PETITION: Stop Deep Sea Mining
An emerging new industry could destroy this fragile and unique deep sea environment before we truly understand its importance.
By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay
Environmental degradation can have major impacts on a community’s quality of life and a new interactive map of mountaintop mining for coal in the U.S. makes this abundantly clear: based on 21 scientific studies, the map highlights how communities near mountaintop mining have lower life expectancy, higher birth defects, worsening poverty, and are more likely to suffer from cancer, as well as heart and respiratory disease. Created by the non-profit Appalachian Voices and posted on ilovemountains.org, the map show that most communities near mountaintop removal sites are in the bottom 1 percent for overall well-being in the U.S.
Mountain top mining begins by clear-cutting forests then employing explosives to destroy mountaintops to access the coal beneath. The resulting waste is buried in nearby valleys. Hundreds of mountains in Appalachia have been destroyed by this type of industrial mining, and thousands of miles of streams impacted. Selenium, a toxic substance, has been discovered in streams fed by filled-in valleys. Once mining is done, companies “reclaim” the site by re-plating vegetation. However it is an open question whether forests, and biodiversity, will return.
A recent study found that the overall hidden environmental and health costs of coal on U.S. society reached $523 billion annually—that’s $1,698 per person in the U.S. every year.
“This is not borne by the coal industry, this is borne by us, in our taxes,” Paul Epstein the study’s lead author, told Reuters at the time. “The public cost is far greater than the cost of the coal itself. The impacts of this industry go way beyond just lighting our lights.”
In addition to impacts on local communities, coal is the most carbon-intensive fuel in the world and thus a major driver of climate change.
By Barbara Fraser / Indian Country Today
A caravan of about 700 people from Peru’s northern Cajamarca region arrived in Lima, the capital, on February 9, at the end of a nine-day journey to protest a mine they said would destroy key watersheds.
“We want the president to say that there won’t be mining at the tops of watersheds,” said Jaime Lozana Infante, 38, of the community of Huasmín, near the site of the Congas mine. Congas is a project of Yanacocha, a mining company consisting of Colorado-based Newmont Mining Corporation, Peru’s Compañía Minera Buenaventura and the International Finance Corporation.
The gold and copper mine would destroy four lakes and a high-altitude wetland at the top of three watersheds that drain toward the Amazon River. Plans call for the company to replace the lakes with reservoirs of equal or greater capacity, but small farmers in the area fear the mine will dry up the water supply for their crops and livestock.
Cajamarca, where the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro murdered the Inca chief Atahualpa and launched his conquest of the Inca Empire, is known for its cheeses and other dairy products.
The Peruvian government approved the environmental impact study for the Conga mine in late 2010 and construction was to begin in October 2011. When heavy machinery moved in, however, local communities began to protest.
President Ollanta Humala, who had been in office just three months, sent Cabinet ministers to negotiate, but residents called a regional strike and blocked highways. The government declared a state of emergency and sent some 3,000 troops and police to Cajamarca. Escalation of the conflict finally forced the entire Cabinet to resign in early December, and the mining company put its plans on hold temporarily.
Although the government agreed to order an outside review of plans for the mine, it also said the country cannot afford to halt the $4.8 billion project. Several protesters said they felt betrayed by President Ollanta Humala, who campaigned in Cajamarca on a platform of “water before gold” before he was elected in July 2011, with strong backing from voters in Cajamarca and other rural areas.
“Ollanta’s message was the one the people had hoped for,” Lozana said. “He took advantage of us. He’s not keeping his promise.”
The conflict over Conga is the latest in a series of battles pitting mining companies against rural communities – most of them indigenous – in Peru they worry that the mines will pollute rivers and dry up lakes and springs.
Of 223 conflicts registered in the country in December 2011, more than half involved environmental issues, according to the government Ombudsman’s Office. Cajamarca was the scene of seven environmental conflicts, including Conga.
This is not the first time communities have confronted mining companies in the region, where Yanacocha, the largest gold mine in South America, opened in 1993. Protests stopped a planned expansion of Yanacocha to a hill known as Quillish in 2004.
Although the Conga mine’s environmental impact study was approved in 2010, protesters said they did not have enough opportunity to question the project or give input, and their communities lacked the expertise to examine the thousands of pages of technical information in the three months allowed.
