Documentary explores high cost of society’s obsession with gold

I grew up over a gold mine. That didn’t make me rich. My father worked in the mine; he didn’t own it.

Even if he had, neither we nor the other families that lived on this particular mine property just outside Timmins would have been rich. In those days, when the price of bullion was pegged at $35 U.S. an ounce, many Canadian gold mines survived only through government assistance.

But living there did make me curious about the sought-after but seemingly pointless metal upon which my community relied. So when a friend mentioned that he was working on a documentary about gold. I was eager to see it.

“The Shadow of Gold” is an ambitious exploration of a metal that still fascinates the world.

More than anything else, gold is an idea. It is desired simply because it is desired.

The documentary opens with a wedding ceremony that focuses on the gold rings being exchanged. Gold symbolizes purity. It does not rust or corrode. It may not be as useful as iron or steel. But it lasts forever.

From there, the camera moves to the more prosaic task of finding and mining this literally precious metal. The best place to find gold, we are told, is where people have already found it. The key to the economics of gold mining is to locate ore with enough of the mineral in it to make exploitation worthwhile.

Advances in technology have made it easier to mine low-grade ore. The downside of these advances is that tons of overburden must be shovelled out of the ground in order to generate just a few ounces of gold.

This is a problem for people who live in an area to be mined. The documentary zeroes in on a community near America’s Yellowstone Park and their efforts to prevent gold-mining in the area.

It also zeroes in on the people who mine the gold — and in particular on a Chinese man named Xu.

Xu is dying from silicosis, a lung disease caused by inhaling metallic dust. Many of Xu’s co-workers in China have already died from the disease. There is a treatment available, a doctor tells him. But the miner cannot afford it. Still, he is stoic. Gold will kill him. But gold has also allowed him to build a solid home for his family.

So it is with the artisanal miners of South America and Africa. They put their lives on the line to scrape up tiny amounts of gold. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, an artisanal miner can make $5 a day moiling for gold. This is not very much. But it is more than he or she can earn doing anything else.

Incidentally, much of the proceeds from mining the Congo’s so-called conflict gold goes to finance murderous warlords.

We flash to the places where big money is made from gold. In London’s gold exchange, we are treated to the views of gold bugs who try to explain their single-minded focus on the metal.

We see safety deposit boxes stuffed with gold bars. We are shown the Toronto skyline and told that this city’s stock market hosts the biggest mining exchange in the world. We see the sumptuous boutiques of Dubai, allegedly the centre of the trade in conflict gold.

And we are reminded again of the human and environmental costs from the search for this elusive metal. Artisanal miners poison themselves with the mercury they use to recover gold. Bigger operations poison whole swaths of land with cyanide-laced tailing ponds.

When the berms that hold those ponds in place collapse — as happened at British Columbia’s Mount Polley Mine in 2014 — disaster ensues. And yet the world keeps on mining gold. The fascination continues.

In my case, the four-room school I used to attend has been swallowed by tailings. The homes of my childhood friends have been razed and the ground that lay below them literally torn out. These are the sacrifices that gold demands.

“The Shadow of Gold” airs on TVO. Check your local schedule.