The high cost of gold

In the latest instance of the Salad regurgitating the New Jork Times all over y'all's new shirt, their third article on the procuring and processing of gold ran in today's edition. Let me sum up the series:

Gold is bad. VERY bad. AWFUL bad.

You see, to extract a few ounces of good old "AU" out of the earth, you need to destroy thousands of tons of topsoil get at it. Then, because all the gold on the planet is only in trace (read=atomic) form, you need to saturate the earth with cyanide to separate the molecules for collection and smelting. So, to recap: Destroy the earth and poison it irrevocably, and then you have a pinch of what you need, to be added to the several mllion more pinches that it might take to smelt one single ring.

The cost of gold is at historic highs now, but in spite of the monetary, it pales in comparison to the millions of acres around the planet that have been despoiled by greedy, ruinous multinationals who flout international law (looking at you, Freeport-McMoRan Copper and Gold of New Orleans) by paying juntas to protect their backwater strikes and also by dumping catastrophic amounts of spoil and mercury into vital waterways. Jakarta, Indonesia, is a prime victim of said rough trade.

What can we do? Buy estate jewelry and avoid new pieces (the way you would avoid other mala in se luxury items as caviar and fois gras) whenever possible. I'm not too sure that silver and platinum operations are better, either.

Scold scold scold!