how the Modi government in India was enacting an untenable lockdown on a population of over a billion people without notice or planning, in a context of overlapping economic and political crises. While the rich and middle class could safely retreat to work from home, millions of migrant workers were forced out of work into a brutal, repressive, and even fatal long march back to their villages. And that was just the beginning.
The jarring “rupture” with normality that Roy wrote about two years ago has reinforced many “prevailing prejudices”, as she anticipated. Whether we’re talking about Amazon, the pharmaceutical industry, or mining companies, big business managed to have itself declared “essential” and profit handsomely. Meanwhile, poor and racialized people have paid the highest costs and experienced the greatest losses in the U.S., India, and many other countries around the world.
But we have also seen how people have fought back hard showing tremendous resilience in the face of greater adversity.
This is very much the case in mining-affected communities around the world, many of whom were already in David and Goliath battles before the pandemic to protect their land and water from the harms of mineral extraction. They have found no reprieve since the pandemic began.
While taking measures to protect themselves from COVID-19, these movements have refused to let their guard down as governments and corporations have taken advantage of greater social constraints to advance the mining industry.
A Pandemic Made to Fit the Mining Industry
Land defenders block mine-related traffic in Casillas, Guatemala, 2019. (Photo: NISGUA, via EarthWorks Flickr)
Since April 2020, the Institute for Policy Studies(IPS) Global Economy Project has been participating in the Coalition Against the Mining Pandemic, which came together to help document what was happening in the mining sector during the pandemic. The coalition is made up of environmental justice organizations, networks, and initiatives from North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America that work in solidarity with mining-affected communities.
The group observed early evidence that mining companies would be among the worst pandemic profiteers. In the past, after all, these corporations have sought to benefit from floods, coups, dictatorships, and other disasters to rewrite laws and push projects through while local populations are busy dealing with catastrophe and living under the gun.
In addition, the coalition especially wanted to understand what the pandemic meant for the struggles of Indigenous peoples and other mining-affected communities on the frontlines with whom we work in solidarity.
This collaborative research effort has involved local partners in 23 countries to document what it’s been like trying to protect community health from the ravages of the pandemic — while also fighting against the threat of losing their water and territory from the long-term impacts of gold, iron-ore, copper, nickel, coal, and lithium mining.
The 23 countries where we looked at cases have recorded 29 percent of the world’s known COVID cases, 43 percent of recorded COVID-related deaths, and include two of the top ten countries for the highest mortality rates (calculated by dividing the number of recorded COVID cases by the number of COVID related deaths). In order, these are Peru and Mexico. (Ecuador, where we looked at another case study, now ranks 11th.)
As expected, our recently released Latin America report No Reprieve demonstrates how COVID-19 restrictions seem to have been made to fit the mining industry. As Price Waterhouse Cooper observed in its 2021 Great Expectations report on the global mining industry, “by any important measure, mining is one of the few industries that emerged from the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic economic crisis in excellent financial and operational shape.”
Precious metal prices rose in the context of the uncertainty created by the pandemic, leading to historic profits for some companies despite lower production in 2020. Prices for base metals, such as copper, soon followed as markets opened up. This was much earlier than the lifting of social constraints, putting affected communities at an even greater disadvantage than before the pandemic in their struggles for water, land, and survival.
No Reprieve for Mining Affected Communities
The lengthy lockdowns and other public health measures that were put in place not only spelled greater socio-economic crisis than before for these communities. They also meant greater difficulty or outright bans on meeting together to discuss concerns about environmental contamination, hardship, mining projects, and the greater difficulty of dealing with government offices responsible for permitting and inspections.
Online meetings were often inadequate or unavailable. When there was no other option but to get together to protest, the risks were greater than ever.
In Brazil, as in many other countries in Latin America, mining has continued pretty much without interruption since the start of the pandemic. For over a year, the community of Aurizona in the state of Maranhão has been living without an adequate supply of drinking water since the rupture of a tailings dam at the Aurizona gold mine owned by Mineração Aurizona S.A. (MASA), a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Equinox Gold.
On March 25, 2021, at the height of the pandemic in this part of northwestern Brazil, the Lagoa do Pirocaua tailings dam overflowed, contaminating the water supplies of this community of 4,000 people. Despite company promises, the community continues to lack adequate water supplies. Meanwhile, the company obtained a legal ruling that prohibits street blockades and filed a lawsuit against five movement leaders to try to deter their organizing.
