There's gold in them thar hills!

or: All that glisters is not gold.                                                                                 Up, Down.                                          Ides 

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Prince of Morocco: O hell! what have we here? A carrion Death, within whose empty eye There is a written scroll! I'll read the writing. [Reads]      All that glitters is not gold;      Often have you heard that told:      Many a man his life hath sold      But my outside to behold:      Gilded tombs do worms enfold.      Had you been as wise as bold,      Young in limbs, in judgment old,      Your answer had not been inscroll'd:      Fare you well; your suit is cold. Cold, indeed; and labour lost: Then, farewell, heat, and welcome, frost! Portia, adieu. I have too grieved a heart To take a tedious leave: thus losers part. (The Merchant of Venice, II-vii)

I have been seeing Belo Sun regularly in the Amigos da Terra daily newsletter; most recently here. The MPF (Ministério Público Federal) has doubts, naturally. There was a meeting on January 10 to go over the revised Belo Sun environmental assessment. Who knows how it will turn out? One imagines that Belo Sun will get the go-ahead and 'everyone' will be happy according to Mining.com.

 
[I understand the correct word to be 'glisters' not 'glitters', but I could be wrong.] 

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Mining.com's narrow-focus editorial approach merits a moment's reflection - reinforcing as it does the complex of relationships between T&A and Brazil in engineering consciousness etc. (and through Carnaval to the liminal for others) ... as does the caption, "Anglo finally has something to smile about in Brazil." The MPF investigation is a 'temporary hiccup' they say, and they are probably right. 

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Like the pretty girl at the dance this Xingu gold 'tem fila' / has a line following her, mostly horny Canadians: Kinross Gold Corporation, Yamana Gold Inc., Jaguar Mining Inc., and, Aura Minerals Inc.; plus AngloGold Ashanti Limited from South Africa; all with bated breath and thumping hearts (but no condom in their pocket I bet) awaiting the outcome on Belo Sun's (formerly Verena Minerals Corporation) Volta Grande project.

[The lion in the AngloGold Ashanti logo reminds me of C.S. Lewis for some reason; or The Lion King ... or something. Ashanti has antecedents too (and more).]

There are up to (possibly) several thousand 'garimpeiros artesanais' / artisanal miners, more-or-less organized, from several communities in the Grande Volta zone taking maybe 5 kilos a month with dynamite and (probably) mercury amalgamation, compared with Belo Sun taking out ~450 kilos a month over 20 years with cyanide leaching (based on 4 million ounces). See here and here.

A $2 stock; blips in May & September 2012 based on the MPF investigations maybe - but 6 billion in cash flow (based again on 4 million ounces) might change all that.

I don't understand why the only map included in the revised Belo Sun Relatório de Impacto Ambiental shows such a small fraction of the area covered by their claims. (?)

I remember life as a consultant: fill up the report with pictures of small animals and bumph on methodology, and throw in "The Decommissioning Plan will seek to mitigate socioeconomic impacts of the end of the undertaking in a regional context." 

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What might clean gold mining look like? (one asks):

Best to get a cognitive map going; Wikipedia is good for this: mining, extraction possibly involving amalgamation with mercury, cyanidation, recovery by carbon in pulp or electrowinning or the Merrill-Crowe process.

When gold was to be had in nuggets and flakes, 'dust' in river beds it was a matter of physically separating it - panning, sluicing - employing gravity. More-or-less the same for digging it out of the ground, plus crushing. Possibly augmented by using mercury to catch and consolidate the dust - done from ancient times apparently.

But to get the really tiny microscopic flakes, you need a chemical process: crush the ore, pile it up, drip cyanide solution on the pile to dissolve the gold, catch the water with the dissolved gold, and use activated carbon or electroplating or precipitation to get it out again. Heap leaching - often carried out in the open air, on pads with impervious clay or plastic liners (which never leak of course).

So, long story short, it looks to me like the only clean way is gravity (minus mercury).    Not happening.

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When advanced technology is in play the production of one gold ring can generate 20 tons of waste material - so say the environmentalists.

