Amazon Gold Ventures Deals: Amazon Rainforest Imperiled In Gold Rush
Record prices push new speculators into mining business
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru — Record gold prices are claiming an unlikely victim: the lush,
spectacularly biodiverse rainforests of the...
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Amazon Gold Ventures Deals: Amazon Rainforest Imperiled In Gold Rush
Record prices push new speculators into mining business
PUERTO MALDONADO, Peru — Record gold prices are claiming an unlikely victim: the lush,
spectacularly biodiverse rainforests of the Peruvian Amazon.
Since the global economy fell off the edge of a cliff in 2008, sending investors scrambling to put
their money into the ultimate safe haven, gold, thousands of illegal miners have flooded into the
Madre de Dios region of central Peru.
Now they are ravaging its pristine tropical rainforests and river systems, including some of
Peru’s most important nature reserves, using primitive mining techniques to churn through vast
quantities of the region’s rich, sandy soils, sparkling with specks of the precious metal.
As the do so, they poison the water table with mercury and carve out vast, toxic holes in the
virgin jungle.
“It is a disaster zone,” says Jorge Herrera, director of the southern Amazon program for the
Peruvia
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