In Colombia, Indigenous Wayúu and Afro-descendant communities in the La Guajira region experienced heightened risks from the continued operation of the Cerrejón mining complex, the largest open-pit thermal coal mine in Latin America. This mine is now owned exclusively by Swiss commodities giant Glencore, which consolidated its control over the mine in January 2022 when it purchased the shareholdings of Anglo American and BHP Billiton.
This mine has already operated for over three decades and displaced dozens of communities. In September 2020, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, asked the Colombian government to at least temporarily suspend Cerrejón’s operations, pointing out that the contamination, health impacts, and lack of water the communities already faced increased the risk of death from COVID-19.
Instead, the mine continued and even accelerated operations, while communities suffered serious physical and emotional impacts from greater social confinement and loss of subsistence economic activities. The company donated food and safety equipment to improve its image, but this generated divisions and disagreements among communities that were difficult to resolve given the restrictions on meetings.
Making this situation worse, the government and companies have refused to respect a 2017 Constitutional Court decision that recognized violations of community rights to water, food, sovereignty, and health in authorizing the diversion of the Bruno Creek’s natural course to expand coal extraction. Instead, since mid 2021, Glencore and Anglo American have been suing the Colombian government under the terms of bilateral international investment agreements with Switzerland and the United Kingdom for not letting them expand the mine.
Militarized Mining
Not only did the spaces for community organizing shrink, disappear, or just get a lot harder, violence got worse in many places. In many cases, there was heavy-handed repression, heightened militarization, and ongoing legal persecution of land and environment defenders.
In Honduras, the Tocoa Municipal Committee for the Defense of the Natural and Public Commons spent nearly the entire first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic fighting for the freedom of eight water defenders who were arbitrarily detained for their peaceful opposition to an iron ore project owned by the Honduran company Los Pinares Investments.
They were only freed in February 2022, after the narcodictatorship of former President Juan Orlando Hernández lost power to the country’s first female president, Xiomara Castro. Meanwhile the company, which has ties to U.S. steel company Nucor, managed to start operations in mid 2021 without obtaining the required environmental permit, immediately putting in danger the future of the San Pedro river on which downstream communities depend.
In Mexico, a special group of public armed forces called the Mining Police was inaugurated in 2020, aimed at protecting mining facilities from mineral theft. The recruitment of troops was announced for the first time in July of that year, during an online event entitled “The reactivation of mining in the face of the new normality.” By the end of September 2020, the first 118 federal officers with military training had graduated and were deployed to guard the La Herradura gold mine owned by the Mexican company Fresnillo plc, which is listed on the London Stock Exchange and owned by Industrias Peñoles.
In contrast, no measures have been taken to lower the levels of subjugation, extortion, forced displacement, and violence against the communities that inhabit these same areas — such as the community of El Bajío, which neighbors the La Herradura mine, where the Penmont company from the same business group operated illegally until 2013.
Members of the community of El Bajío have faced violence since this time, despite receiving 67 favorable rulings declaring the land occupation agreements of the community members affected by the Mexican company Penmont (a subsidiary of Fresnillo plc) null and void. These rulings have yet to be executed and the risks for the community have intensified.
Two members of this community were brutally assassinated in April 2021. Beside their bodies a piece of cardboard was found on which 13 names of other community members involved in the resistance to the mine were written, a clear threat. The state has not provided any protection to family members either — although there are constant patrols by state police, the National Guard, and the army to intimidate the population.
Mining for Supposed Economic Recovery
At the same time, administrative processes for companies to get new permits got easier and projects moved forward. The justification was that mineral extraction would supposedly contribute to post-pandemic economic reactivation, but it’s well known that mining tends to divert attention from more sustainable economic sectors at a national level and impoverish local communities.
In Panama and Ecuador — both countries with few industrial mines in operation due to widespread rejection by the affected populations — there have also been attempts to accelerate mining expansion in the name of economic reactivation.
In Ecuador, there is widespread opposition to mining in the country due to its impacts on water, the country’s exceptional biodiversity, and the well-being of small farmer and Indigenous communities.
During his election campaign, current President Guillermo Lasso promoted “human rights and the rights of nature… and the protection of the environment with a sustainable agenda.” However, once he took office in May 2021, he showed his willingness to serve transnational mining interests.
