Amid growing demand for renewable energy, extraction of key minerals in the Amazon has reached critical point

Illegal mining of key minerals essential to the global transition towards renewable energy sources is increasingly contributing to the deforestation of lands inhabited by indigenous peoples of the Amazon.

In recent years, these illegal miners, who are often self-employed, mobile and working in secret, have expanded their gold-mining operations to include cassiterite, or “black gold,” a mineral critical to the transition to renewable energy. Cassiterite is used to make coatings for solar panels, wind turbines and other electronics. Brazil, one of the world’s largest exporters of the mineral, is now scrambling to deal with this new threat to its Amazonian forests.

The need for developing countries like Brazil to protect their forests for the collective good of the world clashes with the growing demand for their resources on international markets. To complicate matters further, both the transition to renewable energy and the protection of the Amazon are urgent priorities in the global effort to halt climate change.

But increasing deforestation puts these forests at risk of transforming from a carbon sink – where trees absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than they release – into a carbon source – where trees release more carbon dioxide when degraded or burned than they absorb.

Indigenous and other forest-dwelling communities play a key role in protecting forests. In 2014, I spent a year living in Guyana and Suriname, two of the nine countries that share the Amazon basin, researching the effectiveness of international policies that aim to pay these countries to avoid deforestation.

I met with community members who have borne the brunt of the negative impacts of small-scale gold mining, such as mercury poisoning and loss of hunting grounds. For decades, gold mining, which threatens communities’ food supplies and traditional ways of life, has been a major driver of deforestation in both countries.

Small-scale mining operations can harm both communities and the environment. Gold mining, which produces gold for export, used in jewelry and electronics, typically begins with the removal of trees and vegetation from the topsoil, facilitated by mechanical equipment such as excavators. Miners then dig up sediment, which is washed with water to extract any loose gold.

Miners typically add mercury, a substance that is known to be toxic and extremely harmful to human health, to wash pots to bind the gold and separate it from the sediment. They then burn the mercury using lighters and welding equipment. During this process, miners inhale the mercury and wash it into nearby waterways, where it can enter the food chain and poison fish and other species, including humans.

My new book, Forests of Refuge: Decolonizing Environmental Governance in the Amazonian Guiana Shield, highlights the colonial histories that created these countries. These histories continue to influence land-use practices by people and forest users. Having seen these dynamics firsthand, I argue that these unresolved histories limit the effectiveness of international policies aimed at curbing deforestation.

Some of the policy limitations are rooted in their inattention to the approximately five centuries of colonialism that created these countries. In these histories, forests were sites of refuge and resistance for indigenous and African American communities. I believe that the power structures created by these histories must be addressed through processes of decolonization that include removing markets from their centrality to processes of valuing nature and taking seriously the worldviews of indigenous and other forest-dependent communities.

But since 2014, small-scale deforestation in the Amazon caused by mining has continued and even increased. The growth in mining worldwide, partly driven by the transition to renewable energy, suggests that these power structures may be harder to change than ever before.

Extra pressure

When Brazil cracked down on illegal gold mining in the 1970s and 1980s, miners moved en masse to nearby Guyana and Suriname, taking their environmentally destructive technologies with them. Illegal cassiterite miners are now following a similar pattern, showing that global efforts to curb deforestation cannot simply focus on a single commodity as a driver of deforestation on Earth.

My work shows that the challenge of Amazonian deforestation by mining is rooted in historically informed global power structures that position the Amazon and its resources as available for extraction by industries and governments in wealthier countries. These groups of people are now seeking to reduce their disproportionately high emissions through technological solutions, not through behavioral change.

These tensions also have their roots in the willingness of governments and forest users in post-colonial countries such as Brazil and Guyana to respond positively and unconditionally to international demand for these resources.

In the Amazon, outcomes depend on whether different groups of people have access to livelihoods that do not cause deforestation, such as those based on nontimber forest products. The situation is further shaped by the extent to which governments can cooperate to ensure that repression in one part of the Amazon, such as Brazil, does not cause deforestation elsewhere, such as Suriname.

Unless power structures that discriminate against indigenous people and other historically marginalized groups are changed, the negative impacts of developing technologies intended to “save” the planet will continue to fall disproportionately on these groups, even as their current lifestyles remain crucial to supporting sustainable development outcomes.

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