This topic is intended to be a general entry on the subject of Mining and Water. It is a wiki. Anyone here with an account can edit it or participate by making comments below
Digging up the soil to extract and transform matter is a very old human activity, with several different practices that have been added to it over the millennia.
The Ngwenya mine is located on the north-western border of Eswatini.
The Ngwenya deposits were mined at least 42,000 years Before Present (BP) for red haematite and specularite (sparkling ore) [1].
The Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Hebrews and Romans all knew how to extract lead in order to colour and enamel ceramics, weight fish hooks, seal amphorae, produce make-up and kohl and produce everyday objects (between 4,000 and 2,000 BP).
The example of lead
Lead emerged in antiquity with the Greeks and Romans, then in industry / industrial ‘revolution’.
Lead footprints in environnement ‘emerged’ with the Greeks and Romans in Antiquity. Then following Industrial Revolution:
- Colossal contribution with coal mining and the industrial revolution
- Used as an additive in petrol
- Still present in excess far too often in drinking water
- Not the last we’ll hear of it…
Lead production in tonnes per year, traces measured :
- 5,000 years ago: 10⁰ tonnes per year
- today more than 10⁶
In Greenland ice measurements, there is a peak 2000 years ago. Before this peak, 05.5 picograms per gram of ice; then 2000 years ago: 3.5 picograms per gram, the 2000s: 170 picograms per gram, and the concentration explosion begins in ~ 1860 [2].
Over the last few years, the scandal surrounding the city of Flint and lead poisoning (USA), Galamsey in Ghana, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement in Pakistan and in many other parts of the world has shown that the links between soil extraction activities, mining and water quality and access are very closely linked.
Mining is also an anthropogenic source of pollutants[3] and climates changes. This accelerates other forms of so-called non-anthropogenic / ‘natural’ pollution.
This situation and the configurations that have dramatic consequences are not exclusive to lead, but are a fact of life for all mining activities. Activities that are a pillar of the alliance between capitalism and colonialism.
Just to let you know, we’re walking on a cheese party driven by colons and related cultures, here’s an illustration from known data referenced in OpenStreetMap (OSM)
code source
Summary
/*
This has been generated by the overpass-turbo wizard.
The original search was:
“quarry”
*/
[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
// query part for: “quarry”
way"landuse"=“quarry”;
relation"landuse"=“quarry”;
);
// style
{{style:
node, way, relation {
text: quarry;
}
{ color:red; fill-color:red; }
}}
// print results
out body;
;
out skel qt;
4,000 years ago, the ancient Egyptian empire would have used the camp form for displaced populations, in particular to provide a work force for extracting stone for construction [4], with some groups from on what is said today to be the current territory of Lebanon, Israel and Sinai.
Colonialism plays a role in the over-exploitation of natural resources[5] [6].
The division and subsequent colonization of the African territories were efforts of European nations to intensify European imperialism [7].
Mining activities are linked to human rights violations in a global mining rush
According to the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC) 2024 [8], the mining industry is responsible for the highest number of attacks on human rights defenders, while the Environmental Justice Atlas reports that it is the main cause of socio-environmental conflict in the world [9].
in 16th-century geological theories pervaded Enlightenment debates over mining reform [10].
Global silver trade between the Americas, Europe, and China from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries was a spillover of the Columbian exchange.
History of coal mining was only the continuum of that with a ‘technical optimisation of extraction linked to colonialism with capitalism on a large scale and intensity’.
In the 3rd millennium BC, during the Uruk period, writing appeared, linked to the emergence of an economy in which writing was used to map a territory on blocks of stone extracted from the ground, to monitor a population, to count the number of livestock and trade, and to create debts… To sabotage this, the tablet was broken and the accounts reset to zero.
There are accounts of cases where mineworkers, particularly in South America, go so far as to physically sabotage their own bodies, in what is perhaps the best example of the assimilation of the human by the machine, with the miner seeing himself as property owned by the company.
In this sense, the ‘’shattering‘’ of the self could be understood as a way of regaining lost autonomy and, ultimately, one’s own qualities as a human being, ‘’demachinised‘’ [11].
In the midst of unbridled capitalism and colonialism, we have gone from the idea of extracting minerals from Space to the use of micro-organisms to ‘improve’ mining in the 90s [12], also known as biomining, which the EU funded to the tune of 11 and a half million euros in 2004-2008 [13].
Mines, whether open-cast or underground, are also water receptacles and/or ‘new’ passages for water flows. As a result, components are carried into the water cycles, as in the case of the Grand Canyon uranium mine, which is a major source of pollution [14].
There are far more so-called abandoned mines than active ones, and they are a real disaster for the waterways [15] [16].
An estimated 23 million people live on floodplains affected by potentially dangerous concentrations of toxic waste derived from past and present metal mining activity.
