WORLD WATCH •

Vision for a Sustainable World

The Hidden Shame of the

Global Industrial Economy
by Ed Ayres

Excerpted from the January/February 2004 WORLD WATCH magazine

© 2003 Worldwatch Institute

For more information about Worldwatch Institute and its programs

and publications, please visit our website at www.worldwatch.org
 The Hidden Shame
of the Global
Industrial Economy
Conquistadors In the 16th cen-
tury, Hernando
Cortez sailed to Mexico seeking gold for the Spanish
empire. He found a lot of it, and seized it without com-
punction, killing any Aztecs who stood in his way.
Today, that kind of plunder may seem antiquated—
abhorred by the community of nations. Of course, we
still suffer the depredations of various transnational
criminal cartels and mafias. But those are the exceptions,
the outlaws. Today, no self-respecting nation or cor-
poration would engage in the kind of brutal decimation
of a whole culture, simply to seize its treasure, that
Cortez did. Or would it?
In fact, the plundering of precious metals and other
assets is far more prevalent today than in centuries past,
DEATH BY SILTATION
Dying forest downstream from the
Ok Tedi mine in Papua New Guinea.
Photo courtesy Mineral Policy Center
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20 WORLD•WATCH January/February 2004
by Ed Ayres
and on a larger scale. Now it’s not just Spain and a few
other military powers seeking global dominance, but
scores of nations seeking cell phones and teak furniture,
that are seizing materials from native cultures—some
of these materials in quantities that the conquistadors
could never have imagined. Now it’s not just silver
and gold, but coltan (for those cell phones), copper, tita-
nium, bauxite, uranium, cobalt, oil, mahogany, and
teak. And now, in place of the extinguished Aztecs
and other now decimated cultures, it’s hundreds of still
surviving cultures that are being overrun, in perhaps a
hundred countries. And most significantly, while the
looting is still done by invaders from across the oceans,
it is often sanctioned and facilitated by the victimized
peoples’ own national governments.
Where do the raw materials to build our
paneled offices, airplanes, and cell phones
come from? Maybe you really don’t want to know.
A lot of them come from plunder, of a kind
we’d like to think came to an end long ago.
But while the plunder is greater now, it is in some
respects less openly pursued and less visible than it would
have been for Cortez, had the technology to observe
it been available in his day. The conquistadors would
likely have reveled in seeing their exploits shown on TV.
Today such publicity is avoided, for compelling reasons:
First, plunder usually entails invasion, and in the cen-
turies since Cortez the world’s nations have moved
toward nearly unanimous condemnation of unpro-
voked invasion—as reflected in their widely shared
shock at the U.S. invasion of Iraq. There has been par-
allel progress in recognizing the wrongness of enslav-
ing other people or simply killing them for their
property. There’s an evolving appreciation of human
diversity, and of the idea of a global (as opposed to
European, or nationalist) community. Yet the incentives
for seizing the wealth of others are as economically irre-
sistible today as they ever have been, and the means of
doing so are now far more widely available. So the
seizing continues, but not necessarily by military assault.
That’s not to say there aren’t still places where the job
is done with outright killing, as the following pages will
detail. In Indonesia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria, there
have been cases in which people who opposed extrac-
tive operations on their land were given Cortez-style
removals from the discussion. But where the scrutiny
of the global media is present, the means are more
indirect, and appear to be accidental. People living
near uranium mines that have left piles of radioactive
waste on their land die of cancer in unusual numbers,
January/February 2004 WORLD•WATCH 21

