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This study addresses the social and environmental repercussions on Amazonian communities due to gold mining following the conclusion of official concessions. Framed within the literature on natural resource extraction, sustainability, and social impacts in developing countries, the work employs qualitative methods, including interviews with residents and field observations in the community of Yutzupino in the Ecuadorian Amazon. It reveals that post-concession mining, often informal and illegal, sharply triggers social and environmental degradation. The research emphasises the need to incorporate sustainability principles into mining concessions to prevent such effects. This analysis enhances understanding of the complex socio-ecological aftermath of mining in vulnerable environments. It proposes recommendations for mitigation, underlining the importance of dialogue between communities, governments, and mining companies.

The lakes around Yellowknife (Northwest Territories, Canada) have been impacted by multiple environmental stressors throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. Here, we have synthesized diatom assemblage data from ten lake sediment cores from the Yellowknife area and used a landscape-scale paleolimnological approach to investigate the cumulative impacts of past gold mining activities, urbanization, and climate warming on aquatic biota. Our investigations indicated that diatom species turnover (measured using detrended canonical correspondence analysis) was highest at lakes closer to the city and mines, as these sites were more severely impacted by land-use changes (e.g., sewage disposal, run-off from waste disposal sites) and roaster stack emission from the gold mines. Diatom assemblage shifts indicative of climate-induced changes to lake thermal properties were also observed across the gradient of human activities. The inclusion of remote sites was useful to disentangle the effects of climate-mediated changes from impacts related to mining and urbanization. This investigation suggests that the diatom assemblages of the lakes around Yellowknife have changed markedly over the last ∼80 years and there are no signs of biological recovery since the cessation of mining activities around the turn of the 21st century. The biota of the subarctic lakes around Yellowknife are now strongly influenced by climate-mediated changes to lake thermal properties and the urban lakes are also influenced by the legacies of past land-use changes.

In current social theorising there is a burgeoning interest in the ‘afterlife’ of resource extraction. In this chapter, we maintain that while the assumption of a post-extractive afterlife might grasp certain social and extractive dynamics of mining areas, it is not necessarily indicative of how people in mining sites themselves conceive of being in time. To this end, we explore how different temporal experiences coincide and converge with one another in two informal gold-mining regions in Colombia and Venezuela. In particular, we reveal that during our fieldwork in these regions the extractive present was imagined as an afterlife and/or a thing of the past. In other words, miners who were extracting in the present nevertheless experienced and described their work through tropes of anteriority (of being stuck in an earlier time) and posteriority (of being stuck after history). In the gold rush of the Venezuelan Arco Minero region, miners encountered their ongoing mining practices as if having descended into a messy hereafter they had never imagined becoming part of. In the Colombian Chocó region, residents of post-boom towns and villages returned to pre-boom extractive practices, and described these practices as the tragic aftermath of a rich gold rush, while simultaneously relating them to pre-boom years of poverty. We couple both cases to highlight how lived experiences in present-day gold country cannot be analysed without considering previous booms and busts, as one resource frontier’s life is often another frontier’s afterlife. We present ‘muddled times’ as an alternative way to conceive of the temporality of the gold mine.

Copyright of Politique Africaine is the property of Karthala Editions Diffusion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Using the concept of alchemy as a conceptual backbone, this article explores the effects of diverse legal pluralities on the Embera Chamí Indigenous people living in the gold-rich ancestral homeland of the Resguardo Indígena Cañamomo Lomaprieta in Caldas, Colombia. Drawing on ten years of collaborative research and ethnography, I develop a concept I call “Raw Law,” the law of outlawed, armed actors and their norms, sanctions and modus operandi, contributing insights that push conceptual boundaries and add complexity to analyses of “the law.” I show the “inter-il-legalities” at work, as the Embera Chamí exercise their own law over their self-named and centuries-old “ancestral mining,” as a counter-proposal and exercise of self-determination in the face of State Law that criminalizes this gold mining and attempts to impose unilaterally developed formalization schemes. I tease out the effects of “nefarious alchemical” technologies deployed to erode the Embera Chamí land base and constrain their autonomy and decision-making, highlighting the “positive alchemies” the traditional authorities use to assert their self-government and push for their rights to be upheld. I consider the types of transnational flows intruding on the Embera Chamí and what this distinct and violent context means for analysis through the lens of legal pluralities in Colombia, Latin America, and beyond.

