Keep an Open Mine!

     So this week we were studying extractive industries, and trying to figure out the asnswer to "Can mining be sustainable?" It's an interesting question... mining and extractive industry is very closely wound into our everyday lives. We really can't do anything without interacting with something that has been dug out of the ground. Yet mining is a pretty dirty business, both environmentally and socially. So its hard to accept, but hard to criticize. Its interesting here too, because pretty much everyone is quite inclined to out and out hate mining. This topic has made it pretty clear that preconcieved notion can really color how you look at and absorb information.
     In any case, the fun stuff I did in relation to mining, rather than my philosophical waxings about it: we went to a town called Waihi which has two active gold and silver mines pretty much in the middle of town. It was pretty amazing, actually... we stopped at the visitor center, and walked up the hill to look at the old mill's pump-house, and all of a sudden there was a HUGE hole in the ground! We had no idea it was there! Which is pretty good testament to the mine's noise barriers, because there were a lot of massive trucks going in and out of that thing. 

See? Big hole! This open cast mine is 260 meters deep, and its only a third of the depth of an old (now closed) underground mine.

One of those big trucks. My head comes up to about the top of the inner yellow ring on the tire. The truck can carry 10 tonnes of rock, which has about 1 oz of gold. And that's economical, because gold is worth a firstborn child these days. Apparently.

   A representative from the mining company took us on a tour of the mining process, and it was pretty neat to follow the rock from the open pit to the processing plant and the tailing pond. The mining company is American owned, based out of Denver, and as a whole doesn't have a very good record in terms of social and environmental ethics, but the branch in Waihi was doing pretty good. They are very on top of their pollutant run off, have done a lot of restoration work to plant native trees and restore habitat, and plan to turn the tailing ponds into wetlands and convert the open pit into a recreational lake once the gold runs out and the mines close. Which could be a while... they're still prospecting.
  We also had a talk from one of the public relations people, who told us about how the company works within the environmental legislation framework here in New Zealand and how they're trying to make the industry sustainable. You could just tell from his whole talk that people really don't like mining; he was really defensive the whole time. It was kind of odd, actually... I kind of got the feeling from a lot of people that they didn't want to like what they were hearing, so they didn't. But then, the company gives a lot to the community, but there is only so much environmental stewardship a mine can make.
      Anyway, after that, we drove to Karangahake Gorge, where there used to be a huge mining operation that has since been long abandoned, so there are just crumbling foundations, random bits of rebar sticking out of the rock, and old mining tunnels to explore (don't worry... it's all managed by the Department of Conservation and kept safe for the public... EcoQuest is not taking us to clamber around random abandoned mines!). The place was just beautiful: 

This picture doesn't even begin to capture how stunning this gorge was. The walls went straight up (partially helped by mining) and the river was beautiful!

Looking down at a suspension bridge across the river and at the mouth of a short tunnel through the rock.

 Part of the walk was through the old mining tunnels. It was SO COOL! It was absolutely dark in there (we'd brought flashlights, but decided not to use them), so we all held hands and felt our way through. Periodically, there were "windows" out of the tunnel over the gorge, and it was pretty crazy to emerge from the darkness and see something like this:

The view from a "window".

We've almost made it through Moria! But seriously, I think that's a cool picture.

  At one point we all stopped in the dark and just stood in silence. It was really eerie, and very cool. It was kind of like you could hear the mountain. There were also a bunch of glow worms in there... it looked like there were hundreds of stars. Super super pretty. So that was a really neat trip.
    So to explain the title of this post, we had a debate this afternoon on the topic: "That a previously closed gold mine should be reopened if it becomes economically viable to extract the gold". I ended up speaking for the affirmative, and our "team line" was "Keep an open mine". Play on words, eh? Ha ha? It actually worked out pretty well... our team won the debate. It was pretty silly... we all dressed up at the last minute, and it came out pretty funny. Also, all our instructors wore goofy hats. So it was a pretty lighthearted debate. But pretty interesting, too... we weren't told which side we'd be arguing in advance, so we had to prepare for both.

Us pro-miners, looking all snooty. I had a really hard time keeping a straight face.

Anyway, enough with school stuff: this evening we had a massive game of Ninja manhunt... everyone dressed up in ninja clothes (pretty much everyone here has a full compliment of black spandex-y clothing) complete with facemasks, and then we ran around campus in the dark hunting each other. Basically, its a lot like capture the flag, minus the flag: one team hides, then tries to get to their safe zone, and the other team tries to stop them and send them to jail. So it was a lot of full-out sprinting in the dark and crawling through bushes and basically creeping on everyone else. It was awesome. There are pictures of everyone dressed up out there somewhere...
   And finally, I'm going camping at a beach where we can "dig our own hotpools" (i'm sure I'll have stories) and then we are heading up to Northland for our Marine unit, which means snorkling and the like.  SUPER EXCITED!!!
so yeah. sleep time.