But we all know how they exaggerate; so reduce it by three orders of magnitude to ... 20 kilos. Are you willing to carry even that portion of the the environmental weight of your bauble on your finger or on a chain around your neck?

What might a golden ring signifying 'the circle of eternal love' mean then I wonder? 

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Who are these people?   Well, in the case of Belo Sun they are:

There are brief bios here.     The answer is that they are nobody special; richer than most - Forbes gives Mark Eaton's annual take as just short of a million - but a proportion of qualities quite in line with actuarial tables no doubt. And I was wondering what it would take to change their minds. No idea. I don't think they can or will change their minds, any more than the 99%, the consumers who drive this crazy contraption of an economy towards doom, will change theirs.

If Lester Brown had his way and the entire civilization were directed towards solving the environmental catastrophe as it was towards defeating Hitler during WW II, these people would almost certainly be in the thick of it as would I.

Or if there were time for the social imaginary to complete a cycle and fill itself with consciousness of right relationship - but that takes ... generations.

To quote Kurt Vonnegut, "So it goes."     As I was putting this nonsense together I found myself humming an old hymn; couldn't make it out at first but after a while I got the chorus:

Faith of our fathers, holy faith!
We will be true to thee till death.

Maybe some of us worship of a Sunday and sing this tune, feeling strong and faithful.

Be well gentle reader. 

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Postscript:
More of the same by another k-k-Canadian 'player', Guyana Frontier Mining Corp. (formerly Shoreham Resources Ltd. of Houston(?) and a penny stock this time) in Guyana, with collaboration from Rexma in French Guiana (Guyane). See map, and details here (from Le Monde), & here.

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A-and didn't even mention the natives, or the Terras Indígenas (the TI's indicated on one of the maps above). It's a perfect storm: caught between the evangelists and proselytizers (some of whom, like Erwin Kräutler, play both sides); the government with their Código Florestal and Portaria 303 (ditto Deborah Duprat); pension funds investing heavily in Belo Monte; gold; not to mention the loggers - all it needs is discovery of huge and accessible Coltan deposits to bring on the iPhone Valkyrie; Ragnarök.

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Damn!   Just think I have finished and Presto! this appears in the NYT: A Rumble in the Jungle. With points I did not think of making, a-and information on a bunch of TV that I was not (even after a week's researching) aware of. Oh well :-) definitely worth reading and thinking about.

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The Yangtze is a river so there are bound to be pictures of bridges ...

Nadav Kander, some details at Wikipedia, and the photographer's website; or troll for images with a search engine. 

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Down.

Totally Different. ('Eunoia? Is that it?)

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Three foundations:                                                               [I like it when things come in threes :-)   ]
              1962 - Silent Spring, Rachel Carson (1907–1964);
              1973 - Small Is Beautiful, Fritz Schumacher (1911–1977);
              1972 - The Limits to Growth,
                                   Dana Meadows (1941-2001), Dennis Meadows (1942-),
                                   Jørgen Randers, Bill Behrens, and many others.

Habits die hard, says Dennis (last man standing); three lessons: 1. It requires effort; and, 2. It's uncomfortable; but 3. It's possible. Four videos of him (~50 min. each): 2009, 2010 (90 min.), 2011, & 2012; and a symposium in March 2012 - here is a playlist.

I read these books in the 60's & 70's when they were written; some of my friends were already talking seriously about the greenhouse effect by the mid-70's; my 'A' subjects were maths & biology - Doh!    Better late than never I guess - for ethical if not practical reasons :-) 

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So ... towards the end of the 2011 lecture (at minute 29), he says, "I think we need something totally different."

Sure, he is talking about discount rates but the question hits me at another level and I am wondering: What would 'totally different' look like? (vis-à-vis the approaches of various social movements towards somehow re-establishing balance).

I have found two clues:

1. Efficacy in this context depends absolutely upon the nature and the strength of relations between individuals - that is what (fundamentally) moves us. Consider the word 'saw' in Luke 10-33 (possibly qualified by Matthew 18-15).

