In Na Nong Bong, the
hazards of mining and the TKL mining company have reached the people. They can
no longer use rain water or river water because it is too contaminated to
drink, but many of the households cannot afford bottled water so they must
drink and bathe in the hazardous water. This has occurred because of a gold
mine located one km away from the community on Phu Thap Fah Mountain. Why is
this gold necessary? Its use within technology and consumerism must be
important enough to pursue despite the dangers that mining presents to Na Nong
Bong and other marginalized populations.
Prior to arriving in the
Na Nong Bong area, my peers and I learned a great deal about the mining process
in Thailand, specifically the gold mining process. At the present time,
Thailand only permits open-pit mining, the extraction of minerals from a large
man-made pit, rather than traditional mining which is more expensive and
hazardous to laborers. There are multiple extraction methods for gold, but the
one used most frequently in Thailand is gold cyanidation. This process involves
soaking ore in cyanide until the gold is leached out, this cyanide is then
stored in tailing ponds which can often leak into soil and nearby water
systems. This toxic process incurs environmental and health risks that affect
the communities surrounding the mine sites.
The mining process is
problematic on all levels, but is seen as a necessary evil by anyone that uses
technology. The sentiment that if modernity is to be maintained then we must
extract minerals from the earth at an ever increasing rate is unsustainable and
unconscionable. There is no way to maintain this level of modernity without
critically endangering natural resources and marginalized populations.
The injustice that faces
Na Nong Bong speaks to a deeper issue than environmentalism, it is an
illustration of the skewed priorities of our modern world. Consumerism is the
insatiable desire for goods which is an unsustainable movement that is leading
to the earth’s disintegration. If this were not frightening enough, the
consumers rarely have the foresight or resources to research where the goods
came from so informed decisions cannot be made. It is this willing and demanding
blindness which drives commodity fetishism within our consumer culture.
All objects and goods
are fetishized by consumers as most people do not know where their dinner came
from let alone their cell-phone. Consumers are ignorant of the social and environmental
implications of an object. It is made up of resources, and resources were used
in its production; the extraction of said resources and assembly of the object
takes human labor. All these variables contribute the real cost of an object,
but that real cost is rarely charged and so the consumer buys what they think
is a replaceable object. It is this planned obsolescence that drives the demand
but truly the object is irreplaceable in its global impact.
The willingness of
mining companies to ignore human outcry proves that demand on these products
outweighs the moral implication in their use. It proves that there is very
little thought put into the consumption of minerals. There has been no effort
on the Thai government’s part to curb TKL’s cyanide extraction or their plans
to mine Phu Lek after Phu Thap Fah has been drained of gold. TKL leaves its
tailing ponds unlined, free to leach into the water table, and this sort of
cost-cutting occurs because there is no consumer asking “where did my gold jewelry
come from and were any people hurt in its creation?” No, those questions are
not asked by consumers, because if they were, the consumer would not exist.
Taryn Orona
Beloit College
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