Critics say the study lacks detailed hydrological and geochemical data and underestimates the impact of the mine on rivers and wetlands.
Nick Young 26 July 2024 / Greenpeace Scientists have found a source of ‘dark oxygen’ 4,000 meters below the surface of the Pacific in the target zone for deep sea mining. The discovery could have far-reaching implications for science and the wannabe deep sea mining industry. It’s often said that we know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the deep ocean. This new discovery of dark oxygen shows how true that is, and underlines the need to stop a new deep sea mining industry from targeting its source.
What scientists mean by ‘dark oxygen’ is that – in the total darkness of the very deep ocean – around 4,000 meters below the surface of the Pacific Ocean – oxygen is being produced – in the dark.
It’s previously been thought that oxygen on Earth is produced on land and at the surface of the ocean, where sunlight makes plant photosynthesis possible.
Plants on land are the biggest producers of oxygen, but marine algae and phytoplankton also produce it. These microscopic organisms perform photosynthesis in the ocean, which covers about 70% of the Earth’s surface.
Blue-green algae – or cyanobacteria – are some of the oldest organisms on Earth and can also produce oxygen. They were among the first to do so through photosynthesis, and they also need sunlight.
The common factor in oxygen production is sunlight – until this discovery of dark oxygen showed that oxygen is also being produced in another way in the deep dark sea.
The dark oxygen discovery is being hailed as a groundbreaking scientific discovery, but it also has other implications.
Nick Owens, the director of the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) says: “The fact that we’ve got another source of oxygen on the planet other than photosynthesis has consequences and implications that are utterly profound.”
Andrew Sweetman, who was one of the SAMS scientists involved in the research, says in a video: “This research potentially sheds light on where life began on the planet. This discovery has shown that, well, maybe there was another source of oxygen a long time ago and aerobic life or life that breathes oxygen could have persisted before the rise of photosynthesis — and if it’s happening on our planet could it be happening on other planets too?”
But as well as those wider implications, the discovery has significant and immediate implications for the controversial deep sea mining industry which somewhat ironically sponsored the science.
Here’s the thing. This dark oxygen, instead of being produced by plants and sunlight, is being produced by strange potato-shaped metallic lumps found on the deep sea floor.
It turns out that these lumps – otherwise known as ‘polymetallic nodules’ – give off almost as much electricity as AA batteries! By reacting with salt water, their electrical charge produces oxygen way down there on the seabed of the deep ocean through a process known as ‘seawater electrolysis’ which splits seawater into hydrogen and oxygen.
So, these little metallic lumps, which the wannabe deep sea miners have been metaphorically calling ‘batteries in a rock’ actually turned out to be just that – and they’re producing dark oxygen that could play a critical role in the deep ocean ecology.
The discovery of metallic nodules producing dark oxygen has been a huge surprise to science which could even require a new way of thinking about how life first began on planet Earth.
But it could also be the final straw in the case against deep sea mining. It could stop the industry before they begin.
The discovery was made in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a huge flat area of the seafloor that stretches between Hawaii and Mexico, where mining companies like The Metals Company have plans to start harvesting these very same nodules that turn out to be producing all this dark oxygen.
These oxygen-producing nodules could be supporting a whole range of known and unknown deep sea lifeforms. Dark oxygen could be a critical factor in the deep sea ecosystem!
Greenpeace and others have long said that this new extractive mining industry should not be allowed to start in the very deep ocean because the life there is so little understood, and the ecosystems are fragile and potentially vital for the health of the ocean and all life on Earth.
This new discovery underlines the point.
The timing is good because world governments are meeting in Jamaica right now to decide the fate of this new mining industry. They’ll be deciding whether or not to allow deep sea miners like The Metals Company to go ahead with their plans to drop giant mining robots onto the seafloor to start harvesting these life-sustaining nodules.
Greenpeace is in Jamaica arguing strongly that deep sea mining should not be allowed to go ahead – especially now that we know the deep ocean is another source of oxygen that could be vital for the health of the ocean and all of us who depend on it.
In the climate and biodiversity crisis, we know that nature, in all its diversity, must be protected.
PETITION: Stop Deep Sea Mining
An emerging new industry could destroy this fragile and unique deep sea environment before we truly understand its importance.