On August 5, he issued Executive Decree No. 151, an “Action Plan for the Ecuadorian Mining Sector,” which seeks to accelerate mining in fragile ecosystems such as the Amazon and high-altitude wetlands (páramos). It gives legal certainty to mining companies by providing a favorable environment for investors, indicating explicit respect for international agreements that favor corporate interests. It likewise proposes the acceleration of environmental permits for mining projects without taking into account the socio-environmental impacts.
Similarly, on May 19, 2021, the Panamanian government presented its strategic plan to base its post-pandemic economic recovery on mining. Given the prevalence of corruption and the constant violations of environmental regulations and the Constitution by mining companies in Panama, citizens see this mining stimulus plan as the government aiming to enrich itself and its cronies.
Faced with the fallacy of national economic recovery through mining, a national campaign platform arose called the Panama Worth More Without Mining Movement (MPVMSM). This broad based movement of environmental organizations, teachers, workers, youth, small farmers, and Indigenous communities opposes mining and the renegotiation of the contract over the only operating mine in Panama, Cobre Panama owned by First Quantum Minerals, which they consider unconstitutional and argue should be canceled.
Despite evidence that upwards of 60 percent of Panamanians support this movement’s aims, the government insists on continuing to promote initiatives aimed at making way for mining expansion in the country.
Truly Essential Resilience and Resistance
Despite the conditions for peoples’ struggles having gotten harder over the last two years, the resilience and resistance of people fighting from the margins for their land, their water and their community health has persisted, often with women, Indigenous peoples, and small-scale farmers at the forefront.
From Mexico to Argentina, the communities and organizations who shared their experiences for this report have found ways to continue fighting for respect for their self-determination, community health, and their own visions of their future. While some projects moved ahead, others have not been able to overcome tireless community resistance.
Whether communities are fighting to address mining harms or standing in the way of these unwanted projects, their struggles are potent examples of the sort of reimagining and digging in for fundamental change that Arundhati Roy urged at the start of this pandemic.
Through their resistance, mutual care, traditional knowledge, and efforts toward greater food sovereignty and collective wellbeing, these communities and movements demonstrate the urgent need to shift away from a destructive model of economic development that has been forced on people around the world, based on endless extraction to serve international markets with primary materials that are turned into products for mass consumption.
They point out the vital need for a serious reckoning to address the harms that have taken place and to pull back the reins on such militarized mass destruction in order to prioritize peoples’ self-determination and more sustainable ways of living. This is what is truly essential if we hope to ensure collective health and wellbeing now and for future generations.
Jen Moore is an Associate Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Surfing YouTube, I came across an interview of Ezra Klein by Stephen Colbert. He was promoting a new book called Abundance, basically arguing that scarcity is politically-manufactured by “both sides,” and that if we get our political act together, everybody can have more. Planetary limits need not apply. I’ve often been impressed by Klein’s sharp insights on politics, yet can’t reconcile how someone so smart misses the big-picture perspectives that grab my attention.
He’s not alone: tons of sharp minds don’t seem to be at all concerned about planetary limits or metastatic modernity, which for me has been a source of perennial puzzlement.
The logical answer is that I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. Indeed, many of these folks could run cognitive/logical circles around me. And maybe that’s the end of the story. Yet it’s not the end of this post, as I try to work out what accounts for the disconnect, and (yet again) examine my own assuredness.
Imagined Basis
What is the basis of pundit-level rejection of my premise? Oh yeah: my premise is that modernity is a fleeting, patently unsustainable mode of life on Earth that will self-terminate on a historically relevant (i.e., brief) timescale—likely to convincingly crest the peak this century. Modernity can’t last.
I will reconstruct how I think an ultra-smart person might react, were I to present in conversation the premise that modernity can’t last—based on past interactions with such folks. Two branches stand out.
One branch would be the unwittingly spot-on admission of “I don’t see why not.” I could not have identified the core problem any better, and would be tempted to say: “Wow—what a courageous first step in recognizing our limited faculties. That humble confession is very big of you.” My not having the wit to prove conclusively to such folks that modernity can’t work (and I would say that no human possesses such mental powers) says very little about the complex reality of our future—operating without giving a flip as to what happens in human brains. But it’s also quite far from demonstrating convincingly how something as unsustainable as modernity—dependent on one-time exploitation of non-renewable resources—might possibly address the host of interacting elements that will contribute to its crumbling.
That branch aside, the common reply I want to spend more time on goes something like: “Just look at the past. No one could have foreseen the amazingness of today, and we ought to recognize that we are likewise ill-equipped to speculate on the future. In other words, anyone expressing your premise in the last 10,000 years would have turned out to be wrong [well, so far]. Chances, are: so are you.”
