TORONTO: What if gold were no longer an object of desire but an object of disgust? What if environmentalists were able to do to the image of the glittering metal what animal rights activists did to the fur coat — paint it as a symbol of cruel and thoughtless vanity, not of brilliant success?

Many environmentalists, who insist gold mining is dangerous to people’s health and ruinous to the environment, want just that, but it’s not yet an idea whose time has come.

At a high-profile mining conference on sustainable development in Toronto, which is home to some of the world’s biggest gold miners, several proposals were advanced to put an end to gold extraction.

But the anti-mining calls probably won’t come to much. The gold-mining industry is healthier than it’s been for years, with prices rising and the precious metal in strong demand.

But, some argue, there is no need to mine more gold.

“Gold mining and cyanide used in gold mining has had an unjustifiable and irrevocable impact on the Western US,” Stephen D’Esposito of the US Mineral Policy Centre, said at the Toronto conference. “How much new gold do we really need?”

None, detractors say, noting that more than 90 per cent of all the gold that was ever mined is still around — a lot of it sitting in central-bank vaults, and a lot clinging to the necks, wrists and fingers of the rich, famous and beautiful.

The mining industry, in general, acknowledges the environmental sins of the past and promises to do better.

There is a lot of cleaning up to do, critics say. Project Underground, a Berkeley, California based advocacy group, has put out “Fool’s Gold,” a Top 10 list of problems with gold mining that was published in “Dollars and Sense” magazine last year.

“From California’s Sierra Nevada in the 1850s to the lands of the Pemon in Venezuela today, people have ruined rivers by using high-pressure hoses to spray down the banks and sifting through the sediment for gold,” the project said.

“Runoff flows downstream, destroying plant and fish life. But modern mining is even more destructive of water resources: the gold industry in Nevada — where most gold in the United States is mined — consumes more water than all the people in the state.”

The project says cyanide is the chemical of choice for miners to extract gold from crushed ore but that cyanide always leaks into the ecosystem. It points to the case of a cyanide spill at a mine part-owned by Canada’s Cameco Corp. in Kyrgyzstan in 1998 that resulted in four deaths and the evacuation of thousands of people living downstream.—Reuters