Is Gold ethical?

[Osal]

A few months ago, there was an accident aat an abandoned Gold mine in southern Colorado that sent millions of gallons of toxic waste into the headwaters of the Animas River.

The Animas looked like this for a while:

Lots of damage to the river and to the water supply for many communities in the Animas watershed.

Gold mining is incredibly toxic. Shaft-and-drift mining leaves aa cornucopia of deadly minerals exposed to the surface environment. Extracting the gold from the ore often involves the use of cyanide.

This, of course is hard on the environment and leathal to many sentient beings.

Driven by greed and demand, gold mining is raping the earth and leaving permanent scars and potential disasters such as found on the Animas.

Our purchaing gold products drives this plague upon our planet. As Buddhists we contribute to this. Is our participation ethical?

 

[Nietzsche]

A few months ago, there was an accident aat an abandoned Gold mine in southern Colorado that sent millions of gallons of toxic waste into the headwaters of the Animas River.

The Animas looked like this for a while:



Lots of damage to the river and to the water supply for many communities in the Animas watershed.

Gold mining is incredibly toxic. Shaft-and-drift mining leaves aa cornucopia of deadly minerals exposed to the surface environment. Extracting the gold from the ore often involves the use of cyanide.

This, of course is hard on the environment and leathal to many sentient beings.

Driven by greed and demand, gold mining is raping the earth and leaving permanent scars and potential disasters such as found on the Animas.

Our purchaing gold products drives this plague upon our planet. As Buddhists we contribute to this. Is our participation ethical?

Gold is in every modern electronic device because of how superb a conductor of electricity it is. If you want to use the internet, you're going to need gold.

 

[Nietzsche]

That doesn't answer the question, Nietzsche.

...

Somehow, the entire second half of my post was cut.

This was the jist of it;

Gold mining is dangerous, yes. But it's also quite vital to civilization.

 

[Milton Platt]

Gold is simply a metal. It doesn't have ethics.

 

[Penumbra]

A few months ago, there was an accident aat an abandoned Gold mine in southern Colorado that sent millions of gallons of toxic waste into the headwaters of the Animas River.

The Animas looked like this for a while:

Lots of damage to the river and to the water supply for many communities in the Animas watershed.

Gold mining is incredibly toxic. Shaft-and-drift mining leaves aa cornucopia of deadly minerals exposed to the surface environment. Extracting the gold from the ore often involves the use of cyanide.

This, of course is hard on the environment and leathal to many sentient beings.

Driven by greed and demand, gold mining is raping the earth and leaving permanent scars and potential disasters such as found on the Animas.

Our purchaing gold products drives this plague upon our planet. As Buddhists we contribute to this. Is our participation ethical?

It could be argued that there is a spectrum of ethics here.

Gold used for electronics and certain other engineering applications serves a specific functional purpose. Gold used for jewelry is just shiny and resistant to corrosion. And some gold is just used to store wealth- people dig it up, put it into gold bars, and then put it back underground and pay people to guard it.

Honestly, in terms of the overall quantities mined, gold is not high on my list of concerns. The cumulative amount of gold ever mined in the world can fill something like three Olympic sized swimming pools. Compared to the sheer quantity of coal used worldwide, polluting the air and oceans, plus all the other large quantities of substances mined, gold is a tiny fraction.

About a month and a half ago, Brazil had arguably their largest ever environmental disaster in their country's history. A dam failed, and the result was that 60 million cubic meters of waste from an iron ore mine spewed into a major river. Some people died, and the area has been hit with this toxic mess. Estimates are that it'll take a few billlion USD to mitigate it.

I wouldn't particularly say we're leaving permanent scars. Earth tends to do a wonderful job of healing itself over millions of years. For the most part I think we're hurting ourselves, our descendants, and other animals that happen to be unfortunate enough to share the earth with us at this time.

So, wondering about the ethics of participating in gold is a bit overly specific, I think. It's more a question of whether civilization itself is ethical, since gold is like, something around 194th on the list of damage we do to the world, probably. Civilization is pretty clearly harmful to anyone that isn't a human, and also harmful to some of the humans, while being beneficial to some other humans.

But walking around covered in gold jewelry is probably not the most ethical use of one's resources.