Papua New Guinea is one of the world’s largest island. Called the ‘Last Great Place’, it is home to hundreds of unique species of animals and plants as well as to upward of 820 languages. The Porgera gold mine is situated in the highlands. It produced around 18 tons of gold per year and over $1 billion of profits in 2006, according to Barrick Gold, a Canadian corporation that assumed a majority share of the mine. Barrick operates 26 mines worldwide and boasts of having the industry’s largest reserves.

Porgera, New Guinea’s biggest gold mine, accounts for 72 percent of the country’s export earnings. It utilizes the most advanced extraction technologies and helicopters fly people and gold in and out on a daily basis. Its extraction process creates cyanide-laced waste-water that the company discharges directly into the local river system. One millionth of a gram of cyanide in a liter of water is enough to kill the fish. Because Porgera is literally at the top of the country, the streams into which the toxins are dumped flow into many other tributaries before they reach the sea. After 14 years, the mine waste has slowly torn the hills from under the local inhabitants and turned the small valley below into a choked river of dirt creeping toward the Gulf of Papua two hundred miles away. The large rainforests and its inhabitants are also under threat: it is estimated that half of the forests has disappeared by 2020 if present deforestation rates continue. The causes of deforestation are exploitation for timber and clearing by small farmers.

In the Indonesian part of New Guinea, the province Irian Jaya, the American mining company Freeport exploits since the 1970s some of the world’s largest reserves of copper and gold. Here, too, huge profits are made while ecosystems are destroyed. Massive deforestation for infrastructure took place. Almost all processed material is released and fills up several square kilometers at the mouth of the nearby river. These mines are part of what the United Nations Industrial Development Organizations (UNIDO) calls a ‘gold rush in the Third World’ that began in the 1980s and spread to Tanzania, Surinam and many other countries. Mining for gold is one of the world’s most grotesque industries, consuming vast resources and producing mountains of waste to produce a small amount of soft, pliable metal with few practical uses. To make one gold wedding band, at least 20 tons of earth must be excavated..