and their children have unusual numbers of birth
defects. Indians whose land has been taken over by oil-
drilling operations are slowly poisoned by petrochem-
ical contamination of their water and soil. Those living
downstream from large gold mines find their drinking
water laced with cyanide. Food sources are destroyed,
as are sacred places—and people die of spiritual, as
well as physical, deprivation. Those kinds of dying
don’t make the evening news.
Second, the plunder is less visible now because it
rarely need be witnessed by the people who end up
with the wealth—the major purchasers of gasoline or
gold chains or tickets to fly on aluminum-bodied
planes. In gold rush days, the lucky miner who found
a nice nugget could buy a fancy watch. In the mod-
ern economy, the man with the Rolex has likely
never been anywhere near a gold mine. The big
extractive industries are far from the urban centers
where most of the affluent live. In poorer countries
from which much of the world’s mineral and forest
wealth is taken, the extractive operations are often in
remote jungles or subsistence farming regions—
homelands to people who are largely left out of
✦
22 WORLD•WATCH January/February 2004
©Scott S. Warren
the global dialogue and trade.
Finally, there is the unspoken disincentive of the
world’s media giants to expose the exploitative nature
of the industries that provide the raw materials of the
economy that pays their way. Nearly all media, whether
print or electronic, are funded by advertising for con-
sumer goods that too often originate with raw materi-
als largely taken from indigenous land or from ostensibly
protected parkland. It would perhaps be unfair to say
the media are part of a conspiracy of silence, because
in all likelihood most media executives rarely stop to
think about what fuels the economy that allows them
to profit. But it’s fair to suggest that there’s a reluctance
to undermine the foundations of the economy on
which their whole business rests.
Not all extractive industries operate in the shad-
ows. Many are honest businesses, run by people who are
attentive to the human and environmental impacts of
their operations. But those businesses are far too few. By
some estimates, for example, some 80 percent of the log-
ging done in Indonesia—one of the largest producers
of wood in the world—is illegal. Some of the largest
mines in the world, dumping thousands of tons of
deadly poisons into their surroundings each day, are
operating without the consent of the people whose
land they have taken over.
Big Footprints Mining and
logging opera-
tions—the “extractive industries”—aren’t just small
pin-pricks in the Earth’s skin, though they may appear
that way on maps. Apologists may think of them as small
holes discreetly drilled in large territories, for which small
compensations to the impoverished inhabitants of those
territories may be sufficient. But in fact, extraction has
far-reaching impacts and costs. Because nature is not
static but involves continuous movement of wind,
water, and wildlife, contaminants released by mines
can cause Pandora-like destruction.
One of the most alarming forms of contamination
is that of heap-leach gold mining, a modern technique
that involves pouring rivers of cyanide on huge piles of
low-grade ore to extract the gold. Cyanide is extremely
©Scott S. Warren
poisonous: a teaspoonful containing a 2-percent cyanide
solution can kill an adult. In February 2000, a dam
holding heap-leach waste at a gold mine in Romania—
the Baia Mare gold mine owned by an Australian com-
pany, Esmeralda Exploration—broke and dumped 22
million gallons of cyanide into the Tisza River. The poi-
son flowed more than 500 kilometers downstream into
Hungary and Serbia, wreaking what some called the
worst environmental disaster since the Chornobyl
nuclear explosion in 1986. Unfortunately, this event
could not be written off as the last gasp of an outmoded
technology. Heap-leach gold mining is on the increase.
In Peru, the Yanacocha gold mine—second largest in
the world—sits atop the South American continental
divide, from which any similar breech would run all the
way to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. And in
Tanzania, the Geita mine has just been sited on the
Nyamelembo River, which drains into Lake Victoria.
One of the largest and most valuable fresh-water lakes
on the planet, Victoria is essential to the economies of
Kenya and Uganda as well as Tanzania. A Kenyan envi-
ronmental professor, Wangari Maathai (now the coun-
try’s environment minister), described the Geita mine
as “the most insensitive economic undertaking I have
ever come across,” explaining that “it is not just a mat-
ter of poisoning people. Very soon, the European
Union will ban all fish exports from East Africa just
because some toxic elements have found their way into
the fish, and it will be a great economic loss to the local
people whose life depends entirely on fishing.”
The kinds of spills produced by modern mines
shouldn’t be compared to the relatively petty crime
that occurs when someone dumps dry cleaning fluid into
the sewer drain, or drops his old batteries into the
garbage. Mine waste sends huge plumes of poison into
THE KHANTY PEOPLE OF SIBERIA live on ancestral land
that, unfortunately for them, is now being used for 65% of
Russia’s total oil production. Left: two Khanty brothers at
home. Below: a capped oil well in the Samatlor oil field
north of Nizhnevartovsk on Khanty lands.
the world’s rainforests, groundwater, and food. In Zort-
man, Montana, in 1982, the Zortman-Landusky gold
mine spilled 52,000 gallons of cyanide into the local
groundwater, and it was discovered only when a local
mine worker smelled cyanide in his faucet at home.
Cyanide was the agent used to kill Jews in Hitler’s gas
chambers. Today, in West Papua, Indonesia, a gold
mine owned by the U.S. company Freeport McMoRan
dumps 120,000 tons of cyanide-laced waste into local
rivers every day. In Papua New Guinea, the Ok Tedi cop-
per mine, which was built on the local people’s land with-
out their consent, dumps 200,000 tons of waste per day
into the Fly River and has brought the once biologically
rich region to ruin.
There are other means, besides rivers, by which dam-
age from extraction can be spread. Wind, in particular,
can be as dangerous a factor with big mines as with
broken nuclear plants. Uranium mines produce huge piles
of crushed ore waste, or tailings. According to the Cen-
ter for World Indigenous Studies, the most common
health risk associated with uranium mining is breathing
radon-222 gas, which will continue to seep from the tail-
ings for thousands of years to come. In Australia, the tail-
ings dam of an abandoned uranium mine was burst by
monsoon rains, and subsequent dispersal of the waste by
river and wind has polluted an area of 100 square kilo-
meters of land—driving out the Aboriginal people who
lived there. In the U.S. Southwest, radioactive waste from
an abandoned uranium mine owned by El Paso Natural
Gas Company has blown toward an area used by Navajo
Indians for shepherding.
✦
January/February 2004 WORLD•WATCH 23
 Canada, Northwest Territories Canada, Ontario
In the town of Deline, many of the Any major leaks from
indigenous Dene men who worked in Elliot Lake mine, which
the local uranium mine died of cancer. produces 45 percent
of Canada’s uranium,
would flow into the
Serpent River Indian
U.S., Washington state Reserve.
Uranium mine on the Spokane
Indian Reservation is within 1
mile of the Columbia River and
has been cited by EPA for leakage
of radioactive waste into ground water.

