It’s something hardly anyone talks about but the effects of our capitalism and consumerism have made a devastating impact on our land and history via mining. This is absolutely not just limited to countries in Africa and Asia that have at times been destroyed by mines. According to field experts, Australia has never fully rehabilitated a mine (some reports suggest a mere handful have). There are more than 60,000 empty and abandoned holes and sites across the country. On top of this Australia already has far less stringent conditions on what rehabilitation is compared to Europe and America and it’s not even meeting those low standards. There are a variety of reasons for this – most involve companies not caring and not wanting to pay.
In affluent countries you can continue to not care because the damage is often kept hidden, until you or your family personally feel the consequences – and then it’s too late. This is a huge problem of scale – it’s hard to fathom how it will ever be fixed but if you live in Australia or care about the country maybe its time to lobby governments and donate to science groups and organizations who desperately need money to do their amazing work of fixing this. And our smaller actions at home of not buying and using so much stuff, so worldwide we dont have to mine so much, are big actions collectively.
You can read more about this problem on our article here.