Cell Phones Indirectly Contributing to Gorilla Extinction in Congo:

[amborin]

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2010/03/gorillas-extinct-mid-2020

"Last week, the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) announced that gorillas in the Congo may be extinct by the mid-2020s, a drastic change from its 2002 projection which had 10 percent of the original range surviving in 2030. The culprits behind the demise of one of the world's brightest primates: poaching, logging, mining, the Ebola virus, and...cell phones. Adam Hochschild's piece in the March/April issue of Mother Jones, describes how the Congo's vast natural resources are continuously pillaged to feed foreign interests to the detriment of locals, their environment, and now gorillas. CNN reports:

Militias have seized large chunks of gorilla land and logged and mined it. They have done so because the illegal trade in timber and in metals such as gold and coltan -- used in cell phones -- generates between $14 million and $50 million a year for them.

Said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UNEP:

This is a tragedy for the great apes and one also for countless other species being impacted by this intensifying and all too often illegal trade. Ultimately it is also a tragedy for the people living in the communities and countries concerned. These natural assets are their assets: ones underpinning lives and livelihoods for millions of people. In short it is environmental crime and theft by the few and the powerful at the expense of the poor and the vulnerable.

Read the full report, "The Last Stand of the Gorilla - Environmental Crime and Conflict in the Congo Basin."

[MineralMan]

1. Just for clarity's sake:

Coltan is not a metal. It is a tradename for the minerals columbite and tantalite, which almost always occur together. They are the ores of niobium and tantalum, two rare metals that have uses in electronics.

The Congo is the main source of these minerals. However, there are large deposits, as well, in Canada. It's just cheaper to mine them in Congo. So, that's where the ores for those two useful metals are mined.

This is one more way that outsourcing our raw materials, especially mineral resource mining, harms not only our sources, but also the areas where they are mined using what amounts to slave labor and without environmental controls.

There are also deposits of those minerals in the United States, but even less reason to mine them here instead of in the third world.

It's not actually the cell phones that are to blame. It is outsourcing on a purely financial basis.

N.B. Tantalum, right now, sells for about $50/oz.

[amborin]

2. interesting! thanks! so the real culprit is outsourcing and rapacious raw materials extraction ,

as you said! ghastly the way short-term profits take precedence over everything else

[MineralMan]

3. Yup. We outsource almost all mining now. It's so much less

expensive to mine in the third world. Plus our current mining regulations add even more expense to the mining process. We still have huge deposits of most ores here in the US, but mining has virtually come to a complete stop.

Mining is environmentally pretty ugly, so we outsource it and let the third world take the damage. Of course, extremely low wages and non-existent safety measures play a role, too. We don't care where anything comes from or how much damage and human misery it caused where the raw materials are mined. We just want them.

It is one of our most shameful things, in my opinion.

[arachadillo]

4. Eastern Lowland Gorilla Review

Adam Hochschild's piece in the March/April issue of Mother Jones, describes how the Congo's vast natural resources are continuously pillaged to feed foreign interests to the detriment of locals, their environment, and now gorillas.

CNN reports: Militias have seized large chunks of gorilla land and logged and mined it. They have done so because the illegal trade in timber and in metals such as gold and coltan -- used in cell phones -- generates between $14 million and $50 million a year for them.

Said Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of the UNEP: This is a tragedy for the great apes and one also for countless other species being impacted by this intensifying and all too often illegal trade. Ultimately it is also a tragedy for the people living in the communities and countries concerned.

MineralMan Clarifies: Coltan is not a metal. It is a tradename for the minerals columbite and tantalite, which almost always occur together. They are the ores of niobium and tantalum, two rare metals that have uses in electronics.

The Congo is the main source of these minerals. However, there are large deposits, as well, in Canada. It's just cheaper to mine them in Congo. So, that's where the ores for those two useful metals are mined.

Also add, http://www.naturalsciences.be/science/projects/gorilla/external/pdf/statusreport_gbg__july2007.pdf">Status report: Gorilla beringei graueri.

It's a bit dated, but the causal story remains the same.

"By the mid1990s there where estimated to be about 17000 (9000-25000) Eastern Lowland gorillas in at least 11 subpopulations, with ca 86 percent living in the Kahuzi-Biega and the adjacent Kasese region of RDC."

"More recent events in Kahuzi-Biega and the surrounding region, however, indicate that the taxon has undergone a substantial decline in numbers. Access to much of the gorilla range has been difficult in recent years, and is only just becoming possible again"

"This is attributed to the combined effects of the rise in demand for coltan ore and the warfare that engulfed the whole of the eastern lowland gorilla range from the late 1990s onwards; armies, rebels, refugees and miners all lived off the land and consumed bushmeat"

A look at the map on page 5 of the report shows that the once substantial Kahuzi-Biega Western Lowland Gorilla population is located due West, and a short hop, skip and jump from Rwanda.