Photo by Jong Marshes on Unsplash
For more information contact Deep Sea Defenders.
ELISABETH ROBSON
JUL 03, 2024
I’ve recently read three books, all of which I’m glad I read, and all of which have the same fatal flaw: they are all constructed around a faulty premise.
A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of plastic. The book describes how micro- and nanoplastics are everywhere: they are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, the food we eat, the soil, our bodies (brains, blood, lungs, placentas, fetuses, testicles; everywhere we’ve researchers have looked, they’ve found plastic), and the bodies of every living being on the planet including plants. These microplastics are leaking CO2, contributing to climate change; leaking toxics, poisoning us and all living beings who ingest these plastics; clogging our veins, our lungs, our brains.
The book’s fatal flaw? That we “need” plastic in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of plastic rather than eliminate plastic entirely.
Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of roads. The book describes the mass killing (murder?) of wildlife and humans the world’s 40 million miles of roads perpetrate on a daily basis; the habitat fragmentation, the pollution, the noise, the isolation that roads cause, no matter what is driven on them. It is an entire book about the nightmare that is roads for all living beings on the planet.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” roads in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms of roads rather than eliminate roads entirely.
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara is a book about the absolutely catastrophic impacts of mining, primarily cobalt but also copper, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The book describes in devastating detail the destitution of the lives destroyed by cobalt mining; the drudgery, slavery, pollution, health impacts, environmental ruination; the horrors that one can barely believe but are real, all to supply materials for our tech gadgets and electric vehicles.
Its fatal flaw? That we “need” this technology in order to maintain this ecocidal way of life, and so we must mitigate for the harms caused by mining rather than eliminate mining entirely.
In each case, the author has written a book describing why plastic, roads, and mining are untenable for a future of life on planet Earth. In each case, the author excuses and rationalizes the very thing he’s just written an entire book explaining why they cannot be excused; cannot be rationalized. It is truly astonishing.
Plastic
In A Poison Like No Other, Simon writes:
“Plastics aren’t going anywhere—they’re just too useful and too omnipresent. And even if a virus killed every human next week, our plastic would still decay and flush out to sea and take to the air, until one day a long time from now it will all have decomposed as far as it can go, wrapping the planet in a perpetual nanoplastic haze. But there are ways to at least thin that haze by slowing the emission of plastics of all sizes.”
In one paragraph, Simon manages to explain why any new plastic added to the plastic already in the environment is a disaster, and simultaneously suggest that we can somehow reduce the impacts by “slowing the emission” of plastics.
No. All new plastic added to the existing plastic in the world will add to the haze. Slowing the emission of plastics is better than not slowing it, but Simon’s book lays out a compelling case for why we need to entirely eliminate plastic and then he concludes that we should slow emissions of plastic, thus compounding the plastic pollution, just a bit more slowly.
This is like the people who think that by slowing CO2 emissions we can mitigate climate change. No. CO2 emissions are cumulative, like plastic in the environment is cumulative. Anything but zero emissions makes the problem worse. Slow is better than fast, but zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much plastic should we continue to make?” just like zero is the only acceptable answer to “How much CO2 is acceptable to emit from burning fossil fuels and destroying the land?”
Zero.
Simon notes that “in the grand scheme of human existence, it wasn’t that long ago that we got along just fine without plastic.” He’s so close to seeing that we could exist without plastic again! And then he ruins it by saying “There’s a path in which we rein in single-use packaging, fix the busted economics of recycling, and get a microfiber filter in every washing machine.”
Reining in single-use plastics? Get a microfiber filter on every washing machine? Sure, that’s better than nothing, but will do little in the big scheme of things. Recycling, we now know, is a farce: it is down-cycling, not recycling, and it essentially turns macroplastic into micro- and nanoplastic at incredible rates. New research shows recycling may actually be the number one source of microplastic, greater even than clothes and tires which were the number one and two sources when Simon wrote his book.
Using less plastic would be great. And the only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Simon’s book is that zero plastic is what we should be aiming for. Anything more is not acceptable.
Roads
In Crossings, Goldfarb writes:
“‘A thing is right,’ Aldo Leopold famously wrote in his call for a land ethic, ‘when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.’ By that standard roads are the wrongest things imaginable, agents of chaos that shatter biotic integrity wherever they intrude.”
