I Hate Diamonds

Have I mentioned lately that I greatly appreciate Jason Kottke and his site, kottke.org? 

This recent post, titled For What It's Worth, called attention to the work of Dillon Marsh, who created 1:1 scale visualizations of the total amount of material extracted from various South African mines, sitting next to the mines as they currently exist.

This, for instance, is all the copper taken from the O'Kiep mine, which is now an open pit filled with water. At first glance I thought this image was a still from a science fiction film. You know, the metal sphere is an alien space ship? That kind of thing.

But no, it's human destruction, visualized.

The last one of Marsh's images that Kottke shared is almost the worst of all, at least in proportion of wastefulness:

You can't even see the diamonds (millions of karats — but that tells you how small a karat is) extracted from the open-pit Koffiefontein mine. They're on a vertical stand at dead center near the rim of the pit toward the bottom of the photo.

Kottke points out that the diamonds in particular highlight the discrepancy of outcome compared to the "manpower, machinery, injuries, fatalities, and environmental damage related to mining."

Dillon Marsh's site provides more photos (including gold and platinum mining) and some of the history.

The fact that all of this wastefully extracted wealth comes from South Africa makes me think of Gil Scott-Heron's song "Black History," which I quoted here a decade ago. After listing off the ways white colonizers denigrated African cultures, he turns to these stanzas:

So this is why the colonies came
to stabilize the land.
The Dark Continent had copper and gold
and the discoverers had themselves a plan.

They would "discover" all the places with promise.
You didn't need no titles or deeds.
You could just appoint people to make everything legal,
to sanction the trickery and greed.

And then this...

But still we are victims of word games;
semantics is always a bitch.
Places once called "under-developed" and "backwards"
they now call them "mineral rich."

That awareness of mineral-richness started a while ago. As Dillon Marsh points out, copper mining started in 1852 and the first diamonds were found in 1867. And marketed as love ever since (or at least since the 1930s).