00:00Now we're on our way to a legal mining site
00:03after exploitation
00:04to see how the natural environment behaves in the long run.
00:08So here we can see a vestige of the pipes to suck up the mud
00:35These pieces had to be treated to recover the gold.
00:38And all the piles of pebbles that we see,
00:40well, it's all that has been,
00:41all these sediments that have been cleaned of the gold
00:44and that are stored in piles, as we can see, everywhere.
00:47So all of this has been exploited, clearly.
00:49And you see the hole that it leaves in the forest.
00:51And here we are still in an exploitation zone,
00:53all that is legal,
00:54which ended 10-15 years ago.
00:57And when I was a kid,
00:58I was 7-8 years old,
01:00I came to this sector, to this creek,
01:03the main creek, which must be a little further over there.
01:05And we spent our days, our weekends as a family.
01:08The water was translucent.
01:10And we had fun, we fished.
01:12This was our playground when we were kids.
01:14So it's very sad to see all this,
01:16a slightly lunar landscape in the middle of the Amazon forest.
01:19And that's legal, that's allowed.
01:27All this mud that had been sucked up by the machines
01:30that contained the gold that they had separated,
01:33and then this mud had to go back into the wild,
01:35so it decanted.
01:36And I just picked it up at the bottom of the little basin.
01:40So if it's temporary, it's not dramatic.
01:43Where it's more serious is when it continues
01:47and for a period of several years,
01:49where we're going to have an impact on all aquatic life, clearly.
01:52We see it all in the rapids, what we call the jumps here,
01:55the Komaru salads and this kind of aquatic plant
01:58that some fish feed on, it no longer exists.
02:00There is no way to do photosynthesis,
02:02the leaves are loaded with mud, the rocks are loaded with mud,
02:05the fish flee these rivers there,
02:07so these are rivers that become dead.
02:22The subsoil in Guyana is heavily loaded with natural mercury.
02:27And as soon as we're going to decapitate,
02:29as soon as we're going to mix these bits, etc.,
02:32this natural mercury that was in the soil,
02:35which was not a pollutant,
02:37will naturally be transformed, will be methylated,
02:40and there it becomes pollutant because it is assimilable
02:43and in addition bio-accumulable.
02:45That is, every time it goes through a chain of the food chain,
02:48the mercury-methyl content will be exponential.
02:51For example, algae, small content,
02:54it goes into the little fish that eat the algae,
02:56it amplifies, and so on and so forth.
02:58And when it is the man at the end of the chain
03:00who consumes this carnivorous fish,
03:02heavily loaded with mercury-methyl,
03:04over the life of a man,
03:06typically people who live in the forests,
03:08the Amerindians, the Bushinagais,
03:10well, after 40, 50 years,
03:12we start to have malformations,
03:14we start to have neurological problems,
03:16problems related to the intoxication of mercury-methyl.
03:18What is the future of gold mining?
03:27If it sees the light of day, unfortunately,
03:29we must hope not,
03:30it will be the largest gold mine in France
03:32that has ever been set up.
03:34It is the energy needs of Cayenne,
03:36just to run the mine,
03:38and it is above all 20 tons of explosives a day
03:40and 10 tons of cyanide a day.
03:43So cyanide is the chemical product
03:45they need to flocculate gold.
03:47So when they crushed the rock
03:49with, I think, 2 grams of gold per ton of rock,
03:54it's still amazing the toxic waste
03:56that will be behind.
03:58So there will be rotted pieces
04:00that will have to be stored
04:02on gigantic surfaces,
04:03digs of 60 meters high.
04:05You can imagine, if a dig breaks,
04:07imagine the disaster that it will create behind.
04:09So, well, the argument is employment.
04:12We are ready to get the wolf into the sheepfold
04:14because we are at 10 jobs right now.
04:17But I think the goal of a politician
04:22is to see beyond his mandate
04:24and his political chair,
04:26is to see on a generation
04:28make a long-term development.
04:44Each type of gold has its problems.
04:46It's not simple.
04:47In mining activity,
04:48there is the small legal activity.
04:50Here we are on an old legal activity
04:53with an impact,
04:54more or less mastered,
04:55but an impact.
04:56There is the grammatical illegal activity
04:57for the environment.
04:58They add mercury,
05:00there are no more rules.
05:01And then there is the primary gold.
05:03This is the mining industry,
05:05these are big surfaces,
05:06and this is the case in Guyana
05:08with the Montagne d'Or project in the West.
05:10In any case, mining activity,
05:13producing gold,
05:14apart from filling the banks' coffers,
05:17today I think it's 8%
05:19of the world's gold production
05:20that is used in technology.
05:22Everything else is for jewellery
05:24and filling coffers.
05:26With the environmental impact that it has,
05:28in the long term,
05:29it's not an economic engine at all.
05:30It has never been.
05:31If we are given an example
05:33where it was the case in a region of the world,
05:35why not?
05:36But it has never been the case.
05:37So I don't think it's a good decision,
05:39a good project for the territory.
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