Like Simon, Goldfarb is so close to seeing that roads are so wrong that we should and could eliminate them. The future will be small, local and low-tech. It has to be, because large, global and high-tech have pushed us into catastrophic ecological overshoot, are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, and are destroying the biosphere. That way of life cannot last. So the roads we’ve built as part of a large, global and high-tech way of life will soon become mostly useless.
There are 40 million miles of roads on Earth today, and as Goldfarb writes, “More than twenty-five million miles of new road lanes will be built worldwide by 2050, many through the world’s remaining intact habitats, a concrete wave that the ecologist Willam Laurence has described as an ‘infrastructure tsunami.’”
The existing roads are a catastrophe; building more roads will only compound that catastrophe.
The author writes:
“The allure of the car is so strong that it has persuaded Americans to treat forty thousand human lives as expendable each year; what chance does wildlife have?”
“A half-century ago, just 3 percent of land-dwelling mammals met their end on a road; by 2017 the toll had quadrupled. It has never been more dangerous to set paw, hoof, or scaly belly on the highway.”
“More birds die on American roads every week than were slain by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.”
How can someone write these words and conclude anything but that roads must be eliminated? And yet, somehow Goldfarb then writes that we need a “road ethic”, and waxes lyrical about a tiny number of wildlife over- and underpasses existing and planned that, yes, are better than doing nothing, but will do very little to stop the slaughter of living beings on roads, and absolutely nothing to stop the 25 million new miles of roads planned through some of the world’s last remaining intact habitats.
Cars are terrible for the environment, no matter what powers them. The roads they are driven on are terrible for the environment. Goldfarb’s book makes this crystal clear. How does he not conclude that we need to eliminate roads? It’s so obvious we must. I find this astonishing, given that it is the environment that keeps us all alive.
Humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years. Obviously we drove horse- and donkey-pulled carts on roads for millennia before cars were invented; there were far fewer roads, the roads that existed were dirt tracks rather that fossil fueled-concrete and asphalt, and those roads had far fewer impacts, just like carts have far less impact than cars. Perhaps most important, human population was far, far lower so the overall impact of the roads that existed before industrial civilization was correspondingly lower.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Goldfarb’s book is that zero new roads and dismantling existing roads is what we should be aiming for, along with a phase-out of cars and trucks. Anything else is unacceptable.
Cobalt
In Cobalt Red, Kara writes:
“Since about one-fourth of CO2 emissions are created by vehicles with internal combustion engines, the expansion of battery-powered transportation provides the only solution.”
Not only is this false, it displays a stunning lack of imagination on the part of Kara.
Again: humans have been driving cars for only about 135 years, out of our 300,000 year existence on Earth. We’ve had cobalt-containing lithium-ion batteries for only about 40 years. This ecocidal way of life is so alluring, so pervasive, so addicting that we—and Kara, specifically—simply cannot see out of the prison it is holding us in.
If we cannot even imagine a life without cars, without batteries, without technology, then we have absolutely no hope of stopping or even slowing the destruction of our only home.
Cobalt Red is primarily about the desperation of artisanal miners, adults and children, in DRC. It describes an industry that treats people as cogs in a machine and throws them away casually:
“Imagine if a mining company came to the place where you live and they kick you out. They destroy all your belongings except whatever you can carry in your own hands. Then they build a mine because there are minerals in the ground, and they keep you out with soldiers. What can you do if there is no one to help you?
‘They kicked us from our homes!’ an elderly man with patchy skin, Samy, exclaimed. ‘We lived on that land for three generations before the mining companies came. We grew vegetables and caught fish. They threw us out and now we cannot find enough food to find our families.’”
It is secondarily about the devastating environmental impacts of mining. These impacts occur whether it is men in machines or children with pickaxes and rocks in their hands doing the mining. The end result is the same: land, air, water, and natural and human communities destroyed:
“A thick cloud of fumes, grit, and ash suffocates the land. Sky and earth meet vaguely above the hills at some obscure and unattainable frontier. Villages along the road are coated with airborne debris. Children scamper between huts like balls of dust. There are no flowers to be found. No birds in the sky. No placid streams. No pleasant breezes. The ornaments of nature are gone. All color seems pale and unformed. Only the fragments of life remain. This is Lualaba Province, where cobalt is king.”
