James Cameron should know...

... that there are threats like the one in Avatar everywhere you go. Human greed is such-- just there are not feline-like blue aliens; it is our environment, our flora and fauna against the same old two-legged enemy.

Last week, I went on a field trip to Crucitas, a community consisting on few shack-like houses, starving dogs, one school, and a Canadian open pit mining company. The streets of natural red ocher seemed rarely transited by humans. There's one path in particular that called our attention: the old road that divides the two lots of the company. This is the road we took. A guard was wary of our motivations and did not let go his radio transmitter. We had not gotten a hundred meters into the way, but the bosses at the mine should have been aware of our presence by then. "Environmentalists are here again, looking for trouble." We did not care; my whole group, about 25 students in their mandatory community service, kept walking and getting acquainted with the exuberance of the region, or at least what is left of it. As we advanced, our guides told us to watch the trees, to listen to the parrots and birds singing, and to imagine the huge impact destroying all that would do. The fact that an armed guard was following us at a prudent distance, reporting our position constantly, only makes the experience more intense and our indignation stronger. Sure, the company came with their tons of money, built a new road surrounding their lots and connecting the town with civilization, brought electricity, and promised heaven on earth to locals. What did our government do about this? bowed. The problem is not mining itself. The proportions of this project and its poor study of environmental impact just ring the alarm that nothing good can come out of this. They will drill 60 meters in the soil, extract the rock and wash it with cyanide to get the gold. With the underground currents of water running 75 meters down the earth (15 meters from the maximum depth of excavation) the hazard is way too high. The extraction of the gold would be performed in a huge pool of cyanide. As if all that did not sound toxic enough. (see the picture below with the sign? that's the space for the cyanide pool. All of it!)


The similarity with Cameron's movie is absurd. For ten years of gold extraction, the company would displace native species, the endangered green macaw for instance. They brought what is commonly conceived as civilization, but was not that what the RDA promised to the Na'vi in exchange of their land? Likewise, in both contexts the conflict emerges because humanity has given more value to a mineral over an ecosystem. Unfortunately, in Costa Rica there is no Turuk Makto to save the day, hardly any hero. If we do not stop this, it won't be just one hometree that we will see falling but acres of them.