Colombia has been one of the hotspots of the Latin American mineral super-cycle. The State and mining companies have colluded to privilege a model of large-scale corporate mining coherent with three decades of consolidation of a neoliberal sociocultural order. A strong mining sector is coherent with a project obtaining badly needed revenues to fund peace agreements with left-wing guerrillas, sanitary emergency measures and consolidate the state and private capital in regions ridden by violence. All these events and factors are critical in describing “transitional Colombia”. This article analyses this time as a conjuncture, and it does so from the point of view of the sites that are most impacted by the dream of a modern, peaceful country. In the case of gold, contrasting the desires of influential players in the sector, the countries' mineral is mainly extracted by the poor and precarious population or by criminal organisations, which often coerce the former. Managing profitable but conflicting regions has oscillated between the open criminalisation and the more managerial approach during the last decade. The article explores the implications of this latter set of strategies that rely on managing affect in mining communities. Taking as an example the case of Marmato, Caldas, the article will illustrate how Corporate Social Responsibility, 'productive chains', and entrepreneurial programmes operate. Finally, the article concentrates on the lived experiences of everyday techniques of pressure, shaming, and desire, leading to an analysis of the affective regimes of current socio-political conjuncture, crisis, and societal management in Colombia. The article is based on ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Colombia and documentary research.

Cocoa farmers in Côte d'Ivoire are mostly below the poverty line. In September 2019, the Ivorian and Ghanaian governments imposed the Living Income Differential (LID) on private companies, an additional $ 400 per ton compared to the international market price, passed on to the producer price (farm gate price). At the beginning of 2020, the Covid-19 arose. In this dual context, how did prices change? Has the hope of increased income been achieved? Three approaches are used: a) monitoring of the selling price of cocoa beans and monitoring of the price of purchased cocoa farming inputs and basic necessities for households; b) monthly monitoring of farm gate cocoa price in 2020–2021; c) an analysis of national production data from Côte d'Ivoire and Ghana, the world price, variations in the demand for beans by the grinding industry, and the price paid to producers, over 20 years. The first result is a very temporary and limited rise in the farm gate price of cocoa at the end of 2020, then its fall in 2021 as the price of inputs and basic necessities soar. The 2021–2022 campaign is even more harmful with a tightening of the price scissor. It is therefore the failure of the LID, but the role of Covid-19 in this failure is very nuanced with regard to the declarations of the State and the multinationals. The drop in prices and the loss of income for cocoa farmers in 2020–2022 rather fits into the economic theory of games. Without control of their supply, an agreement between two companies or countries cannot work. The failure is part of a largely endogenous structural change: demographic growth, policies to encourage migration and deforestation, opacity of the sector and finally continued growth of the supply of cocoa from Côte d'Ivoire on the international market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims at questioning the power dynamics in the region of Upper Guinea, in Guinea, starting from an analysis of the increasing resort to the national justice system in land disputes. Besides the growth of artisanal and industrial gold mining, the pressure on the land and the inhabitants of this region has worsened with the multiplication of property deeds. Based on a twenty-month ethnographic work, this article first analyzes an interpersonal land conflict, and finishes with an emblematic case of land grabbing in the area, concerning the town of Kintinian. This article proposes an analysis at multiple scales to question the notions of dispossession and legal property in the context of land grabbing.