Mining for the materials to make everything from our gadgets to our cars; materials to build roads, to make plastic; materials to create the things we all take for granted every single day, is destroying the planet. The author notes:
“We would not send the children of Cupertino to scrounge for cobalt in toxic pits, so why is it permissible to send the children of the Congo?”
Here in the U.S. with our environmental laws, we don’t allow children to work in mines. But we do allow men driving massive mining machines to destroy the land that the families of nearby children have foraged on for generations; to create air pollution that nearby children will breathe; to stack or dam toxic tailings, contaminating the soil and water for eons, soil and water the children need to survive and grow up healthy.
We allow mining companies to “take” golden eagles and pygmy rabbits and other endangered and threatened species; to destroy the homes of wild beings who are just trying to raise their own children on land that holds the same materials the children in the Congo mine with their bare hands.
Kara concludes that “If major technology companies, EV manufacturers, and mining companies acknowledged that artisanal miners were an integral part of their cobalt supply chains and treated them with equal humanity as any other employee, most everything that needs to be done to resolve the calamities currently afflicting artisanal mining would be done.”
Yes, helping the artisanal miners would be better than nothing. Stopping the child trafficking, the sexual assaults, the sickness, the injuries, the penury, and the deaths is critically important. But that won’t stop the mining; that won’t stop the pollution and environmental devastation that mining causes.
The only conclusion a sane person can draw after reading Kara’s book is that zero artisanal mining is what we should be aiming for. An especially perceptive person reading his book will conclude that zero mining should be the real goal. Anything else really is unacceptable.
Connections
The faulty premise behind all three of these books is that this ecocidal way of life can and should continue. This is false. It can’t, it shouldn’t; ultimately, of course, it won’t.
Not only are these books connected by the stunning lack of understanding by their authors of the implications of their own work; they are also connected in that they describe just three of the many devastating implications of modern life. One can imagine a thousand books just like these, about every aspect of modern life we take for granted.
All three of these books are well-worth reading if you, dear reader, want to know the truth about what this ecocidal way of life is doing to us, to the natural world, to other people, and to the planet as a whole. Each of these books is absolutely devastating to read, if you truly take in what they are saying and deeply understand what we have done, and what we are doing, right now. The perversion of all that is good in the world in service to industry and consumption will wreck you to your core, if you let it—and I implore you to let it.
Why? Because only if we truly understand the implications of the horrors these books describe will we be able to make change. Real change. Not the half measures, the compromises, the ineffectual so-called “solutions” suggested by the authors of these books, but major, life-altering change that is what we need to stop the slaughter of the planet.
I will leave you with this last quote from Cobalt Red that says pretty much everything I’ve been trying to say in this essay:
“A lone girl stood atop a dome of dirt, hands on her hips, eyes cast long across the barren land where giant trees once ruled. Her gold-and-indigo sarong fluttered wildly in the wind as she surveyed the ruin of people and earth. Beyond the horizon, beyond all reason and morality, people from another world awoke and checked their smartphones. None of the artisanal miners I met in Kipushi had ever even seen one.”
Banner: Covers of the books discussed in this essay.
by Michael Beltran / Mongabay
SITIO DALICNO, Philippines — Domeng Laita, 64, stands on a mountain ledge outside his home, looking down with worry on his face. Below him stands the embankment of the San Roque dam, stretching more than a kilometer (0.6 miles) along the Agno River. In 2012, a spill from a gold mine upstream sent millions of tons of waste into the river system. With a looming increase in mining activity, Laita says he dreads a repeat of the incident.
Laita looks back at his home, casting another shrug then grinding his teeth. More mining means the old tunnels under his house will likely deepen. He tries not to think about the ground swallowing up his entire family.
“There will be digging underneath. My house could fall into the softened ground. When the mining starts again, there’s no telling how bad it will hurt the land,” he says, walking along the mountain ridge.
It wouldn’t be the first time that a mining disaster hit the town. Laita lives in Sitio Dalicno, part of Ampucao village inside the municipality of Itogon in Benguet province, in the northern Philippines. Dubbed a “gold haven” for its massive deposits of the precious metal, the region has drawn miners to the mountains for centuries.
The town is part of the northern Cordillera range in the Philippines, known for its resource-rich mountains and the Igorot, the region’s majority Indigenous population.
