NY Times Reviews Jungle Gold Shows

January 17, 2013 - NY Times
A Rumble in the Jungle

The new reality TV series “Bamazon,” on the History Channel, along with already established shows like “Gold Rush” and “Jungle Gold,” have elevated the global mining bonanza into living-room entertainment. Each focuses on a different group of Americans seeking their fortune in distant, ostensibly dangerous locales: “Bamazon” in Guyana, “Gold Rush” in Alaska and Guyana, and “Jungle Gold” in Ghana. But while these shows claim to depict “reality,” they gloss over the most awful truths of gold mining, particularly as it is practiced in the tropics.

It is estimated that up to a fourth of global gold production now originates not from licensed, regulated and monitored mines, but from often illegal, unregulated artisanal, or informal, mines — much like those dramatized in these series. In South America, artisanal gold production, which churns out nearly 450,000 pounds of gold a year, involves millions of people — about four miners and support labor per pound.

But to get even an ounce of that gold, miners have to upend tons of river sediment. They pump a continuous slurry of sediment and river water over mats that trap minute fractions of gold-enriched dust, discharging their tailings back into the river.

Periodically, the accumulated gold dust is separated, and the gold isolated by amalgamating it with mercury. Invariably, the mercury is burned off into the atmosphere or, like the tailings, poured into waterways. Over 1,000 tons of mercury is dumped or burned off annually, and several large rivers have been so exhaustively mined that they simply disappear into vast mud pits that make parts of the Amazon look like the Somme.

Much of the gold being sought by the stars of these shows — and by millions of poorer artisanal miners throughout the tropics — is buried beneath remote and biodiverse pockets of primary rain forest. In some places, like the boomtown of Puerto Maldonado, Peru, regional gold rushes are fueling mass demographic shifts and unchecked urbanization.

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