Tuesday and Wednesday mainly contained of lectures, debate prep, and more lectures. The one exceptionally interesting lecture that we had was taught by Chris on Extractive Industries. Extractive Industries is this week's topic at EcoQuest. For some reason, I am fascinated by this weeks topic, I'm guessing because I know little of it. When talking about extractives in NZ, you are mainly dealing with coal, gold, and silver mining. Mining, something I have learned little about, which is quite sad considering how extensive U.S. mining industries are. All of this talk on extractives led to "The EQ Debate."This debate will be based around the not-very-simplistic idea of mining. More specifically, there will be two sides, one that affirms and another than denies the following phrase:
"It is better left in the ground."
Splitting into groups and flipping a coin, my ground was given the denial or pro-mining side. This means that no matter how we personally feel about mining, we need to support it. Ok. This shouldn't be that hard. Right? After many hours of forming a debate, my group realized how little information we had to go off of. Which leads me to today….
The mentors believed it would be in the students' best interest to visit a mine - of course, for educational purposes. This was exciting news for me because I've never been to a mine, along with most other EcoQuesters! So today, we traveled to the Martha Mine in Waihi. What does this mine actually mine? Mostly silver, but gold as well. Newmont, an American mining company, has a series of mines throughout the town of Waihi. They have "Martha," the main open pit, along with many other underground mines.
When we first arrived at the mine, we were greeted by a tall, lanky man named Phil (?) - but we all just called him Martha (after the main pit). We began our day with a tour of the mines. We took a bus to various parts of the mine: the open pit itself, the waste rock area, the mill (where the gold and silver is smelted), and to their tailings pit. I won't bore you with the nerdy information that I found so fascinating... but one cool thing was that when we arrived to the mill, another man met us and Martha with some "treasure."He pulled out of his pocket a black cloth bag. He first pulled out a clump of silver the size of my hand, worth around $250. After some time, he pulled out a cube of gold not much bigger than my thumb fingernail, worth around $4,000. To my surprise, he actually passed these cubes around so that everyone could get a feel for how much gold and silver weighs. I was shocked to feel how much heavier the little cube of gold was in comparison to the chunk of silver. Martha then reminded us how not many people are given the opportunity to hold this much gold at once, so cherish it.
Something interesting about this specific mine is that by 2016 (when Newmont "believes" they will complete the pits' resources) they will close Martha and turn her into a recreational lake for the town of Waihi. Now, from my standpoint….how in the heck are they going to replace 26 years of mining with a lake? And even if you do, will the lake ever be at quality that is safe for recreational/swimming or even drinking purposes? Phil claimed "probably over time," but I, along with other EcoQuesters, believe differently.
Side note: I was pretty impressed that Martha/Phil didn't poop his pants with the amount of environmental scientists that came to a mine to talk about all the reasons why mining is bad for the environment and for surrounding inhabitants. Kudos to you Martha.
Another side note: To get an idea of how big the trucks are that work in the pit…6 tires, each twice the height of me. Holy. Cow.
Towards the end of the tour, Martha brought up the fact that Newmont has just received consent to build a new underground mind, called Correnso. The plan for Correnso is to run an underground gold/silver mine ~190 m beneath the city of Waihi. This has raised many concerns regarding affects of this mine to the residents who live just above it - such as noise, light, dust, and vibration pollution. One of the major concerns is vibration: residents above the mine will feel a 10 second vibration 3 times a day for as long as the area is mined (could be years!). Though Newmont has proposed compensation to residents living directly above the Correnso mine, how can they simply tell someone to change their way of life or suck it up? Another interesting debate regarding Correnso is what will this mean for the future of mining? Newmont has decided to mine directly underneath a city, which has NEVER been attempted before. If something were to go wrong, what will happen to the people of Waihi? What will this say about mining? About Newmont? BUT if Newmont can pull it off, what will this say about the rest of the world? "Be prepared for mining to occur under your home?" Is this really something we are going to allow happen? These are all important questions that need to be answered.
On the way home, we stopped at a historic rich mine site and walked through old mines that have been abandoned for decades. There were many historic plates that told stories of how New Zealand's economy was founded on mining gold out of this area. Walking through these tunnels was dark, clammy, and cold. But unreal! For the first time, it wasn't exactly the view (mainly because it was so dark) but rather we were walking through New Zealand's history. Leaving the mine caves, I overheard others feeling the same way, which put an instant smile on my face.
Getting back to campus, groups gathered to prepare for the debate tomorrow. Reading paper articles after articles after articles about how mining is a good thing, all I can seem to think about is the giant, collapsed hole that potentially will be Waihi within generations to come.
In the pit
Horrible pan of the pit - Martha
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