Damn. Blistering. How can one get up from that knockout? And the thing is, it’s a completely valid bit of logic. I also appreciate the intellectual humility involved. Why, then, am I so stubborn on this point? Is it because I want to be popular or rich? Then I’m even stupider than I thought, because those things are basically guaranteed to be incompatible with such a message. Is it because I crave end-times, having been dealt a bad hand and never “good at the game?” Nope: I thrived as an all-in astrophysicist and had/have a rather privileged and comfortable life that I would personally, selfishly prefer not to have disrupted. Is it out of fear of collapse? Getting warmer: that was a big early motivation—the alarming prospect of losing what I held until recently to be a glorious civilization. But at this point all I can say is that based on multiple lines of evidence I really think it’s the truth, and can’t easily or honestly argue myself out of this difficult spot. Denial, anger, bargaining, and depression don’t help us come to terms with the hard reality..
Returning to the putative response: I’ll name it as lazy. It’s superficial. It’s a shortcut, sidling up to: “Collapse hasn’t happened yet—in fact quite the opposite—and thus most likely will not.” It declines to examine the constituent pieces and arguments, falling back on a powerful and persuasive bit of logic straight out of the left brain. It has all the hallmarks: certain, crisp, abstract, decontextualized, logical, clever.
It carries the additional dual advantage of simultaneously avoiding unpleasant confrontation of a scary prospect and inviting starry-eyed wonder at magic the future might bring. No wonder it’s so magnetically attractive as a go-to response!. We’re both driven to it and attracted by it! The very smartest among us, in fact, often have the most to lose, and may therefore be among the most psychologically attached to modernity. We mustn’t forget that every human has a psychology, and is capable of impressive levels of denial for any number of reasons.
Some Metaphors
Its time for a few metaphors that help to frame my approach. I offer two related ones, because none are perfect. Together, they might work well enough for our purposes.
TAKE ONE
Imagine that someone tees up a golf ball in an indoor space full of hard objects: concrete walls and steel shelves—maybe loaded with heavy glass goblets and vases, etc. Poised to deliver a smashing blow to the ball with an over-sized driver, they ask me: “What do you think will happen if I hit this ball?” Imagining a comical movie scene where the ball makes a series of wild-ass bounces shattering priceless collectables as it goes, it might seem impossible to guess what all might or might not happen. So, I “cheat” and say: “The ball will come to rest.”
And guess what: I’m right! No matter how crazy the flight, it is guaranteed that in fairly short order, the ball will no longer be moving. I could even put a timescale on it: stopped within 10 seconds, or maybe even 5—depending on the dimensions of the room. I can say this because each collision will remove a fair bit of energy from the ball, and the smaller the room, the shorter the time between energy-sapping events.
During the middle of the experiment, it is clear that mayhem is happening, and it’s essentially impossible to predict what’s next. That’s where we are in modernity. So, yes: some intellectual humility is called for. We could not have predicted any of the particulars, after all. But one can still stand by the prediction that the ball will come to rest, much as one can say modernity will wind itself down.
TAKE TWO
The golf ball metaphor does 80% of the work, but I don’t fully embrace it because the ball is at maximum destructive capacity at the very beginning, its damage-potential decaying from the first moment. Modernity took some time to accelerate to present speed, now at a fever pitch. For this, I think of a rock tumbling down a slope.
I do a fair bit of hiking, sometimes off trail where—careful as I am—I might occasionally dislodge a rock on a steep slope. What happens next is entirely unpredictable (even if deterministic given initial conditions). Most of the time the rock just slides just a few centimeters; sometimes it will lazily tumble a few meters; or more rarely it will pick up speed and hurtle hundreds of meters down the slope in a kinetic spectacle. Kilometer scales are not entirely out of the question in some locations.
Still, for all these scenarios, I am sure of one thing: the rock will come to rest—possibly in multiple fragments. I can also put a reasonable timescale on it, mid-journey, based on its behavior to that point. I can tell if it’s picking up speed. I can evaluate if the slope is moderating or will soon come to an end. It’s not impossible to make a decent guess for how long it might go, even if unable to predict what hops, collisions, or deflections it might execute along the way.
