Intergenerational Equity of Wealth: an 'other' mining framework towards a continued exploitation

Abstract

Extractive mining provides resources that are deemed essential to the basic needs of civilisation and the requirements of the high-technology, 'developed' and 'urbanised' world that most of us live in. Across the world, mining contributes to erosion, sinkholes, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, significant use of water resources, dammed rivers and ponded waters, wastewater disposal issues, acid mine drainage and contamination of soil, ground and surface water, all of which can lead to health issues in local populations. Overall, erosion, flooding, deforestation and the contamination and consumption of ground and surface waters all act as stressors on the health of local communities, depleting food production capacities and delivering harmful elements into the food chain. Intergenerational equity of wealth is a concept endorsed, advocated and propagated by 'The Goenchi Mati Movement' (GMM) and 'Goa Foundation'(GF). This proposition is a concerted, invidious strategy to undermine the entire philosophy of indigenous and ecological movements. Not only is this a socially dangerous proposition that propagates inequality and Brahmanised greenwash, this premise threatens the very livelihoods of tribal, dispossessed and displaced communities. It further perpetuates the marginalisation and impoverishment of such communities through its proposed five-point agenda. This is an attempt to reify a legacy hierarchy, generational ownership of land and maintain caste tradition.

Thus, this GMM and GF agenda remains a perversion and distortion of the ancient Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) seventh-generation principle and philosophy. There can be no tabula rasa when we examine the questions of extractive industrial mining. "Any form of concurrence or acquiescence to industrial mining in any guise or form is categorically destructive to the environ and this proposition of 'intergenerational equity of wealth' advances a 'cost of doing business’ for the mining industry and continued crony capitalism for its proponents and stakeholders".