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Since Barrick Gold unbelievably proposed dynamiting glaciers to get at gold deposits underneath perennial ice, a movement has begun along the Central Andes comprising civil society actors, environmental groups, indigenous peoples, common individuals and even governmental agencies, to ensure glacier protection. In Argentina, the world’s first National Glacier Law was adopted in 2010, and in Chile, there is a National Glacier Policy in place to protect these critical water reservoirs captured in perennial ice.
In only a few years, since Barrick’s incredible glacier management plan proposing to dynamite and bulldoze glaciers to get at gold, community awareness about the role that glaciers and periglacial environments play in the Central Andes is increasing. We are learning more and more about glaciers and periglacial environments so that we can protect these very important hydrological resource, far more valuable to our ecosystems, than the gold extraction that is proposed, that only benefits a few. With this collective learning about glaciers in Argentine and Chilean societies, it is becoming more and more difficult for actors who fail to comply with basic environmental due diligence and even respect for the law, to hide behind systematic public ignorance about the role of glaciers in the Central Andes, and more specifically about the impacts of many extractive activities such as Barrick’s Pascua Lama project, is already visibly having on these sensitive environmental resources. It is becoming harder and harder to distract the public and divert attention of glacier impacts.
CEDHA has compiled a short report in direct response to Barrick Gold’s new website, posted recently about its glacier impacts. As a response to increasing public outcry over the glacier impact information that is starting to appear in both Chile andArgentina, and as regulatory and legal frameworks develop to protect glacier resources, Barrick Gold is scrambling to cover up damning information about the impacts its activities have on glaciers. Barrick is systematically producing misleading and false information about the glacier resources they are impacting in the Central Andes around their Pascua Lama and Veladero projects in an attempt to downplay the very serious and irreversible impacts they are causing to extremely sensitive high mountain ecosystems.
On this website, which Barrick entitles ironically “Protecting Glaciers”[1], Barrick Gold makes at least 14 false or misleading statements with regards to their impacts to glaciers and periglacial environments in their zone of influence. In some cases they are outright false, and in others, Barrick employs misleading semantics to distract or divert the real issues that they face in terms of impacts to glaciers and periglacial environments.
We enumerate these false and/or misleading statements one by one in this report and offer a counterpoint with what we argue is the “true” situation in regards to these critical and sensitive hydrological resources affected by Barrick Gold.
To download the report:
For more Information:
Jorge Daniel Taillant
[email protected]
tel: +54 9 351 507 8376
www.cedha.org.ar