Canada, Saskatchewan
The Key Lake uranium mine Spain
is sited in the indigenous A spill from the Los Frailes
Dene people’s subsistence lead and zinc mine in 1998
hunting grounds. released more than 4 million
cubic meters of toxic slurry,
U.S., Nevada* which covered several thousand
Recently approved mines near Carlin will hectares of farmland and
lower the water table of an extremely threatens the Doñana National
water-scarce region by 1,600 feet, and U.S., Colorado Park, a World Heritage Area.
will likely pollute the Humboldt River and The Summitville
surrounding groundwater with cyanide. mine abandoned Liberia
by Pegasus Mining $100 million worth of timber was
U.S., Utah Company spilled
Bingham Canyon copper mine is one of only cut in 2000 for the enrichment of
cyanide and killed the dictator Charles Taylor and the
two man-made alterations of the Earth large 17 miles of the
enough to be visible from space; toxic waste purchase of weapons, primarily by
Alamosa River. the Oriental Timber Company, which
from the half-mile-deep pit has contaminated
surrounding groundwater and land. bulldozed villages in its way.
Guyana*
U.S., California* Proposed reopening of the Omai
Glamis Imperial open-pit heap-leaching gold gold mine, owned by the Canadian
mine could leak cyanide into the ground company Cambior, would allow
water of an already water-scarce state. Mexico, Chiapas massive dumping of cyanide waste
Indigenous and non-indigenous into the Essequibo River, despite
U.S., New Mexico protests of local Amazonian people.
The largest known U.S. uranium groups are bitterly resisting the
deposit—the Grants Mineral Belt, Mexican government’s building
centered on the town of Grants— of a major highway to speed
Ghana
lies partly under the Navajo, Acoma, military occupation and oil
Operations at the Ashanti
and Laguna reservations. Indians development in Chiapas.
gold fields have exacerbated
are concerned about breathing Brazil vector-borne diseases,
radon 222 gas, which continues Colombia* Gold mines dump respiratory tract diseases,
to seep from crushed ore and mill Occidental Oil and Ecopetrol cyanide into the Amazon. and acute conjunctivitis, and
tailings for hundreds of thousands have planned oil drilling adja- Ecuador have caused massive social
of years. The Kerr-McGee Corp. cent to U’wa Indian territory ARCO drilling for and economic disruptions
mill at Grants contains 33 million that the U’wa say would oil on 200,000 among the people of Ghana.
tons of tailings. destroy their land and culture. hectares of Shuar
In 1995, the U’wa vowed to and Achuar Democratic
*Uranium mine proposed for the commit mass suicide if the peoples’ territory.
Navajo town of Crownpoint Republic of Congo
exploitation proceeded. Mining coltan for cell
would use the groundwater under
the town as an “in-situ” medium Peru phones in or near the
for extracting uranium, arousing Yanacocha gold mine, Okapi Reserve and
Bolivia Kahuzi-Biega National
fears that the radioactive solution second-largest in the world,
Logging invaded 500,000 Park has led to an 80-
would leak into the aquifer used dumps cyanide waste into
hectares of Guarayo to 90-percent decline
by the Indians for drinking water. watersheds reaching the
indigenous territory with- in population of the
entire width of the continent.
out Guarayo permission. eastern lowland gorilla.
The mine itself now covers
9,000 hectares. Logging invaded 140,000
hectares of Chiquitano de
Monte Verde territory
Riddled: Here are just a few of the major without permission.
mining, drilling, and logging operations that have left huge
holes in the Earth—making the planet look as if it has been Argentina, Patagonia*
machine-gunned. Thousands more of these holes are not People of Esquel vehemently oppose
shown. As human population has expanded and per-capita opening of an open-pit mine by the
consumption of materials and energy has continued to rise, Canadian company Meridien Gold,
the search for resources has intensified—ripping into more which would blast 42,000 tons of rock
and more indigenous homelands and ecosystems. per day and soak it with cyanide, from
which it is feared leaks would poison
* Planned or Proposed Operations the local water supply. The mine may
Scale varies in this Mercator Projection. open anyway.

