A worldwide growth in the price of gold has accelerated the pace of deforestation in some of the most pristine parts of the Peruvian Amazon, where miners are cutting down trees in order to extract the valuable natural resource. From 2003 to 2009, found a new study, the rate of deforestation in two gold-mining areas increased six-fold alongside record-setting leaps in the international price of gold. During one two-year period, as gold prices climbed steadily, forests disappeared at a rate of 4.5 American football fields a day from one of the two sites.
Alongside the accelerating paces of both mining and deforestation, the study found, there has also been an exponential rise in the use of mercury, which helps miners extract gold from the Earth. As a result, larger quantities of the toxic metal are ending up in the atmosphere and in Amazonian waterways and fish.
Together, the findings point to gold mining as an overlooked source of deforestation and environmental contamination in the Amazon, said lead author Jennifer Swenson, a landscape ecologist at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Until now, researchers have focused mostly on forces like agriculture, oil, logging and road construction.
"It's another blow that was not really anticipated," said Swenson, who added that the situation is particularly complex because Peruvian miners are among the poorest members of society. That makes it hard to recommend that people take measures like boycotting gold, which is unlikely to happen anyway. (read more)
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