 

2. Economics and other (dismal) models based on the metric of price simply do not wash - they are irrelevant. Dennis Meadows proves it in a specific case - just try it on as a general principle. Why is my inbox jammed with messages asking me for money but offering no connection? Try Matthew 6-31. Too extreme? Look again at Theresa Spence and Raymond Robinson.

 
 
That's it; and both couched today in a manner which I am certain will distract and mislead you. Please believe me gentle reader that I do not quote scripture as if I were any sort of a Christian, not at all. 

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The list of disconnects becomes longer and longer:    Some people say to me, "So then, H. sapiens has had it. Oh well. Ho hum." Some say, "I have to bring up my kids," or, "pay for my house," or, "build up my career." Some just refuse to think about it at all. Some think about it and are overwhelmed and so stop thinking about it on purpose. And some are doing what they can.

And somewhat, a year or so, before the point at which abatement alone will not serve, we are already turning to adaptation & resilience. Resilience is very good - but is it a condition or a result of right relationship? And resilience or not, our best (last and faint) hope is for immediate economic collapse.

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When I first read In Watermelon Sugar I got it wrong (I thought it was about sex but you know, I was in my 20's, everything was about sex). A friend took me up on it at the time but I wouldn't hear it. Thirty or forty years later I read it again and finally understood that I had got it wrong and how.

Just this week I looked at Brautigan's potted bio on Wikipedia, discovered that he died by suicide at 49, AND that his body lay for a month or more before being found. Hell, my father (not a suicide but dead nonetheless) only lay for a week! Something else I might be wrong about.

I am often wrong and it often takes a long time to figgure out - decades.

And I probably never get anything right either :-) I re-read In Watermelon Sugar this week and except for some tantalizing almost-connections I understand it no better than I did back in 1968. Reading some of the reviews at Brautigan.net I see that no one else does either.

A very old friend said to me recently, "Our time here is short anyway - so we should do our best to be happy." Yes. Quite. I wonder if predicate logic permits happiness in the midst of economic collapse - I think so. 

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Problématique:    Humanity's predicament, the complex of problems facing humanity; and a central concept in The Limits To Growth.

One of the problems certainly is just that - the snake has so many heads. Hydra (defeated by Hercules only with the help of Iolaus - a lesson perhaps) and the Gorgon sisters all rolled into one and no Greek hero in sight.

Some of the fragmentation and competition among the aforementioned social movements stems from this: there are many issues and no clear hierarchy to provide an encompassing category. The 'environmental catastrophe' is close, 'décroissance' is close, but so is 'the 1%' and even 'the subject/object split in Graeco-Roman thought' ... lots of 'close', but no cigar.

Problématique may be the best; but it embodies a similar quandary to that faced by Stéphane Dion - and his 'Green Shift' failed to ignite. It takes time and study and probably a bourgeois education to understand.

If the Christians had managed to perfect humankind maybe everyone would already have that bourgeois education; anyway there is no time for that now (nevermind other impracticalities).

Just have to get on with no rubric banner I guess. 

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Complete cultural disconnect: (coming soon to a theatre near you)

The very last sentence of The Limits To Growth:

The crux of the matter is not only whether the human species will survive, but even more whether it can survive without falling into a state of worthless existence.

Maybe it merits thinking about what 'human flourishing' and 'worthless existence' might mean? And now, at the end of his (last?) lecture, I hear Dennis Meadows saying:

If we go through this period of decline without foreknowledge, without preparation, I fear that it will strip away many of our fundamental values and that we will be left afterwards with a system that is very very unpleasant.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see what 'unpleasant' might mean.


So-oh, clue #3 - with a video (1.5 min.) this time: "If you go out'a here promoting sustainable development but your actions are consistent with overshoot, that's what you're gonna get."    [There had to be three eh? :-)   ] 

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Catching up on a few threads:

Tim DeChristopher is in a half-way house (see here and it was confirmed for me by someone who knows him), and due for parole as soon as April.

