“Mining faces some of the most difficult challenges of any industry and is distrusted by many . . .” (T.N.M., Facts ‘n’ Figures, July 29-Aug. 4, 2002). In fact, the boot is on the other foot.
The mining industry is sustained by men in their 40s and older who have neither the desire nor the ability to earn a living any other way. For many senior executives, it is an exercise in frustration. For more junior people, periods of moderately well-paid work in a detiorating work environment are interspersed with increasingly long periods of unemployment. These people are not encouraging their sons and nephews to go into the industry; for this and many other reasons, the recruitment of mining engineers dried up in the 1990s.
By 2030, almost all of those who went into mining before 1990 will have left the industry, retired or died; in the coming decades, the mining industry — worldwide — is going to suffer a major loss of manpower and skills. The problem won’t be a shortage of minerals in the ground but a shortage of people who know how to mine them.
Overproduction has been creeping up on the industry for 200 years and affecting its viability for the past 50. Over the forthcoming decades, this problem will solve itself through a lack of both manpower and investment. Twenty to 30 years from now, the mostly urban, and appallingly naive, population of the industrialized world is going to wake up to the fact that mining isn’t such a bad thing after all.
Thomas Morrison
Delta, B.C.
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