24 WORLD•WATCH January/February 2004

 Russia, Siberia
Heavy oil production in the area,
66% of Russia’s total, has deforested
and polluted the ancestral territory of
the Khanty people, destroying their
traditional culture of reindeer herding,
hunting, and fishing.

Tibet*
Romania
Oil and mineral resource
Cyanide from the Baia
exploitation by China
Mare gold mine spilled
Kyrgyzstan threatens to further
into the Tisza River, and Philippines
Kumptor Gold Mine marginalize Tibetans
thence into the Danube Tailings dam failure at a
spilled 2 tons of in their own country,
for 500 kilometers copper, gold, and silver mine
sodium cyanide bringing an invasion of
through Hungary and run by the Marcopper Mining
into the Barskoon relocated Chinese farmers
Serbia, in what was said Corp. dumped over 1.5 million
River, poisoning and releasing petro-
to be Europe’s worst cubic meters of waste into
2,600 people chemical, cyanide, and
environmental disaster local rivers, forcing evacuation
in Kyrgyzstan. mercury pollution to rivers
since Chornobyl. of 1,200 people, contaminating
serving a large share of
drinking water and destroying
the world’s population.
wildlife, livestock, and crops.

Indonesia, West Papua

Nigeria, Ogoniland
A government deal allowed
Shell Oil to drill with impunity
on Ogoni homeland in early
1990s. When the Ogoni people
protested, their leader was
arrested and hanged.
Sudan
Oil revenues have financed a civil
war that has killed 2 million people,
with the government pursuing a
scorched-earth policy—bombing
villages and destroying livestock.
India, Bihar
Villagers suffer from
radiation emitted by
Jaduguda uranium
mine in Jharkhand.
Burma
A natural gas pipeline for Unocal
and Total was built with forced
labor through the last primary
rainforest in mainland Asia.
Burmese government soldiers
tortured and killed residents to
force evacuation, also opening
the way to unchecked logging.
The largest gold mine in the world,
India, Meghalaya*
owned by U.S. company Freeport
Proposed uranium
McMoRan, on land seized from the
mine would displace
Amunge and Kamoro people, dumps
30,000 people.
120,000 tons of cyanide-laced
waste per day into the local river.
Papua New Guinea,
Western Province
Ok Tedi copper mine, owned
by Australian company BHP,
dumps 200,000 tons of toxic
waste into the Fly River every
day. Forests, wetlands, and
fish in the region are all dying.
As many as 2,700 square
kilometers could be destroyed.
Cambodia
Illegal logging in 2000
led to severe deforestation,
flooding, destruction
of rice crops, and
displacements of people.