 

Stephen Gardiner has written several notable essays: Human Rights in a Hostile Climate; and, Geoengineering and Moral Schizophrenia: What’s the Question?. He keeps a list of publications on his website.

 

Simon Critchley published this just before Christmas: The Freedom of Faith: A Christmas Sermon.

 

The UN's FAO tells us that as of December 6 the Food Price Index was falling. (?) Hard to believe.

 

Paul & Anne Ehrlich ask a good question: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided? January 8, 2013. "Yes," they say; but qualify it so heavily as to mean "No".

 
 

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Stephen Harper is up to dirty tricks; but Theresa Spence is right - it is a distraction. Nonetheless I am left thinking about 120 million over 7 years for 1,800 people - that's ~10 grand a year each - hard to ignore. I was mayor of a small isolated town for a while. We had about 400 grand in the bank and figgured we were all set for life. The mayor got no salary. Granted there were only 150 of us (scale it up is 5 million) ... still, 125 grand a year each for Theresa Spence & Clayton Kennedy?

That said, last word goes to Pam Palmeter: "... to stop Harper’s destructive environmental agenda."

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Another eu-word: Eunoia, meaning "well mind," or "beautiful thinking," according to Wikipedia. Not in the electronic OED I have (and that does almost piss me off :-) but I bet it's in the 24-volume.

That's it. Be well. [Try a few bars of Euphoria, see if that works :-)   ] 

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Down.

Odyssey.

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Raymond Robinson of Cross Lake Manitoba has joined Theresa Spence on Victoria Island in Ottawa. He began his hunger strike on December 12. Heroes!

The blockade of CN in Sarnia has been stopped by Superior Court Justice John Desotti. Ron Plain (another hero) has apparently declared this a 'huge victory', which it is not; but it is a lesson, viz. flash actions may be more effective.

Au lieu d'un chateau fort dressé au milieu des terres, il faudrait penser a l'armée des étoiles jetées dans le ciel. (possibly Jacques or Raïssa Maritain or Jean-Luc Barré, in the late 60's or so)

My own journey is now through Thomas Pynchon (it's the arthritis); though I would prefer to be walking with the KI or working with the Unist'ot'en in Wet'suwet'en beside Brett and Julien. 

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THE FISCAL CLIFF IS FICTION ... (and the 'Debt Ceiling' as well)

THE CLIMATE CLIFF IS NOT.


Tom Toles has a similar notion.

And a touching vignette from tOad below. His (her?) caption is "Les conséquences de nos chers nombreux conforts manquent cruellement d’un certain réconfort."

Which she (he?) translates, "We nestle in the comforts of progress though distressed by costs in process," trying to rhyme 'progress' & 'process'. But réconfort has a sense of giving courage, strengthening ...    [I'm working on it :-) ]
 
 
 
The real Odyssey (for me) these days is trying to see more clearly what is necessary (as posed a few weeks ago) and somehow stay with the Lucky '13 energy.    :-) 

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Good. Baby steps at least:    Stephen Harper has called for a more-or-less timely meeting on January 11. His motivations undoubtedly included pricking the Idle No More balloon before it could overwhelm him, and a nice estimation of Shawn Atleo's (and most of the rest of official native leadership's) current insecurity and likely increased tractability because of it ...

... but still.

The photograph at the right bears looking at closely; it is worth studying carefully, there's a lot in it - here it is again, larger, in colour - well more than three humble heroes (whom I applaud and support with all my heart).

A few pundits to remember (for good and bad reasons): Christie Blatchford, Jeffrey Simpson, Chantal Hébert, Jason Fekete & Tobi Cohen, and, L. Ian MacDonald.

I wish I could say that I had not heard certain things in the statements of Theresa Spence and Raymond Robinson - if they had not said them I might have been able to pretend they are not true; and anyway they were in extremis at the time if not articulo mortis. But there it is: baby steps on all sides.



In the words of Dennis Meadows: "I think we need something totally different," (just after minute 28 of this video and out of context I know). 

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Down.