Laita, like most Dalicno residents, has been a small-scale miner all his life, using hand tools to dig small tunnels along the slopes of the mountain and extract ore. These methods have supported his family’s modest life along the village slopes. And like many of his neighbors, Laita says he feels powerless to stop the government from brokering new industrial mining permits on Indigenous soil.
In 2023, the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP) concluded talks with Itogon locals to obtain their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), a requirement for state agencies to allow mining operations on ancestral lands.
These talks first began in 2012 when Itogon-Suyoc Resources Inc. (ISRI), one of the Philippines’ oldest mining firms, initiated its application for production sharing agreement, or APSA 103, to mine 581 hectares (1,426 acres) of Itogon land covering nearly the whole of Dalicno.
If finalized, the agreement would allow ISRI access to 22 million tons of gold-bearing ore for the next 25 years.
Talks proceeded haltingly, gaining momentum in 2018 with a series of community consultations.
Itogon communities initially rejected APSA 103 in 2022. ISRI responded with a motion for reconsideration early in 2023, entailing another round of consultations.
In September 2023, the company finalized an agreement with Indigenous representatives and the NCIP. However, many in Dalicno, where most of ISRI’s operations will take place, question the FPIC process, alleging it was railroaded in ISRI’s favor — a claim both ISRI and the local NCIP branch reject.
To approve APSA 103, the Philippines’ Department of Environment and Natural Resources requires a final signoff from the NCIP called a certification precondition. While this is pending, Dalicno residents are pressing the government to scrap the project altogether.
On the doors of many of Dalicno’s cliffside homes hang signs saying “No to APSA! Save our water sources, built-up areas, people, future!” On the highway to Dalicno hang hand-painted banners that read “Save Dalicno! No to APSA!”
“Itogon has seen so many lapses with mining, we don’t trust the companies,” says Allan Sabaiano, head of the Dalicno Indigenous Peoples Organization (DIPO), formed in January this year with the goal of overturning the initial agreement. ”They’ve compromised our water sources, and ISRI is coming back to take the rest. They did it by ignoring the voice of Dalicno’s people.”
Fearing the loss of drinkable water from a nearby spring, restricted access to the designated mining areas, and the continued plunder of their ancestral resources, DIPO has been lobbying to cancel APSA 103.
“So many ‘good-intentioned’ companies have mined here,” Dalicno elder Cristeta Caytap tells Mongabay. “But where are the schools and the hospitals? Yes they’ve given some financial assistance on occasion, but we remain underdeveloped while they line their pockets with gold. And now here they come again.”
Eric Andal, ISRI’s resident manager, says the no-mining zones, including residential areas, will be off-limits to the company’s operations. While conceding that large-scale mining has caused some environmental damage, Andal tells Mongabay that “we mitigate our impacts.”
If anything, he adds, it’s the community-driven “small-scale mining which has more of a degrading impact, because it is unregulated with so many working that way,” He says, “They themselves mine underneath their houses. If something collapses, it’s their doing.”
In September 2023, weeks after the agreement was signed, DIPO filed a petition at the NCIP’s regional office to nullify it, citing irregularities in the consultation process.
According to DIPO, most residents were kept in the dark about the motion. Elder Juanito Erciba, who represented Dalicno at most FPIC talks up until 2022, says he was one of them. “When we said ‘No to APSA’ in 2022, I thought that was the end of it. I never knew about any motion for reconsideration. I just found out there was a signed agreement that nobody informed me about,” Erciba says.
He adds that Jimmy Lumbag, the man who suddenly replaced him, was never affirmed through a community decision, thereby making his participation in the FPIC illegitimate.
“It hurts, upsets my stomach. Is it because I’m just a poor man that I was overlooked? But the community appointed me,” Erciba says.
In January 2024, the NCIP dismissed the DIPO petition, deeming it without merit.
According to NCIP community development officer Abeline Cirilo, consensus was achieved with the cooperation of the municipal Indigenous group Itogon Indigenous People’s Organization (IIPO). IIPO, which unlike DIPO is recognized by the NCIP, represented the entire municipality when it came to allowing ISRI entry. The matter was then put to a vote by secret ballot, Cirilo says.
“The outcome registered a yes to the operations while declaring the Dalicno homes and water source a ‘no-mining zone,’” he says.
