E-waste is bad, scientist Josh Lepawsky told me, but it's nothing compared to the damage mining waste does, hidden among wild nature, in poor and indigenous communities, mainly in the Global South. And so began my journey of documenting some of the horrors of mining. I started off in Ireland, where I lived, expecting to find very little, and discovered the Russian mining oligarch-owned Aughinish Alumina, that had done terrible damage in Limerick.
It was 2022. We were in the process of selling our big house and moving to an apartment in Valencia, Spain. Even then, I hadn't given up on the hi-tech "renewability" dream. One of the first questions I asked was whether we would be allowed install solar on the communal roof. Arriving in Spain, I decided to dig into its mining history and discovered the Rio Tinto area and the centuries of damage done there. I found Milla'n Milla'n and his research on why the Spanish summer rains were disappearing, and how authorities tried to silence him.
My wife, Rosilda, is Brazilian, part-Indigenous. We have often spent time in Brazil, and I used some of it to visit Minas Gerais, the Brazilian state that means "General Mining". Brumadinho, Bento Rodriques, Mariana, Congonhas-- places with toxic mining secrets and barren futures. Inspired by Rosilda, I began to discover more about Indigenous culture. I interviewed Daniel, an Indigenous person who wasn't supposed to exist in Minas Gerais because white people were sure they had exterminated them all. Daniel told me about the true meaning of being Indigenous. I would come across the same descriptions from Indigenous people all over the world. Indigenous means being truly of the land, staying put and being dedicated to becoming a good ancestor, where you take care of the water, air and soil so that you can lovingly pass something good on to future generations. An Indigenous person sees life everywhere: in the air, soil, rivers, birds, bees, trees. The mountains are alive. The rocks are alive. The mountain is your mother and you're not going to mine your mother. Everything is deeply connected and loved.
The more I discovered, the more Indigenous protectors I came across, the bleaker the outlook became. Indigenous communities are under so much pressure from mining, from coal, oil, gas. Now it was even worse, as there was a mining frenzy for so-called green metals: aluminum, lithium, nickel, copper, cobalt, rare earths, etc. etc. The harms are accelerating, multiplying. These so-called green metals for so-called renewable energy are an oxymoron, if there ever was one. They may be vital for the construction of solar panels, wind turbines and batteries but there is nothing remotely green or renewable about them. It's all part of an elaborate con and scam on our environment. We're being led to believe that if we simply change the energy device and source, we can keep on consuming and that, in fact, not only will our continued consumption not be bad for our environment, it will be good for our environment. Because, the con goes, if we move super-fast and roll out all this so-called clean and green energy tech, we will be able to "transition-- "the Green Transition-- away from coal, oil and gas. This is a total pipe dream down which oil and gas flows. This is a lie as wide as an open-pit coal mine. In the name of the "Green" Transition and "green" metals, we are accelerating the worst of all worlds: more coal, more oil, more gas, AND hydro, AND nuclear AND solar AND wind. We are accelerating when we should be braking.
The most important thing I discovered while writing this book was not technological. Nor was it material. It was social, cultural. It was obvious once I could see it. There's a common underlying cause of all this greedy devouring. Macho man. Great men, of whom I had hoped to be one. The stench of power, control, domination. I too wanted to dominate, to compete, to work hard and climb to the top. To be wealthy and have a big car and a big house. So, it was very painful for me to find out that at the bottom of the bottom of causes, it's not a CO2 problem, not even an overconsumption problem. It's a greedy man problem. The greedy elite male has gotten way, way, way out of balance. I have met enough of them to know that they will never, ever be satisfied. They will devour everything if they are let. If we don't bring the male of our species back into balance, everything else we do will be futile. For the engine of destruction has got balls.
As I more deeply explored Indigenous thought, I discovered concepts such as bearing witness and intergenerational struggle. Keeping memories alive over hundreds of years, passing on truths and secrets of how to survive in a particular landscape. Being a good ancestor, after all, means being a long thinker, someone who looks to the future with a sense of care and love. Someone who looks to the past too. A backwards thinker, who longs to commune with all life and materials that have gone before them. Who thinks slowly, acts slowly, is constantly in conversation, and is searching for the solution that is good enough; for the perfect solution is only ever perfect for some. Daniel told me about resistance and being a witness. He urged me to tell their story and when I promised I would, he grabbed my hands and smiled at me with eyes that said: You've promised.
Indigenous thought is almost directly opposed to the tech bro Silicon Valley culture I was so much a part of; a valley flooded with lies and deceit. For so long, Silicon Valley has been expert at hiding its true face. It literally hid underground the chemical tanks it needed to make its semiconductors, because it wanted to promote clean tech and green software. When I did workshops for Big Tech, I found bicycle paradises, wooden cutlery, table tennis, all sorts of ethereal, soft stuff. In the meetings, though, the tech bros were impatient. Build. Build. Build. Enough talk. Just do it. They hated meetings. Committees were sneered at. They eulogized the solitary hacker who, fueled with Coca Cola, pizza and Big Macs, stayed up all weekend to hack out some brilliant technical solution in a hundredth the time it would take a sludgy development team to do it. Stories would pass like wildfires about how this or that piece of software was developed in super-quick time. Faking it until you made it-- lying through your teeth and stealing data where you could-- moving fast and breaking things. What a life!
Good ancestors? Are you joking? The tech bro horizon is at most 18 months to three years, when they're going to cash out. And literally anything goes-- just don't get caught, and if you do, have a good lawyer. At one stage, a tech bro explained to me that the very best of the very best minds in Silicon Valley were relentlessly focused on "user engagement". Planned obsolescence was not enough. No, deliberately making products with super-short lives that were really difficult to repair and almost impossible to recycle, that wasn't profitable enough. A more addictive model was needed.
The Web of all those promises had morphed into the Valley of Pimps and Pushers. That's the core business of AI: to create functioning addicts that can be sold to advertisers so as to sell more fascism, more trashy planned obsolescence products, and the great wheel of overconsumption keeps on spinning, faster and faster. Accelerating. Accelerating. Energy. We must have more energy! We'll reopen Three Mile Island and rename it Crane Clean Energy Center. More coal, oil, gas, hydro, solar, wind. More. More. More.
I wasn't proud of my father. He wasn't a hard worker. There was no development or progress on our farm, only slow decline. If it were not for my mother's efforts, we would have been in a bad way. In the end, my father was on his own and he seemed happy that way. He grew most of what he ate. Never took a flight. Never learned to drive. Cycled into his eighties. I was ashamed of him. And now I am ashamed of myself. All that success. Books published. Sought-after speaker. Worked in 40 countries. It felt special sleeping in business class. When I was born, in 1962, Ireland was economically poor and ecologically rich. We are the Irish generation of hard workers who embraced technology and globalization. We're the generation that did three times more damage to our environment than the previous 8,000 generations combined. And we're proud of it. We devastated the wild salmon and decimated birdlife and I could go on and on about an Ireland craving to be top of the class in the Growth Death Cult. Growth to me was a religion. Everything was okay once the economy was growing. Infinite growth on a finite planet met impossible-is-nothing optimism. There would only be one winner to take all.
I'm a bad ancestor. I've done so much damage. I started out intending to write a history of the evils of mining. Then it became a sort of witness statement. In the end, I found myself out. This is a confession. And a warning about technology.
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