Kenya*
A Titanium extraction operation by the
Tanzania* Canadian company Tiomin Resources Australia, Northern Territory
Giant Geitz gold mine, would strip 1,500 tons per hour from Waste from the now-closed Ranger
next to Nyamalembo the sands on the Kenyan coast, evicting uranium mine contaminated the
River, would drain tens of thousands of the indigenous Magela River used by Aborigines.
cyanide spills into Lake Digo peoples and other local Kenyans The uranium level in their water
New Caledonia*
Victoria, dealing a and wiping out fragile ecosystems. reached 4,000 times the safe
A nickel and cobalt mine planned by
potentially mortal blow drinking standard.
the Canadian company INCO threatens
to the main economic Madagascar* The Rum Jungle uranium mine, both the indigenous Kanuk people and
asset of central Africa. A proposed titanium-mining operation by the the ecosystems of a country where 14%
abandoned in 1971, polluted 100
Anglo-Australian company Rio Tinto would strip square kilometers and drove out of the species are on the IUCN’s Red
South Africa
40 kilometers of coastal dunes in Madagascar, Aborigines. List of Threatened Plants. Proposed
At the Nigel and Harmony
deforesting and polluting a large area of one of dumping of the mine’s chemical waste
gold mines, workers were
the world’s megadiverse countries and ravaging into the ocean would could be a death
exposed to radiation levels
the ancestral homeland of the local people, who knell for the world’s second-largest
up to 7 times allowable limits.
fiercely oppose the project. coral reef.

