The Project...

It all began in Birmingham, AL with a standard chain email pleading for signatures to stop another global instance of injustice and consumer greed. Standard behavior: delete immediately or sign, send and continue Web shopping. But this one stopped me for a second. It involved four things I love: Latin America, indigenous cultures, mountains, and rivers. Plus, our group was looking for the next adventure to the source of an everyday consumer item.

FINDING THE SOURCE
A few months before looking into The Gold Link situation, we were in Ecuador's Amazon Basin photographing a large-scale oil drilling operation deep in the rain forest and on the sovereign property of an indigenous reserve. The photographs compared two neighboring Quichua communities - the Samona-Yuturi Reserve that had remained pristine and free of oil involvement, and the Eden-Yuturi Reserve directly adjacent, a community that had allowed California's Occidental Oil Corporation to establish a major extraction and processing facility within its borders. (Link to Amazon Oil)

Standing in an air-conditioned room as sterile as a hospital OR and being surrounded by banks of multi-million dollar technology didn't feel so strange for Nick, Michael, and me; we grew up in big southern cities with industry like this in our backyards. The weird part was outside, behind the thick walls muting the roaring engines processing the recently extracted crude oil. Where the Oxy facility's mowed grass and flower-bordered walkways ended, there began one of the world's most remote and uncharted jungles with badass men hunting monkeys, tapirs, and the occasional pesky puma. This contrast illuminated the distance, both physical and cultural, between the oil's destination (our world) and its source (this Amazon world).

We decided to continue going to the source of popular consumer items. While oil at present is essentially an unavoidable part of our everyday lives, the demand for gold is more voluntary. Though a portion of the gold supply is held and traded by large Central Banks to hedge inflation – a structural economic tool – the majority of mined gold goes to the production of gold jewelry. So we set out to trace the gold in 50 Cents’ mouth to one of its sources high in the Andes Mountains.

STRIKING GOLD IN CHILE-ARGENTINA
The original email scrutinized Canada's Barrick Gold Company, the world's largest producer of gold and owner of dozens of silver and copper mines throughout the world. At the proposed Pascua Lama site, Barrick intends to move parts of three glaciers/icefields in Chile's Region III Andes in order to access a gold deposit. They already have an active open-pit mine (Veladero) just across the border in the Argentine Andes and they hope to open the Pascua Lama site in 2010.

While bulldozing entire mountains to access mineral deposits is nothing new and continues to disgust us here at The Source Loop, chopping up a glacier* above a pristine watershed that supports dozens of indigenous, agrarian communities so that Paris Hilton can rock out in new bling or a father in India can shower his beloved daughter in more gold jewelry than his neighbor seems excessive. (see DEMAND for gold below in ECON 101: GOLD) We began looking into the situation and it became clear that a comparison between an untouched site (Pascua Lama, Chile) and a developed mine (Veladero, Argentina), both under Barrick ownership, was possible in this relatively unknown region of Chile north of Santiago.

*NOTE ON GLACIER: Barrick's "studies" have shown that the mine will not affect glaciers, rather the anticipated gold deposits lie under "icefields." This technical distinction is, in our minds, an attempt to soften the blow with geological rhetoric: "icefield" sounds much more mundane and disposable than "glacier;" the public sentimentally associates the latter with national parks and global water supplies worthy of protection. Either way - glacier or icefield - the frozen water eventually melts and supplies the watersheds below.

INDIGENOUS COLLABORATION
The Gold Link project really started rolling when we learned that the Black River First Nation group from Canada, along with others at the time, had signed an International Accord with the Diaguita tribe who inhabit the valleys below the proposed Pascua Lama mine. This cross-hemispheric indigenous collaboration intrigued us. After getting in touch with a few of the First Nations people involved, we were invited to join them on a tour of the Veladero site and be introduced into a few of the Diaguita communities. This is exactly what we needed in order to gain access for photos of the operational mine in Argentina and the Diaguita tribe attempting to negotiate a fair agreement with Barrick at the controversial Pascua Lama site.

OUR PLAN
We will spend a month in Chile living in the Diaguita communities, touring the Veladero site (hopefully) with representatives from the Black River First Nation, and exploring the glaciers and high-alpine terrain that might be affected by the Pascua Lama mine. We leave January 2 and will be updating this blog with photos and stories as often as possible. We hope to share our experience and create a (cyber) loop from consumer to source. We're also using this as an educational tool for our Center Street Middle School Photo Club in Birmingham. These students are learning photography with simple film cameras. They will be helping with our post-production editing and organizing. Rock on, Camille, Jeremy, Brenda, Sam, Boston, Kourtney, Chasteny, Jayana, Ericka, Prothaniel, and Mrs. McMillon!