Rosita Bargaso, the IIPO chair, hails from Itogon’s Gumatdang village, not among the localities that would be directly affected by APSA 103. She refutes DIPO’s claims, telling Mongabay that Dalicno elders were informed but uninterested in the latter part of the consensus building. She adds that they suddenly protested after the agreement was already signed.
Bargaso says Dalicno elders like Erciba oppose APSA 103 because of their “self-interest.” She says the proposed operations would help all of Itogon: “ISRI will permit them to gold mine on its site, [and offer] a chance to work for the company and access to company-owned water sources. The problem is they want all of it for themselves.”
In September 2023, IIPO released a resolution to support APSA 103 and “deny the allegations of alleged irregularities in the conduct of the FPIC.”
Andal seconds this assertion, dismissing DIPO as a “small group making a lot of noise to appear like there are many.” He adds that the support it has generated is because it has reached out to “leftist groups.”
“It was a desperate move on their part,” Andal says. “They can’t convince others anymore so they called on outsiders to help.”
Cirilo also says community voices weren’t ignored. When asked about DIPO’s allegations, including the unceremonious replacement of Erciba, he says that “if that did happen, hopefully it won’t affect the consent given through the voting. We can correct the names on the [agreement], but it cannot undo the outcome.”
DIPO head Sabaiano and many other residents say Dalicno was left out of the vote, rejecting the idea that the outcome represented a “consensus.” He also says IIPO failed Dalicno by “bypassing and excluding its people.”
“Neither the document nor the company has told us what kind of method ISRI will use. They could be ready to crack open the mountain,” he says.
Caytap also voiced her distrust over the “no-mining zone” disclaimer, saying underground digging is usually goes unchecked, causing irreparable and untold damage despite the surface looking untouched. “Mining affects everything,” she says, adding she expecting the tailings to eventually contaminate their spring water.
DIPO has since appealed to the NCIP’s central office, which is currently reviewing the matter.
Meanwhile, the regional office of the environment department’s Mines and Geosciences Bureau confirmed to Mongabay that approval for APSA 103 is on hold pending issuance of a certification precondition from the NCIP. The document is issued when a review by the central office has judged the process of acquiring community consent has complied with the proper guidelines.
So far, the NCIP’s central office has rejected the report its local branch submitted on the FPIC process for the mine because it lacks photographs, minutes, or attendance sheets proving that community assemblies, a key component of FPIC consultations, actually took place.
“We lacked the necessary documentation,” Cirilo says. “We did conduct two assemblies, but there were no pictures, an incomplete report, and we have yet to submit it.”
If that means a delay to issuing the certification precondition, Cirilo says the environment department could grant a one-year special gold mining permit, which only needs approval from municipal officials, forgoing Indigenous consent.
Large-scale mining here began during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines, with the first colonial mine opening in 1903. Since then, firms like ISRI have followed, amassing free patents and leases that continue today.
Lulu Gimenez, a seasoned Itogon community organizer and historian, has worked with groups like the Mining Communities Development Center and the Cordillera People’s Alliance. She says complaints against mines have piled up over the past century. “Communities complained of erosion, ground subsidence, and worsening conditions of water supply, but mining companies appeased them with monetary compensation for poisoned cattle.”
In the 1990s, the tensions erupted, with Itogon locals mounting barricades against the intrusion of heavy mining machinery.
Activists scored a big win against Australian mining firm Anvil in 2007. Anvil had struck a $2.12 million deal with ISRI for its mining rights, and planned to bore 20 holes, each 100 meters (330 feet) deep, for extraction. Locals protested, arguing that Anvil would puncture and drain a water table beneath a vein of ore, and successfully stopped the project.
Itogon residents cite the same fears about ISRI’s latest prospects.
More recent disasters attributed by Itogon locals to mining-related activity have also refreshed long-standing concerns about mining safety. In 2015, a sinkhole swallowed up seven houses in the Itogon village of Virac, forcing the evacuation of 170 families. Then, in 2018, a landslide in Ucab village claimed the lives of 82 miners living in bunkhouses on land controlled by mining firms.
In 2015, APEX Mining Company, owned by the Philippines’ second-richest individual, Enrique Razon, acquired ISRI. In February this year, a landslide in an APEX mining concession the southern province of Davao de Oro province killed nearly 100 people and displaced thousands.
