Apocalyptic mining. OCT 14 from Babtiste.https://www.elespectador.com/opinion/minerias-apocalipticas/
In the language of war it has become what should be an extremely responsible and profound reflection on the extractive industries. Today everything that is said about them becomes a symptom of moral alignment between good and bad, a fight between those who claiming greater attachment to "nature" claim the obviousness of the defense of water: not gold, not oil, some what no one in their right mind can doubt. But in a country where building aqueducts has become one of the most stable sources of corruption and where millions of us defecate in the water of others, putting zeroes of more or less to the flows, or the hectares, or the populations or the money it does not seem to matter: they are small "errors" that do not distort the "substance" of the discussion. Today ANLA is a serious entity because it filed the mining request in Soto Norte, yesterday it was totally flawed and incompetent, tomorrow it will return to the gallows. That's how technical and rational the discussion is.
Friends fondly point out to me the impossibility of considering gold mining in a contemporary world where climate and biodiversity collapse and the antecedents of activity are generally a sign of colonialism, devastation and death. I answer that the duty of civilization is that this does not happen, that the child should not be thrown away with the contaminated water and that other mining operations are possible and should contribute to solving, with their capacities and resources, environmental liabilities and welfare demands. collective pending. Other people demand of me, with a different language and less affection, to return the environmentalism card (?) Together with the eventual revenues that I must have received for the "rigged" interpretations that I make of the place of extractive activities in the contemporary socio-ecological concert ,
Who is going to invest in the Bucaramanga sewage treatment plant, a gigantic environmental debt that the city owes to the populations downstream of the Lebrija River? Who will restore the (dry) basin of the Surat River, degraded by decades of human intervention? Who the onenollado wasteland, with its lagoons and peat bogs dried up decades ago? If the perception of the potential risk of negatively affecting the water supply makes any activity ethically unviable in a region where the identification and demarcation of the pramo is now considered “rigged” despite scientific work, how is it that the evident damage caused by the devastation Farming in Berlin or in Chingaza or in the high mountain reservations of Nario, denounced the day before yesterday by indigenous people perplexed by the burning, the tractors and the erosion, is it not addressed?
Asking oneself about the enabling conditions for gold extraction in a gold-bearing region, with mining history and cultures, seems impossible now, I admit it: it is a totally unpopular discussion, which nobody wants. But mining cannot just be an apocalyptic activity and the spaces must be restored to openly and calmly discuss their perspectives, hopefully in the eventual reform of the Mining Code, not on social media. Starting by focusing on the most urgent: the control and formalization of illegal mining.