[Rockhounds] How ending mining would change the world

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Mining fuels the modern world, but it also causes vast environmental
damage. What would happen if we tried to do without it?

"If you can't grow it, you have to mine it" goes the miner's credo. The
extraction of minerals, metals and fuels from the ground is one of
humankind's oldest industries. And our appetite for it is growing.

Society is more dependent on both greater variety and larger volumes of
mined substances than ever before. If you live in a middle-income country,
every year you use roughly 17 tonnes
<https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-12/> of raw materials –
equivalent to the weight of three elephants and twice as much as 20 years
ago. For a person in a high-income country, it is 26 tonnes – or four and a
half elephants' worth.

Extracting new materials continues to be cheaper than re-use for many
substances, leading some experts to sound the warning
<https://ipbes.net/global-assessment> about the increasing pressure of
mines on the natural world. A growing chorus is concerned that
environmental toll of mine-caused pollution and biodiversity loss, as well
as the social impacts caused to local communities, could sometimes outweigh
the benefits of mining.

But what if we stopped extraction of fossil fuels and minerals entirely?
What if, in order to better protect the environment, humanity decided the
contents of the Earth's crust were off limits?


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220413-how-ending-mining-would-change-the-world