Malthusian sustainability

Are the authors of “Sustainable development, Part 1” (T.N.M., June 3/02) really ignorant of the most basic “sustainability” activity of all for the human race? Mining provides the raw materials to build everything else. It is, and has been, so closely associated with human development that, like the beaver’s use of trees and earth materials, there can be little question it is a life-sustaining instinct.

Most often, the only way we can determine if early man passed this way or that is the presence of stone or metal tools, mineral-based construction ruins, cave paintings (made with hematite and limonite), and the like — and we name the stage of human development after these materials (Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, etc.). Moreover, these early people might be described as “developing societies.” Am I breaking new ground here?

Is it such a wonder that the developing nations have a favourable outlook on mining? They know how we got where we are in the developed world. The intellectual dishonesty or naivete of the notion that mining is an elective activity (“no longer socially acceptable,” like chewing tobacco) has been a barrier to fruitful dialogue with environmentalists for decades.

I’m prepared to admit that an overzealous environmental lobby at the outset (and the industry’s invention of geochemical analysis) was probably required to get the environment on the agenda. Now that it is there, though, don’t you think it safe to admit that the survival of homo sapiens (important for those future generations, by the way) depends on the use — wise use — of minerals won from the ground?

And can we drop the absurdity that we are using up future generations’ mineral resources? The finiteness doctrine has already proven itself a failure of imagination. Taken to its logical conclusion, rationing resources for the unborn still arrives at a brutish, short life for future generations anyway, even if mining then should become “socially acceptable.”

I thought that Malthus, Jevons and the Club of Rome fantasies had worn themselves out in the previous two centuries. Perhaps there’s an opportunity to right these misapprehensions in future articles. Remember, future generations will be reading this stuff, just as we read Malthus, et al., today.

Gary Pearse

Equapolar Resource Consultants

Ottawa