Gold Is Destroying Peru's Rainforests

Years of illegal gold mining in Peru have taken a serious damage on the Amazon
rainforest.

No one knew the full extent of the damage until a research team from the Carnegie
Institution of Science and Peru's Ministry of the Environment used satellite imagery to
map the damage.

Their findings are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greg Asner and his team of researchers found that gold mines in Peru increased by
400% from 1999 to 2012. Tons of forest area has to be cleared in order for miners to dig
into the Earth and extract gold, and this is a serious problem because the Amazon forest
produces about 20% of the planet's oxygen, according to the World Wildlife Fund. It
also sucks up carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, returning them to the Earth.

Peru's rain forests sit on top of a wealth of natural treasures, from oil and coal to gold.
To get to these riches, miners destroy the forest and mountains that sit atop them. This
could be devastating for the Earth, since these forests play such an important part in our
ecosystem.

Justin Catanoso, a journalist who just returned from touring the Peruvian rain
forests with ecologist Miles Silman, thinks that saving these forests is an integral part of
slowing the potentially devastating effects of climate change. One way we can do that,
he said, is if richer countries work together on an international level to pay countries
like Peru to leave these important forests untouched and stop the destruction of these
forests.

These miners are already destroying acres and acres of these precious rain forests. An
article in The Verge described the process gold miners use: They create craters by
digging a few metres and blasting the holes with pressurized water to clear away the
soil, completely destroying the forest area.

When the price of gold skyrocketed in 2008, miners began clearing forest area much
faster. The rate of forest destruction jumped from about 5,400 acres per year to 15,000
acres per year. Thousands of small mines have sprung up in the area, away from main
roads so most are undetected from the land, but visible from the air.

Around 50,000 small-scale miners in Peru are mining without permits or any
government regulation, according to The Verge.

In addition to forest destruction, the mining in Peru also releases pollutants into the
nearby Madre De Dios river. Mercury is used to extract gold from the Earth, and excess
Mercury from the mines has polluted the area and made its way into the food chain.
 SMART DRUGS
Honoré de Balzac was a great believer in the cerebral power of coffee. The renowned
French writer had a punishing schedule every evening; he would scour the streets of
Paris for a café that was open past midnight, then write until the morning. It is said that
he would consume 50 cups of his favourite drink in a single day.

For centuries, all workers have had to get them through the daily slog is boring old
caffeine. But no more. The latest generation has been experimenting with a new range
of substances, which they believe will supercharge their mental abilities and help them
get ahead.

In fact, some of these called “smart drugs” are already remarkably popular. One recent
survey involving tens of thousands of people found that 30% of Americans who
responded had taken them in the last year.

The original “smart drug” is piracetam, which was discovered by the Romanian scientist
Corneliu Giurgea in the early 1960s. At the time, he was looking for a chemical that
could get into into the brain and make people feel sleepy. After months of testing, he
came up with “Compound 6215”. It was safe, it had very few side effects, and it didn’t
work. The drug didn’t send anyone into a restful slumber and seemed to work in the
opposite way to that intended.

However, Piracetam did have one intriguing side-effect. When patients took it for at
least a month, it led to substantial improvements to their memories. Giurgea
immediately recognised the significance of his findings, and coined the term
“nootropic”, which combines the Greek words for “mind” and “bending”.

Today piracetam is a favourite with students and young professionals looking for a way
to improve their performance, though decades after Giurgea’s discovery, there still isn’t
much evidence that it can improve the mental abilities of healthy people. It’s a
prescription drug in the UK, though it’s not approved for medical use by the US Food
and Drug Administration and can’t be sold as a dietary supplement.

Two increasingly popular options are amphetamines and methylphenidate, which are
prescription drugs sold under the brand names Adderall and Ritalin. In the United
States, both are approved as treatments for people with ADHD. Now they’re also
widely abused by people in highly competitive environments, looking for a way to
remain focused on specific tasks.

Amphetamines have a long record as smart drugs, from the workaholic mathematician
Paul Erdös, who relied on them to get through 19 hour maths marathon, to the writer
Graham Greene, who used them to write two books at once. More recently, there are
plenty of anecdotal accounts in magazines about their use in certain industries, like
journalism, the arts and finance.