January/February 2004 WORLD•WATCH 25

 THE GUARAYO PEOPLE have seen the Bolivian govern-
ment give away 500,000 hectares of ancestral forest to log-
ging firms, without their permission. Below: Guarayo farmers
demonstrate for constitutional reform in La Paz. Right: more
forest clearing for soybean production east of Santa Cruz.
David Mercado, ©REUTERS 2002
In some cases, the extraction is not at a single point
at all, but takes place over a wide area. Logging oper-
ations have decimated some of the world’s most bio-
logically valuable forests. Many of these operations are
either illegal or are sanctioned by corrupt national gov-
ernments over the desperate objections of indigenous
inhabitants. In Bolivia, in the late 1990s, the govern-
ment granted logging concessions covering 500,000
hectares of Guarayo Territory and 140,000 hectares of
Chiquitano de Monte Verde Territory. In Cambodia,
illegal logging has led to severe deforestation, flooding,
and destruction of rice crops—and to the displace-
ment of people who depended on those forests for
subsistence. In Liberia, in the year 2000, some $100
million worth of timber was cut down and sold, mainly
to European consumers, to enrich the dictator Charles
Taylor and to buy arms for his henchmen. In Indone-
sia, the looting of forests has reached new levels, with
about 2 million hectares disappearing every year.
Buying Silence Cortez did not
have to worry
about bad PR. Companies like Shell Oil or Freeport
McMoRan may do their extraction in remote places, and
with the tacit acceptance of the global media, but they
can no longer escape the attention of activists and
groups like Amazon Watch, Rainforest Action Net-
work, and the Mineral Policy Center. Shell was burned
badly when it was accused of collusion with the Niger-
ian government in the murder of the Ogoni activist Ken
✦
26 WORLD•WATCH January/February 2004
Saro-Wiwa, who had dared to protest Shell’s ruination
of his people’s homeland. So, the major extractive
industries have learned to become more discreet about
how they take what they want. One of the most com-
mon strategies is to offer employment in the mines to
indigenous people who are not well informed about the
hazards, and to develop a dependency that the work-
ers and their families are unable to break even when their
health begins to break—a contemporary form of inden-
tured servitude. An Aborigine writer, Vincent For-
rester, describes how this dependency was established
at the Ranger uranium mine in his people’s region of
Australia. Mining royalties are paid to the government,
not to the local people. (Most mining companies don’t
pay royalties to anyone at all.) The government then
supplies the community with essential services, but
does not inform the people about the effects of the min-
ing on their land and health. “This dependency, I
believe, is a form of ransom,” writes Forrester. “White
Australia says to the under-serviced, fledgling outsta-
tion movement, ‘You can have money for Toyotas, for
bores, to help you set up, but if mining stops the
money stops too.’”
A more hardball way of buying acquiescence is sim-
ply to find individual members of the local community
who are willing to publicly support a proposed mining
project in exchange for a small payment, which in an
impoverished area can be a large inducement. The
offers open rifts in the local community, causing enough
disarray to allow the project to gain a foothold. In the
late 1990s, for example, the Navajo Times reported that
the HRI corporation, which wanted to open a uranium
mine near the Navajo community of Crownpoint, New
Mexico, had arranged to give lease payments to some
of the Indian landowners living in the community.
According to a report by Chris Shuey of the Southwest
Research and Information Center in Albuquerque, the
total amount of the payoff came to $367,000. The pop-
ulation of Crownpoint at that time was 2,700, which
meant HRI was paying $136 per citizen to begin a
process that would use the community’s underground
water-bearing strata as a medium for “in situ leach” pro-
cessing of uranium—turning the water into a “pregnant
solution” from which the uranium would be extracted
within one-half mile of several churches, schools, busi-
nesses, and most of the homes in the community.
In Madagascar, the Anglo-Austrialian mining giant
Rio Tinto has tried to buy off the natives for even less.
Rio Tinto wants to mine 40 kilometers of coastal dunes,
bulldozing an indigenous homeland that is also a habi-
tat for numerous rare and endangered plant species. The
company’s strategy has been to invite the villagers to
dinners at which they can eat and drink while watch-
ing PR films that extol the proposed operation but
make no mention of likely damage.
 1986
Courtesy of NASA/GFSC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
In hundreds of mining or logging operations around
the planet, the main economic incentive for capitula-
tion is the lure of jobs. Where people are poor, that lure
of short-term cash can easily blind young workers to the
long-term impacts of the project on their culture and
health—and on the long-term sustainability of their local
economy. In the Arctic, Inuit communities are now
divided about whether to welcome more intensive oil
drilling. Those who see a threat to their traditional
way of life have put up strong resistance, but it’s rarely
enough to fend off the incursions, especially when
their own national governments have been bought off.
In a globalized economy, the buying-off of governments
has become widespread. A few years ago in India, for
example, the indigenous Bhagata, Khond, Konda Reddi,
and Samantha communities found themselves targeted
2001
by foreign companies interested in the bauxite (alu-
minum ore) deposits on their lands. Indian constitu-
tional law protects indigenous peoples from unwanted
exploitation of this kind, but that did not stop the
state of Andhra Pradesh from secretly inviting the com-
panies—and giving them leases—to begin mining. The
opposing parties have been litigating ever since.
Is There Really When econ-
omists talk
No Alternative? about “ex-
tractive industries” they’re usually referring to min-
ing, oil or gas drilling, or logging—essentially, the use
of heavy machinery to cut raw materials from the
planet. The concept could easily be broadened to
include pumping water from aquifers, hauling fish from
✦
January/February 2004 WORLD•WATCH 27
 the oceans, shooting monkeys
for bushmeat, or collecting
honey from wild bees. We
focus here on mining, oil
drilling, and logging because
they have been so heavily con-
centrated in places that are
both the homelands of the
world’s marginalized peoples
and the habitats of the most
threatened ecosystems. These
industries are therefore the
most direct—and least regu-
lated—assaults of industrial
society on the Earth’s cultural
and biological stability.
To some extent, the lack
of restraint in these industries
may reflect an implicit belief,
in the governments of indus-
trial nations, that the genie
long ago exited the bottle,
and that trying to undo any
damage it has done now is as
unrealistic as trying to undo
the damage done by the seiz-
ing of Indian territories by
Europeans two or three cen-
turies ago. But the idea that
redressing past injustices is
now “unrealistic,” too, makes
a questionable assumption—
that the descendants of the
conquered Indians have long
since been assimilated into the
modern industrial economy

Luc Gnago, ©REUTERS 2003

and share the same benefits
as the descendants of their
conquerors. Yet, the reality of
places like the Navajo reser-
vations in the U.S. Southwest
belies that assumption. Native
American communities are far more impoverished,
with far higher rates of disease, unemployment, and sui-
cide, than the rest of the country. And it’s on Native
American lands that the most blatantly exploitative
extractive operations are concentrated. A similar obser-
vation can be made of the oil-rich Ogoni lands of
Nigeria, or the Guarayo territory of Bolivia, among
scores of others.
The political inertia that has allowed colonial-era
racial distinctions to be perpetuated in the twenty-first
century economy has also allowed outmoded assump-
tions about industrial productivity to be perpetuated.
The prevailing belief is that if we want to continue
✦
having the rich lifestyle to which we are now accus-
tomed, we have no choice but to keep on drilling and
digging in the places where we already are—and, indeed,
to commence new drilling in any place where more
resources can be found. If the Inuit are hunting caribou
in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), but
the war on terror and the fueling of American Hum-
mers and Expeditions demands oil and there’s oil under
ANWR, sooner or later the Inuit will have to step
aside—will have to forget their antiquated ways, learn
to speak English, head south, and find jobs at Exxon
gas stations or Wal-Mart.
Such assumptions have been amply discredited,

