Five years ago, I went to Potosí in Bolivia.
Maybe you’ve heard of it, but most likely you haven’t.
In the 1500s, Potosí was the second-largest city in the Americas. (These days, it’s only about twice the size of Red Deer.)
In its heyday, Potosí was the place to be. You see, it had Cerro Rico — “rich mountain.”
And Cerro Rico had silver. Tons of it. Something like 60,000 tonnes (that’s metric tonnes, yes). To this day, it’s still the world’s largest silver deposit.
And the Spanish mined it. Or rather, they made unwilling Africans and local Indigenous peoples work underground as slaves to mine it, as the current workers told me.
They pulled more silver out of that mountain than there had ever been in the world. This isn’t an exaggeration — in those days, 60 per cent of the world’s silver was from Potosí.
I was in that mountain. Traced my hands on the tunnel walls, my fingertips glazing over asbestos. I listened to distant booming of dynamite, chewed coca leaf to dampen the effects of oxygen deprivation.
It’s estimated that 8 million miners have died in that rich, red earth.
Miners there told me that after all that silver came out into circulation, it crashed the market. It all became rather valueless.
But people keep mining it. Because what else are you going to do?
They keep dying, too, inside and out of the mines. Lung issues, water problems related to tailings and runoff, work site injuries. Mining is not good to the environment, and rarely good to the people working in the mines.
A few years before I arrived, the mountain began to collapse. It lost its top. It slumps now. It’s no longer as glorious as it once was. It’s held together inside by a patchwork of cross braces and prayers to El Tio, the god of the underworld.
This is just one stark example of how the mining industry affects communities around the world.
We have our own example just to the north here.
What will people be saying about us 500 years from now? Will our land be collapsing in on itself, continuing to poison our children’s children long after we’re gone? Will those children’s children be cursing our existence?
How could it be any other way?
