On Point
"The
Real Cost of Gold"
NPR - WBUR - On Point
28 October 2005
If there's a gold stud in your ear, or chain on your neck, or ring on your finger, you're part of the picture. A century and half after miners pulled gold nuggets out of river beds in California, the gold mining industry is now going to incredible lengths to blast and bore and leech every tiny fleck of gold out of the planet.
A single ounce of gold -- the ring on your finger -- now means 30 tons of rock torn from the earth and drenched in cyanide to bring to the jewelers shelf. It's an ancient human appetite, now made voracious by global economic uncertainty and the rise of gold-hungry China and India.
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Hear
about dirty gold, and what it now takes to pull it from the Earth.
· Bill O'Neill, Managing Director of Logic Advisors, a research
and brokerage firm
· Kirk Johnson, New York Times Bureau Chief in Denver
· Ann Maest, geo-chemist
· Russ Fields, President of the Nevada Mining Association
· Alan Berger, Harvard Design School.