[…]
Worldwide, there are recorded 22,609 active and 159,735 abandoned mines, 11,587 TSFs [tailings storage facilities] and a further 257 reported TDFs [tailings dam failures] (Fig. 1). Metal mining has affected some 164,400 km2 of flood-plains (112,400 km2 from inactive mines and 52,000 km2 from active mines), and 480,700 km of river channels (active, 114,000 km; inactive, 365,200 km) are affected by mining.Impacts of metal mining on river systems: a global assessment
In 2024, Impacts for half of the world’s mining areas are undocumented.
Mining and the invisible
The mining industry uses complex, time-consuming processes that consume a lot of water and energy, and generate considerable quantities of waste. In fact, it is the industry that produces the most waste of all.
Although the extraction phase can sometimes cause pollution that has been reported and studied, the phase of a mining project that consumes the most is not mining (whether underground or open-pit) but ore processing, which alone accounts for more than 2/3 of a mining site’s water consumption and more than 80% of its electricity consumption.
This specificity of the mining industry leads to chain reactions: the mining waste generated has a major environmental impact, affecting all environments (water, air, soil), and this environmental degradation and the contamination of people’s living environments have serious health and social consequences.
A wide range of initiatives are springing up all over the world
[There’s a lot missing here! − To be Done!]
On 18 August 2024, in Argentina, Mexico, Portugal, France, Spain, Serbia and Germany, thousands of people rallied against mining projects threatening to destroy the livelihoods of territories around the world.
Now some are arguing that direct actions cannot bring about social change, because such change is impossible. Direct actions do not rely on the people in power, be it politicians or mainstream media, to bring about social change[17].
and this is not something new − To be continued
[Mapping Mines in Basque country]
Notes and references
C Boutron, K Rosman, C Barbante, M Bolshov, F Adams, S Hong, C Ferrari. 2004. L’archivage des activités humaines par les neiges et glaces polaires : le cas du plomb. Comptes Rendus Géosciences 336:846-867 ↩︎
Bioassays, Advanced Methods and Applications. p.24. 1st Edition - October 19, 2017. Editors: Donat Hader, Gilmar Erzinger. ISBN: 9780128118610 ↩︎
PATTON, Walter Melville, (1903), Ancient Egypt And Syria. Bibliotheca Sacra 1903-01: Vol 60 Iss 237 ↩︎
Earth Day: Colonialism’s role in the overexploitation of natural resources Earth Day: Colonialism’s role in the overexploitation of natural resources ↩︎
Antonin Plarier , « Mines and the Environment in the Colonial Context », Encyclopédie d’histoire numérique de l’Europe [online], ISSN 2677-6588, published on 05/03/24 , consulted on 17/10/2024. Permalink : Mines and the Environment in the Colonial Context | EHNE ↩︎
Harvard. Youe, C. (2010). Mining Capital and Colonialism in Africa. Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines, 44(1), 179–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/00083968.2010.9707564 ↩︎
archive https://archive.is/VgMsN ↩︎
The environmental justice atlas has documented over 4,000 social environmental conflicts around the world. It is a collection of stories of communities struggling for environmental justice. EJAtlas is housed at ICTA-UAB https://ejatlas.org/ ↩︎
Scott, Heidi V… “Mining, geological imaginations, and the politics of subterranean knowledge in the colonial Andes.” Geoforum (2020): n. pag. ↩︎
Rafael Simões Lasevitz, « L’ethnographie et les mines », Revue d’anthropologie des connaissances [En ligne], 11-3 | 2017, mis en ligne le 01 septembre 2017, consulté le 17 octobre 2024. URL : L’ethnographie et les mines ; DOI : L’ethnographie et les mines ↩︎
Rawlings, D. E. & Johnson, D. B. (editors) (2007). Biomining.
Heidelberg: Springer. See also The microbiology of biomining: development and
optimization of mineral-oxidizing microbial consortia Douglas E. Rawlings and D. Barrie Johnson DOI 10.1099/mic.0.2006/001206-0 ↩︎BIOMINE Grant agreement ID: 500329 Adding the 'bio' to metal extraction | BIOMINE Project | Results in brief | FP6 | CORDIS | European Commission ↩︎
Flooding at Uranium Mine Near Grand Canyon Tops 66 Million Gallons Flooding at Uranium Mine Near Grand Canyon Tops 66 Million Gallons | Grand Canyon Trust ↩︎
Shingo Tomiyama, Toshifumi Igarashi, The potential threat of mine drainage to groundwater resources, Current Opinion in Environmental Science & Health, Volume 27, 2022, 100347, ISSN 2468-5844, Redirecting. ↩︎
Liu Y, Ma G, Han Y, Wang Y, Tang C, Tian N, Tang X, Jiang L, Zuo H, Zhang Y, et al. Assessment of the Impact of Abandoned Mine Water on Groundwater Environment. Water. 2023; 15(14):2649. Assessment of the Impact of Abandoned Mine Water on Groundwater Environment ↩︎
Verdonschot, C. P. (2024). The sense of direct action. Constellations, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12766 ↩︎