Artisanal gold mining is an important source of income for millions of people across Burkina Faso. However, it is also a source of significant health risks for the gold miners' community. This study, conducted in three sites in the rural commune of Méguet, aims to show the impact of artisanal gold mining on the health for those involved in this activity. The methodology was based on the collection of quantitative data from gold miners and residents of the sites through a questionnaire and interviews with resource people. The study involved a representative sample of 147 artisanal gold miners (about 25% of all the gold miners) and about 50 households living near the sites within a 0.5 km of radius. The results of this study show that health risk is present at all levels of the artisanal gold production chain. Extraction and mechanical processing methods expose gold miners to traumatic injuries (52.21% of respondents) and deaths (5 during the 6 months of the study). At the sites, 67% of gold miners use chemicals that are dangerous to health, such as mercury, cyanide and acids. Gold production methods combined with lack of hygiene at the sites, exposure to acute respiratory infections (273 cases recorded at the Meguet Health and Social Promotion Centre, between December 2017 and May 2018), malaria (205 cases), traumatic injuries (156 cases), sexually transmitted infections (125 cases), diarrhea diseases (109 cases) and skin infections (87 cases). Regards to the weight of artisanal gold mining in the rural world, strategies to improve the production and supervision techniques of this activity, remain essential to reduce health risks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2014 and the unexpected discovery of nuggets in the Saharan part of Niger, a feverish race towards the search for gold mobilizes tens of thousands of nomads, rural and urban, who have become gold diggers and come from Niger as well as from neighbouring or more distant countries. Sudden, massive and cosmopolitan, but also moving, sometimes violent and located in sparsely or uninhabited areas, gold mining is largely informal, i.e. often considered illegal but tolerated. Initially artisanal, it is becoming more and more mechanized, even industrial. The aim of this article is to analyse the spectacular development of gold mining in the north of Niger in order to draw up an initial provisional assessment six years after it began and, above all, to highlight the main challenges ahead. Our analysis is the result of several fact-finding missions in the field in 2018 and 2019, to meet the various players in this extractive rush. Contrary to the exploitation of other mining resources such as uranium, gold mining has the particularity of being very little monopolized by both multinational mining companies and the state, which is largely outmoded and cautious. Our approach will consider the rush as an exemplary case of setting up a complex, mobile and evolving system of resource predation exercised by multiple actors. We will address the transformations of informal and concerted regulation mechanisms between actors that took place during the different phases of the rush that we will qualify. If this rush produces major social, economic and political changes in a particularly unstable Saharan space, we will also discuss the disastrous and largely underestimated environmental and health effects. For this rush is symptomatic of what is happening on a wider scale and according to similar logics in the Sahara and the northern Sahel, where a vast pioneering nebula of gold exploitation has been spreading for the past ten years or so from the shores of the Red Sea to the Atlantic. More generally, the various features of the spectacular development of gold mining north of Niger that we will highlight make it a gold rush comparable in some respects and to some extent to the Californian model of the mid-nineteenth century. Without having too general an ambition to characterize the features common to any gold rush, we will nevertheless propose some avenues for reflection in this direction, distinguishing in particular three phases of gold rushes based on the case of the contemporary Nigerian Sahara.

Copyright of VertigO is the property of La Revue Electronique en Sciences de l'Environnement VertigO and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of VertigO is the property of La Revue Electronique en Sciences de l'Environnement VertigO and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Recherches Sociographiques is the property of Recherches Sociographiques and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Études Inuit Studies is the property of Centre interuniversitaire d'etudes et de recherches autochtones (CIERA) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Études Inuit Studies is the property of Centre interuniversitaire d'etudes et de recherches autochtones (CIERA) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Politique Africaine is the property of Karthala Editions Diffusion and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Pouvoirs is the property of Editions du Seuil and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article examines the historiography of the Kirkland Lake strike from 1941 to 1942 in Ontario. This strike opposed management and local 240 of the union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. This article pays particular attention to one of the mines affected by the strike, the Lake Shore Gold Mines. The author points to this strike as important in Canadian history, the history of the labor movement, and the history of the Second World War. The work of historian Laurel Sefton MacDowell is examined in light of evidence that was released in 2005. This study examines job applications in addition to documents and newspaper reports that MacDowell had studied.