“Corporations have extracted too many minerals and profit from Itogon,” Gimenez says. “The destruction has been going on for over a century. It’s time they leave Itogon alone, let the land heal and let the people redevelop the resources.”
According to data from the Mines and Geosciences Bureau, Benguet province, where Itogon is located, is one of the most intensively mined areas in the Cordillera region. Fourteen of 30 APSAs in the region are in Benguet, as are seven out of the 11 approved mineral-sharing agreements.
As far as the mining bureau is concerned, ISRI has an impeccable record. In its 2022 Compliance Scorecard, used to measure how companies abide by safety, health, environmental and social development guidelines, ISRI notched a 94.35% rating.
“We see no problem, insofar as their compliance as a company,” says Alfredo Genetiano, chief engineer at the bureau. “The company conforms to our standards and hence we’ve given them a passing rate.”
The bureau lauded ISRI for its faithfulness to the Big Brother-Small Brother (BBSB) government initiative, where mining companies are obligated to allocate 1.5% of their expenses to community development and employ locals as contract miners. APEX told Mongabay that its BBSB commitment is aimed at reducing illegal, unsafe and unregulated small-scale mining.
ISRI also gave an additional 10 million pesos ($173,000) in goodwill funds to the communities upon the signing of the FPIC agreement last September.
However, Caytap remains skeptical, saying the cons severely outweigh the pros. “It limits the number of people who can mine,” she says. “Here, we go by traditional rules. Young ones, the elderly, anyone can work. And anyone with a bit more is obliged to share what they collect with the others, especially when times are tough. That’s how we’ve survived.”
Under the BBSB system, contract miners are hired in groups for short periods of time, and paid according to how much ore they extract, meaning earnings are highly variable.
ISRI’s Andal, who is also vice president for geology and exploration at APEX Mining, says their BBSB employment arrangements worked well for them in Davao, in the southern Philippines, and they’ve already replicated it with some 400 Itogon contract miners. Should APSA 103 be approved, he says, they could take on around 400 more locals.
While private operators shoulder all of their own costs, under BBSB, Andal says, contract miners only need to pay for their own food. “We provide the tools and buy the ore they extract,” he says.
Working eight-hour shifts, a group of around 20 contract gold miners can make up to 600,000 pesos ($10,400) a month if they’re productive, Andal says. Split evenly, that works out to 1,363 pesos ($23.60) per person per day. Andal says even less productive miners could make about 454 pesos ($7.90) a day, or slightly more than the daily minimum wage for the Cordillera region, which is 430 pesos ($7.45).
Local observers, however, question the touted benefits of BBSB and put the numbers much lower.
Jestone Dela Cruz has worked as a security guard at the Benguet Corporation, the oldest mining company in the Philippines, for nearly a decade, where he says he sees miners come and go, remaining poor. “A group of eight will probably get paid around 20,000 pesos [$347], that’s less than 3,000 pesos [$52] a month,” Dela Cruz says.
Sabaiano, who’s worked on ISRI sites in the past, also says the BBSB offer affords a typically low rate, with some gold miners taking home 7,000 pesos ($121) for two months’ worth of ore.
“How’s one supposed to survive like that? Plus other expenses like food and transportation are shouldered by the workers,” he says.
He also questions if the employment opportunities are even a good thing to begin with. ISRI will gain control over hundreds of hectares of mining land while employing fewer than 1,000 Itogon locals. Dalicno alone has a voting population of more than 2,000.
Caytap says she blames the mining firms for holding back the region’s economic development. “Our land is literally filled with gold. The country has first-class municipalities, we might have exceeded that without the mining firms. But somehow, we are left collecting money to fix our roads,” she says.
She adds, however, that she takes heart in the traditions and community spirit that sustain Dalicno and keep the memory of its history and struggle alive.
Local customs foster the collective. Everyday mining is a community act for young and old. During weddings or funerals, extraction is strictly prohibited out of respect for the family. When times are tough, each makes an offering to the deities and fairies to appease them.
For the first time in a long time, APSA 103 threatens to divide the commonly united Dalicno. But Caytap says she hasn’t lost faith, that in times of loss, their traditions beckon stronger. “We band together,” she says.
Photo by Hitoshi Namura on Unsplash