Skip to main content

mining

Red Mountain

The copper mine in Erdenet, Mongolia, provides jobs, income, opportunities. It finances most of the city’s infrastructure. It funds a hospital. People are grateful for the mine, and proud. There’s copper everywhere in Erdenet.

Lord of Childhood

We are all enchanted. But we have to pay for it.

You know that part of town where the miners once lived? Sooty frame houses, porches whose floorboards spring up? Rusty screen doors that close with a thrum, then a series of clicks, then a squeak?

Lieutenant Ponce Pilate Mbenga, a Central African Army officer with the Chinko Project, looks on as one of the rangers examines a leopard skin confiscated from Mbororo poachers during a camp raid.

The Fight for Chinko

In the ungoverned wilds of the Central African Republic, a group of young conservationists uses every resource it can muster—from technology to armed confrontation—to protect a vital habitat.

The approach to La Rinconada, a gold-mining town nestled under a glacier in the Peruvian Andes.

Dreaming of El Dorado

Senna has pounded rock; she has ground it to gravel with her feet, she has teetered under heavy bags of crushed stone. But she was never lucky as a child miner; she never found even the faintest glimmer of gold. Today, with her father dead and her mother bordering on desperation, she makes fancy gelatins and sells them to men as they come and go from the mine shafts that pock the unforgiving face of Mount Ananea. When she is asked why she slogs through mud and snow for a few hours of school every day, as few children do, she says she wants to be a poet. She is fourteen years old.

Jharia Burning

At the center of Dhanbad City, in the Jharia region of northeastern India, amid a handful of concrete buildings, stands the enormous bronze statue of a coal miner. He is shirtless, muscular, and handsome. He strides doggedly forward, a mining helmet on his head, a pickax slung over his shoulder. The message is clear: Coal is my life.

A miner piles salt to drain and cure on the edge of Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. A fifty kilo bag sells for three bolivianos, about fifty cents.

The Solution: Bolivia’s Lithium Dreams

The 4,086-square-mile Salar de Uyuni is remote, flat as a billiard table, twice the size of Rhode Island—and it hides a great treasure. The billions of gallons of mineral-rich brine just below its crystalline surface hold perhaps half the world’s supply of lithium.

Tin Fever

In the first shafts of light to pierce the jungle canopy, the tin porters danced. They swayed and sashayed to the languorous rhythms coming from a radio that someone, in the night, had thought to stash under a bag of beans. The rest, an hour earlier, had been looted—the other radios, flashlights, pocketfuls of cash, half of Adolphe's precious stock of sardine tins, and two porters to transport it all, nudged forward with assault rifles into the moonless oblivion of the jungle.

The Price of the Paperless Revolution

We hiked along a twisting, curse-worthy trail down the craggy face of Brownsberg plateau, hacking our way toward Witi Creek. I had been told by the administrators of the Central Suriname Nature Reserve that many of the waterways that snaked through the country’s only national park on the northern edge of the Amazon were dotted with illegal gold mines, but I wanted to see for myself.

Father Copper

When Carmen Ahumada first looked on the copper mining city of Calama, she wanted to die. It was 1958, long after Germany’s World War I-era invention of artificial saltpeter—the main ingredient in bombs—brought Chile’s glory days as a world supplier to an end and made obsolete the tiny, arduous saltpeter towns that had cropped up all over the Atacama Desert.

Pages