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS)) is the property of Canadian Association of Latin American & Caribbean Studies (CALACS) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The mercury content in bottom sediments of Kalkan Lake, of the Uchala district, the Southern Ural. It was assumed that high concentrations of mercury in fish due to pollution of bottom sediments as a result of amalgamation at developing of gold placers. Detailed study of distribution of different elements in sediments show close association Hg with the chalcophylic elements, whose anomalies do not have technogenic nature. Association of mercury with the elements-companions of gold placers is evidence of basic contribution of natural mercury to its anomalous accumulation in sediments and fish. This is result of steady long-term natural mercury pollution.

This article focuses on the issues raised by the local gold mining industry in Burkina Faso. The small-scale extraction of gold of is today one of the pillars of the economy of this poor state of West Africa. However, the gold mining results in the destructuring of the social fabric and the degradation of the environment. The discovery of a gold lode generates massive migrations to mining sites and the creation of makeshift camps. Far from the cities, the miners and their families are deprived of social and sanitary infrastructure and live in great precariousness. Finally, the environment around the mines is durably polluted by the techniques of extraction of gold (use of mercury or cyanide). Nevertheless, we will see that more environmentally and population-friendly initiatives are now being tested in Burkina Faso.

The objective of this article is to understand how socioeconomic and legal-institutional factors are contributing to evidence the expansion of cooperativism in gold mining in Brazil, demonstrating an overview of these organizations in the country and signaling to their reality. Data from mining requests made available by the National Mining Agency were accessed and analyzed those made by cooperatives. The results of this work are presented in two broad categories: (i) Overview of mining concessions for mineral cooperatives, which show the intense movement of application for gold mining area, especially in the Amazon, conducted by miners' cooperatives; and (ii) Densification and geographical dispersion of mineral cooperatives in Brazil, which signal the exponential expansion of mining requisitions for gold mining by cooperatives between 2019 and 2022, organizations and their dispersion to different regions of Brazil. The price of gold and the easing of the gold mining legislation in Brazil interfered widely in this movement of mineral cooperatives. Despite the expansion of the demand for gold mining made by cooperatives, this movement does not mean strengthening the social organization of miners/ miners and this suggests the importance of this research agenda and the need for its continuity.

In the past decade, gold mining has developed on a large scale in the Bolivar State (Venezuela). The national government seeks to integrate the Guyana region into its “Strategic Plan of Joint Action for the Development of the Orinoco Belt and Mining Arc” (Ministerio, 2011). The project aims at developing, at the macro-regional level, a vast frontier, rich in energy resources (conventional and unconventional oil and gas) and mining on both sides of the Orinoco river. Gold mining causes environmental damage and human destruction. Governments try to control the evolution of the mining frontier.

The French territory of Guiana is currently exploited illegally by thousands of small-scale artisanal gold miners who extract each year between 5 and 10 tons of gold and smuggle them into Suriname and Brazil. Almost exclusively Brazilian and called garimpeiros, these miners deploy in French Guiana the economic, social and cultural system that makes their specificity in Brazil, and that covers Suriname as well. This system is grounded on a specific territorial logic which articulates all the mining territories of the Brazilian Amazon and of the Guiana plateau in the form of a transnational or, rather, an a-national network in which borders are no more than obstacles that are hardly impossible to overcome. The garimpeiros approach the different territories in function of their own evaluation grid where a region richness in gold or the pressure by authorities to prohibit their activities are much more relevant than the country the area they consider belongs to, thus reducing borders to mere material contingencies. Based on four years of extensive research about illegal gold mining in French Guiana, this paper shows how the “garimpeiro system” is deployed in the French territory and exploits the difficulty of border control, both on rivers and at sea. It also analyzes how this system links illegal mining areas in French Guiana with the ones in Brazil and in Suriname.