Block and Byrd. Earth and Sky.
by Alex
I love the short radio program “Earth and Sky”:http://www.earthsky.org/shows/show.php?date=20060422 for many reasons — mostly having to do with the poetic compactness of its title and byline. But now it also features one of my favorite anthropologists — Paige West — talking about gold mining! Go Paige go! One quick note however: Paige says that “When you have a mine, you have to have a road. And when you build a road into a roadless area, lots of people come in . . . then you’re going to have disease that comes in . . . people are going to have access to alcohol, to guns, to all sorts of things.” This is not actually true, technically — if I remember correctly, the Tolukuma mine has no road going into it and all supplies are flown in and out. I know little about the prospect that Paige mentions, but given its likely size and location it’s not inconceivable that this would work for Maimafu. Of course not having a road hasn’t really spared Tolukuma from having guns and people coming in — but it certainly has blunted what could have otherwise been quite a nasty impact. Of course the flip side of delivering all of your supplies via helicopter means things like accidentally spilling cyanide over bits of Gulf Province. So I guess you win some and you loose some.
Paige works on environmentalish related stuff in PNG, so maybe this is also a good post to mention “Forest Trend’s”:http://www.forest-trends.org new report on “logging in PNG”:http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/publications/PNG2006/png.php which actually got PNG a nod on “CNN”:http://www.cnn.com/2006/BUSINESS/02/27/png.logging/.
That is a really good point – my last conversation with TPJ in PNG was about roadless mining so I should have been a bit more careful. The weird thing about media is this – I talked to the E&S guy for 2 hours (no joke) and the majority of the talk was about conservation-related issues in the country. That two minute bit about mines was the only time gold was mentioned at all. Interesting what got pulled out and put on the air.
Yeah. The caption for the picture on the website also features you in the “the roadless Eastern Highlands” — as if the largest road in the country didn’t run through the province!