Pitfalls and Pipelines - Philippine Indigenous Peoples Links

Chapter 1.1: Overview of Impacts of Extractive Industries on Indigenous Peoples
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Where large-scale underground mining does take place,
it is increasingly in the form of block caving, which is a massmining
method underground that can match the largest
surface mines. Essentially large caves are created by machinery
and the ore is allowed to collapse before being collected.
Block caving is increasingly employed at the bottom of surface
mines to continue mining low grade ore, such as at Freeport
McMoRan’s Grasberg mine in Papua New Guinea. 12
Surface mines can be strip or open-cast mines, which
usually take up the largest surface area in terms of land use.
Quarries are generally surface mines, and used for extracting
building materials, such as stone, construction aggregate,
sand, and gravel. Dredge mining refers to the use of dredges,
and although you can get dry dredging—for instance with
minerals sands—it generally refers to excavation from rivers,
coastlines, wetlands or specially-flooded lagoons. Finally alluvial
mining, refers to mining in rivers, and can be largerscale
with suction-pumps, but tends to be associated with
small-scale, or artisanal, operations, like panning for gold.
A particularly destructive form of strip mining is mountaintop
removal mining, which actually removes the tops from
mountains to access the coal underneath and then dumps the
“overburden” or waste rock, into the adjoining valleys. This
effectively destroys whole mountain ranges in the USA where
it is practiced. 13
The oil and gas industries deal in extracting fossil fuels in
the form of petroleum and natural gas. In classic terms this
involves drilling a hole into the earth with a rig, and the oil
or gas flows or is pumped to the surface. The production of
conventional oil is in decline, although it now appears that
rather than this leading to more sustainable alternatives, we
have entered a period where cheap oil is being exhausted.
A higher price has led to new strategies for developing nonconventional
sources of oil and gas, such as tar sands, shale
oil, deep offshore drilling and new geographical frontiers
(including the Arctic, where access has been aided by global
warming).
This expansion brings with it real concerns for the new
technologies being used. Tar sands are oil that is saturated