28 WORLD•WATCH January/February 2004

though you might never know it from following the
mainstream news media and its conservative-domi-
nated commentary. The discrediting takes several forms,
each of which involves the exploding of a persistent
myth about the materials economy:
“Economic growth requires increasing materials and
energy consumption.”
In other words, population momentum (the
unavoidable population growth of the coming years
even with maximum stabilization policies), plus rising
standards of living across the planet, will necessarily drive
up demand for raw materials. Historically, economic
growth has meant soaring material consumption. But
the idea that this link must continue assumes that the
efficiency of materials use must remain constant, which
it need not. If cities were redesigned to be more com-
pact, for example, the quantities of materials required
to provide housing and transport per capita could be
greatly reduced while actually improving the quality of
urban life. As asphalt and gasoline use declined, so
would the psychic and physical ravages of traffic con-
gestion, auto accidents, air pollution, and suburban
isolation. At the same time, growing efficiency in energy
use, both from technological advances and from changes
in consumer behavior (how about trading in your
Expedition for a Prius, or your leaf blower for a rake?)
could vastly reduce the per capita demand for oil or alu-
minum without compromising the pursuit of happiness.
For the 2 billion people who are poorest, hopes for a
better life do not have to require further impoverish-
ment for those of their indigenous counterparts whose
land is being mined or deforested.
“Meeting the need for increased supply of materials
requires taking more out of the ground.”
When the benefits of more efficient design and use
have been exhausted, we may indeed need to increase
the supply, at least until population has stabilized. But
to assume that the increase must come from the ground
falsely assumes that the new materials must be virgin.
In the long-term ecology of the planet, nearly all mate-
rials are eventually recycled, and now we need to do that
in the short term as well. The mines of the future will
be, increasingly, the cities rather than the rainforests.
Already, in some areas, aluminum recycling has reduced
the need for bauxite mining by half.
“Mining or timbering in indigenous areas is cheap.”
This argument is similar to the one employed by
Wal-Mart, which says it’s economical to get poor peo-
ple, who have few alternatives, to clean toilets and
wash floors for cheap wages. That thinking is just one
expression of the more general myth that industry can
profit by not paying the externalities, or social and
AFRICAN MINERS are trapped in a system that enriches
international black markets in diamonds and gold, and
finances destructive resource wars, while keeping them and
their communities in poverty. Left: miner in the Ashanti
goldfields, Ghana. Below: diamond miner in Sierra Leone.
Dylan Martinez, ©REUTERS 2000
environmental costs, of production. But while eco-
nomic practice remains entrenched in reactionary doc-
trine, moral consciousness has come a long way since
the days when few people had any qualms about slav-
ery. Exploiting cheap labor is a form of quasi-slavery,
and the hundreds of organizations dedicated to raising
public sensitivity to that have long since brought us past
the point where social costs can be ignored. The true
costs of extractive industries will inexorably become
more internalized—for example, in requiring oil com-
panies to bear the medical costs of diseases brought by
their polluting of indigenous water supplies. As that hap-
pens, the prices of oil and other raw materials will rise,
and there will be more incentives to develop sustainable
substitutions—of renewable energy for oil, of recycled
metals and wood for virgin, and of more efficient use
for more supply.
That’s not to say the mining of minerals and fuels,
and the harvesting of trees, will not continue to some
degree into the indefinite future. But in a healthy econ-
omy, those activities will be done with far greater care,
on a smaller scale, and only in places where permission
is granted out of choice rather than compulsion—and,
even then, only in places where there will be no lasting
injury to any human or natural community. Ultimately,
it will cost no less to site a mine in an Indian reserva-
tion or rainforest than it would to site it in, say, a sub-
urb of Paris or Dallas.
Ed Ayres is the editor of World Watch.
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January/February 2004 WORLD•WATCH 29