God said 'please leave', but they didn't
By Jonathan Maslow
THE first rays of tropical morning revealed an opening in the mountainous forest worthy of Jurassic Park: A square mile of phlegm-coloured lagoon, rimmed by a thick slab of exposed red clayish soil. No dinosaurs wade here. Instead, the principal sign of life is the malaria hum of mosquitoes, left in charge in the wake of a gold mining operation that toppled the jungle, gouged the earth, extracted the buried treasure, and was then abandoned three years ago. The creek nearby, diverted by the miners to suck water for their hydraulic jets, has been forsaken, too. Miners found it a lucid little mountain torrent, gushing downhill to join the bigger Potaro, then the Essequibo River, Guyana's Old Man. They altered the creek to their purpose, leaving it choked by their sand and gravel dredge spoils - a feeble ooze of army khaki mud. "God said, `You done enough damage, now please leave'", said Neil Brock, a former miner, who drove two reporters in his four by four to this gold rush landscape, 130 miles of rough terrain south of the Caribbean coastline. They didn't leave, they came, harder. For every Red Hole the gold miners scrapped, dozens and hundreds of new claims pock this gold-rich area. The open-pit mines stretch out alongside a two-year-old red laterite road the government constructed to help unburden the vast interior of its mineral and timber wealth. All you need is a claim and a mining licence, worth less than US$10. Two days of roaming the uphill watershed of the Potaro-Essequibo Rivers showed countless abandoned open pits, working pits and pits where small-scale Guyanese miners are vexing the disturbed earth all over again. In the fevered hope of extracting over-looked gold dust from the tailing wastes of their predecessors. Big pits like Red Hole and White Hole. Small pits like 51-Mile Camp and everything in between. As a result, the sweet music of flowing water is replaced by the diesel-engined chugging of land dredges. Most of the small streams are suffocating in the soupy tan mud caused by the disturbance. Only a few months ago, sediment from similar gold mining pits within 20 miles of here, turned the waters of Kaieteur Falls, Guyana's national tourism attraction and four times higher than Niagara, a shameful coffee with milk. All this gold mining activity - and the environmental damage it does - has been occasioned within the past 10 years by the introduction of new powered land dredges from Brazil, which shares a border with Guyana along hundreds of miles of uncontrollable mountain forests. Since the last century, the old-time Guyanese miners - known as `pork knockers' - would spend months and sometimes years in the bush, carefully prospecting for the tell-tale black sands that are said to bear gold. With pickaxe and spade, they would unearth a rectangular hole not much large than a grave site and braced with logs to prevent cave-ins. With buckets of water from the myriad creeks, they ran the soil through a sluice box, adding a few drops of quick silver to amalgamate the gold dust and nuggets. "Them old-time pork knockers was able prospectors," said one Black miner, standing naked and barefoot in the tail ends pile he was hosing with his water jet. "Today, it's all luck and chance." Driven from the Amazon Basin by the Brazilian government after lone and violent land conflicts with Indians, Brazilian miners shifted to Guyana and neighbouring western Venezuela. They brought with them the hydraulic pumps, high-pressure water jets and suction dredges that blast away hillsides, leaving scars and spoils where there was once forest, rivers of sediment once fed by clean-flowing streams. Ecologically valuable seed banks contained in the topsoil run off with the top-soil, leaving former mine sites barren and unable to regenerate. The Guyanese miners rapidly adopted the new Brazilian mining technology and today, tens of thousands of Guyanese and Brazilian gold miners are moving massive amounts of soil, dumping mercury into their sluice boxes, which drains into the rivers to poison the fish and the people living downstream. Whether they strike it rich or not, when they move on, they leave behind a sobering legacy of deforestation, toxic pollution, khaki rivers and mosquito farms. In the mining boomtown of Mahdia at the end of the road, 85-90 per cent of the population came down with malaria in the past year, including three quarters of the local hospital staff, according to Regional Democratic Chairman Ewart Clarke. Clarke, who is himself being treated for malaria, warned us to sleep under mosquito nets. Peter Hudson, the district's inspecting mining engineer from Guyana's Geology and Mines Commission, was asked if miners are required to reclaim the land they turmoil. At first he was evasive, but finally admitted, "No, we don't enforce reclamation on small-scale (foreign) mining operations." As from mercury pollution, Hudson said he does not look into it. "I don't know what excessive use of mercury is. We are not trained in environmental monitoring," he said. "We are not responsible for the environment." Guyana, in fact, does not have a water sampling programme to test water for toxic metals. It needs one badly - as it needs a small dedicated gold tax to pay for reclamation and regeneration of the forest. The ugly brown silted stream and resurgence of malaria should serve as sufficient warnings of the need for all humans, - in rich countries and in poor - to balance exploitation of the environment with preservation of nature's life support systems.
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