Professor’s helpful parodies are pure gold
A mining engineering professor at the University of B.C. is hoping his parodies of pop songs will help reduce mercury pollution in smallscale gold mining in developing countries.
Marcello Veiga is heading to Colombia on Wednesday, where he will be singing to about 600 miners in 11 states about the dangers of using highly toxic mercury in extracting gold.
Worldwide, artisanal and smallscale gold mining in rural areas is the single biggest industrial user of mercury at about 1,400 tonnes a year. Other countries where significant amounts of mercury are used in artisanal gold mining include Peru, Ecuador, Zimbabwe and Indonesia.
Veiga believes singing parodies to miners is the best way to educate them about changing their methods so they’re not harming their own health and that of their families and communities.
One of the first songs he wrote is I Just Called to Say Don’t Mine It, sung to the tune of I Just Called to Say I Love You, the 1984 Stevie Wonder pop tune.
“The first one relates to a person who wants to get rich and doesn’t care about enforcement,” Veiga said. “That is exactly the attitude of the miners. They say ‘Who cares about enforcement? The authorities are never going to come here.’” Sample lyrics:
I just called to say don’t mine it I just called to say how much I care
If you mine and don’t reclaim it I guarantee your life will be a nightmare
Another Veiga song is They Don’t Wanna Talk About It. It’s a parody of I Don’t Wanna Talk About It, written by Danny Whitten and made popular by Rod Stewart in 1974. Veiga’s version is about men potentially becoming impotent from mercury pollution. Sample lyrics:
And with time you’ll find that you became impotent
I don’t want to talk about you But the girls will do
You will say that ‘global warming did it’
You will say ‘Viagra is gonna help me’
But you don’t see ... it was the mercury
For impoverished people living in rural areas of developing countries, the lure of artisanal gold mining is huge. Often, they’re making as little as $60 a month. With gold at close to US$43 a gram, artisanal gold mining can generate from $500 to $1,000 a month for a miner, Veiga said.
He said the response to his songs has been fantastic. In South America, some songs are translated into Spanish with colloquialisms so that the audience understands what he’s singing. “It’s the way to get the guys laughing. This is the best way to educate them about the dangers of mercury pollution,” Veiga said in an interview at UBC.
Veiga, from Brazil, said he started getting interested in the issue in 1980 when Jacques Cousteau visited Brazil and drew attention to the connection between mercury and gold mining.
From 2002 to 2008, Veiga was the chief technical adviser on global mercury for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization in Vienna. He became a UBC mining professor in 2008-09.
At UBC, Veiga was known as the professor who sang to his class. Every Wednesday, he would bring out his guitar and sing a song related to a theme he was teaching, such as acid rain or climate change. If he could do it at UBC, he thought, he could do it in the field as well.
“When I was there in Colombia, I started to sing in English with translation in Spanish to the miners, to the authorities, making jokes about sustainability,” said Veiga who has studied the effects of gold mining in more than 40 countries.
When mercury is added to gold ore taken from the ground or riverbeds, it chemically binds with the gold; because the gold-mercury amalgam is heavier than crushed rock particles, it sinks and is recovered from the muddy mixture. The mercury is either squeezed from the amalgam by hand or burned off.
The former method is highly inefficient and can result in as much as 80 per cent of the gold and mercury being lost; the second method results in toxic airborne mercury.
One way to help reduce the health effects of airborne mercury pollution is to convince miners to use retorts — relatively inexpensive condensation systems — that recover mercury when the amalgam is being burned.
In 2010 tests conducted by Veiga in Antioquia, a mountainous area in northwest Colombia, inorganic mercury vapour was measured at almost 1,000 times the World Health Organization’s air quality guidelines for long-term exposure. Three years later, after initiatives led by Veiga at UBC and the U.S. Department of State to introduce cleaner extraction methods, mercury levels had been reduced by as much as 60 per cent.
Last August, the Minamata Convention came into effect. The international convention ratified by 88 countries — including Canada last April — seeks to protect human health by reducing mercury emissions. Health effects of mercury pollution can include damaged kidneys and irreversible neurological damage such as short-term memory loss, speech impairment and impaired vision.
Veiga’s research has found unique isotopes of mercury from small-scale mines in Ecuador downriver in Peru 160 kilometres away. As a result of the contamination of fish, Peru is looking for financial compensation from Ecuador.
“I try to be friendly,” he said about his approach in the field. “I believe in education — and songs.”