Maybe the phrase “a rolling stone gathers no moss” can be re-interpreted as: kinetic mayhem is no basis for a healthy, relational ecology. If tumbling boulders were the normal/default state of things, mountains would not last long (or more to the point: never come into being!). Likewise, one species driving millions of others to extinction in mere centuries is not a normal, sustainable state of affairs. That $#!+ has to stop.
Modernity’s Turn
Modernity is far more complex than a tumbling rock. But one side effect of this is a multitude of facets to consider. When many of them line up to tell a similar story…well, that story becomes more compelling. I offer a few, here.
POPULATION
Global human population has been a super-exponential, in that the annual growth rate as a percentage of the total has steadily climbed through the millennia and centuries (0.04% after agriculture began, up to 2% in the 1960s). It is no shock to anyone that we may be straining (or overtaxing) what the planet can support. Indeed, the growth rate has been decreasing for the last 60 years, and the drop appears to be accelerating lately. Almost any model predicts a global peak before this century is over, and possibly as soon as the next 15–20 years. This is, of course, highly relevant to modernity. Economies will shrink and possibly collapse (being predicated on growth) as population falls from a peak. Such a turn could precipitate a whole new phase that “no one could have seen coming.” I’m looking at you, pundits!
The argument of “just look to the past” and imagining some sort of extrapolation begins to seem dubious or even outright silly in the context of a plummeting population. Let’s face it: we don’t know how it plays out. Loss of modern technological capabilities is not at all a mental stretch, even if such “muscles” are rarely exercised.
RESOURCES
Modernity hungry!. Fossil fuels have played a huge role in the dramatic acceleration of the past few centuries. We all know this is a limited-time prospect. Oil discoveries peaked over a half-century ago, so the writing is on the wall for production decline on a timescale of decades. Pretending that solar and wind will sweep in as substitutes involves a fair bit of magical thinking and ignorance of myriad practical details (back to the “I don’t see why not” response). We face an unprecedented transition as fossil fuels wane, so that the acceleration of the past is very likely to run out of steam. Even holding steady involves an unsubstantiated leap of faith—never fleshed out as to how it all could possibly work. “I don’t see why not” is about the best one can expect.
Mined materials are likewise non-renewable and being consumed at an all-time-high rate. Ore grade has fallen dramatically, so that we now must pursue increasingly marginal and deeper deposits and thus impact more land, while discharging an ever-increasing volume of mine tailings. This happened fast: most material extraction has occurred in the last century (or even 50 years). We would be foolish to imagine an extrapolation of the past or even maintaining similar levels of activity for any long duration. More realistically, these practices will be undercut by declining population and energy availability. I’ve spent plenty of time pointing out that recycling can at best stretch out the timeline, but not by orders of magnitude.
WATER/AGRICULTURE
Agricultural productivity has also steadily increased, but on the back of “mining” non-renewable resources like ground water and soils—not to mention an extraordinary dependence on finite fossil fuels. Okay: at least water and soils can renew on long timescales, but our rate of depletion far outstrips replenishment. Land turned to desert by overuse stops even trying to maintain soils, while also suppressing water replenishment by squelching rainfall. This is yet another domain where the fact that the past has involved a steady march in one direction is quite far from guaranteeing that direction as a constant of nature. Its very “success” is what hastens its failure. The simple logic of “hasn’t happened yet” blithely bypasses a lot of context sitting in plain sight.
CLIMATE CHANGE
I don’t usually stress climate change, because I view it as one symptom of a more general disease. Moreover, should we magically eliminate climate change in a blink, my assessment is hardly altered since so many other factors are contributing to the overall phenomenon of modernity’s unsustainability. I include climate change here because it seems to be the one element that has percolated to the attention of the pundit-class as a potential existential threat. It isn’t yet clear how modernity trucks on without fossil fuels. Yet, even if we were to curtail their use by 2050, the climate damage may be great enough to reverse modernity’s fortunes (actually, the most catastrophic legacy of CO2 emissions may be ocean acidification rather than climate change). Again, the “logic” of extrapolation becomes rather dubious. The faith-based assumption is that we will “technology” our way out of the crisis, which becomes perfectly straightforward if ignoring all the other factors at play. Increased materials demand to “technofix” our ills (and the associated mining, habitat destruction, pollution) puts a fly in the ointment. But most concerning to me is what we already do with energy. Answer: initiate a sixth mass extinction by running a resource-hungry, human supremacist, global market economy. Most climate change “solutions” assign top priority to maintaining the destructive juggernaut at full speed—without question.
ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE
This brings me to the ultimate peril. As large, hungry, high-maintenance mammals on this planet, we are utterly dependent on a healthy, vibrant, biodiverse ecology—in ways we can’t begin to fathom. It’s beyond our meat-brain capacity to appreciate. Long-term survival at the hands of evolution has never once required cognitive comprehension of the myriad subtle relationships necessary for a stable community of life. An amoeba, mayfly, newt, or hedgehog gets on just fine without such knowledge. What is required is fitting into the niches and interrelationships patiently worked out through the process of evolution. Guess what: in a flash, we jumped the tracks into a patently non-ecological lifestyle not vetted by evolution to be viable. It appears to be not even close.
This is not just a theoretical concern. Biologists are pretty clear that a sixth mass extinction is underway as a direct result of modernity. The dots are not particularly hard to connect. We mine and spew/dispose materials alien to the community of life into the environment. Good luck, critters! We eliminate or shatter wild space in favor of “developed” land: exterminating, eradicating, displacing, and impoverishing the life that depends on that land and its resident web of life. The struggle can take decades to resolve as populations ebb—generation after generation—on the road to inevitable failure. Even this decades-long process is effectively instant compared to the millions of years over which the intricate web was crafted.
I have pointed out a number of times that we are now down to 2.5 kg of wild land mammal mass per human on the planet. It was 80 kg per person in 1800 and 50,000 kg per person before the start of the agricultural revolution—when humans held a roughly proportionate share of mammal biomass compared to the other mammal species. In my lifetime (born 1970), the average decline in vertebrate populations has been roughly 70%. Fish, insects, birds decline at 1–2% per year, which compounds quickly. Extinction rates are now hundreds of times higher than the background, almost all of which has transpired in the last century.
Just like the golf ball in the room or the rock tumbling down the mountainside, these figures allow us to place approximate, relevant timescales on the phenomenon of ecological collapse—and that timescale is at the sub-century level. We’re watching its opening act, and the rate is alarming. The consequences, however, are easily brushed aside in ignorance. Try it yourself: mention to someone that humans can’t survive ecological collapse and—Family Feud style—I’d put my money on “I don’t see why not” being among the most frequent responses.
So, Don’t Give Me That…
I think you can see why I’m not swayed by the tidy and fully-decontextualized lazy logic of extrapolation offered by some of the smartest people. This psychologically satisfying logic can have such a powerfully persuasive pull that it short-circuits serious considerations of the counterarguments. This is especially true when the relevant subjects are uncomfortable, inconvenient, unfamiliar, and also happen to be beyond our capacity to cognitively master. Just because we can’t understand something doesn’t render it non-existent. Seeking answers from within our brains gets what it deserves: garbage in—garbage out.
We used the metaphors of a golf ball or rolling stone necessarily coming to rest. Likewise, a thrown rock will return to the ground, or a flying contraption not based on the aerodynamic principles of sustainable flight will fail to stay aloft. Modernity has no ecological context (no rich set of evolved interrelationships and co-dependencies with the rest of the community of life) and is rapidly demonstrating its unsustainable nature on many parallel, interconnected fronts. This would seem to make the default position clear: modernity will come to rest on a century-ish timescale, the initial reversal possibly becoming evident in mere decades. [Correction: I think it will likely be mostly stopped on a century timescale, but it may take millennia to fully melt into whatever mode comes next.]
Retreating to the logic of extrapolation or basic unpredictability amounts to a faith-based approach that deflects any actual analysis: a cowardly dodge. Given the multi-layer, parallel concerns all pointing to a temporary modernity, it would seem to put the burden of proof that “the unsustainable can be sustained” squarely on the collapse-deniers. The default position is that unsustainable systems fail; that non-ecological modes lack longevity; that unprecedented and extreme departures do not become the rule; that no species is capable of going-it alone. Arguing the extraordinary obverse demands extraordinary evidence, which of course is not availing itself.
When logic suggests an attractive bypass, recognize that logic is only a narrow and disconnected component of a more complete, complex reality. Most importantly, the logic of extrapolation only serves to throw up a cautionary flag, without even bothering to address the relevant dynamics. That particular flag is later recognized as a misfire once the appropriate elements are given due consideration: this time is different, because modernity is outrageously different from the larger temporal and ecological context. Pretending otherwise requires turning a spider’s-worth of blind eyes to protect a short-term, ideological, emotionally “safe” agenda. Pretend all you want: it won’t change what’s real.
