A River and Its Water: Reclaiming the Commons - Part 36
36th of a series
“We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.”
- Hernan Cortes (1485–1547)
The bus ride from Cusco, the ancient capital of the Incan empire, to Puerto Maldonado in the Amazon rain forest, takes over 10 hours, although the distance is not even 300 miles, and you can fly in under an hour. Such is the precipitous majesty of the Andes, where travel can feel like falling off a cliff and landing in a different ecosphere. Set among the peaks of the Vicabamba mountains, Cusco is 11,152 feet above sea level. Puerto Maldonado lies at the confluence of the wonderfully named Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers, near the western edge of the 2.7-million square-mile Amazon basin. Its elevation is 600 feet. Its rivers flow northeast for 2,700 miles, part of the Amazon River’s long journey to the Atlantic Ocean. Averaging nearly seven feet of rain a year, Puerto Maldonado is as hot and humid a place as I have ever been.
In the markets, the fish have an incandescent red color – not the vibrant, festive colors of the flowers and birds of the rainforest, the macaws and toucans, orchids and passion fruit flowers – but the sickening color of stunted development and death. For this red is the sign of mercury in the food chain, the byproduct of thousands of gold mining operations in the rainforest and along the rivers’ banks.
When I was there, about 15 years ago, most travel occurred by boat, and you could hear the discordant sound of heavy machinery long before you rounded a bend in the river and came upon a group of people, often a family with the children waist deep in the water, as the machine sifted dirt in search of gold. Mercury is used to adhere to the tiny gold pieces, which are extracted by vaporizing the mercury, which then ends up in the water and soil, absorbed by the insects, the fish, and the workers’ lungs.
I have long thought that the most diabolical fate to come out of the Industrial Revolution was that of a chimney sweep in an English city. Boys (and some girls) were taken from that country’s plentiful poorhouses at the age of six or younger, and shoved up chimneys into which only they were small enough to fit.
“The fate of these people seems singularly hard,” wrote Percival Pott in Chirurgical Observations (1775). “In their early infancy, they are most frequently treated with great brutality, and almost starved with cold and hunger; they are thrust up narrow and sometimes hot chimnies, where they are bruised, burned, and almost suffocated; and when they get to puberty, become peculiarly liable to a most noisome, painful, and fatal disease”, namely cancer of the scrotum and testicles, from which they die. Thomas Hobbes did not need to look to a more primitive age to see human life that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
What I witnessed on the Madre de Dios and Tambopata rivers was a world away from England’s dark, satanic mills. Here, 30-50,000 miners work in one of the planet’s most biodiverse areas, amid the breathtaking grandeur and vibrancy of nature. And yet their often illegal operations are destroying millions of acres of rainforest, polluting the vast Amazon river system, and poisoning the people too poor and vulnerable to escape.
Maybe the next time we’re tempted to buy gold, we should think of those children in the river and remember the words of Martin Luther (1483-1546), that “every green tree is far more glorious than if it were made of gold and silver.”