Mining, Sacrifice Zones and the Climate Transition: A book talk by award-winning journalist Christopher Pollon, author of ‘Pitfall’

In this wide-ranging talk, the author connects his own family history of mining in northern Ontario to the migrations of poor migrants into mining zones across the global south. This includes artisanal miners, numbering at least 40 million people worldwide, who rely on scraping a living from small-scale mining for gold, diamonds and so-called “battery metals.”

We must confront a future where a necessary clean energy transition will require massive amounts of metals – like copper, nickel and lithium – which will force miners ever further afield: to more remote and pristine places and ever deeper, including the ocean seafloor. How do we get the metals our civilization needs and, at the same time, minimize the environmental devastation and human rights abuses and misery on the ground?
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Author of Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places.
www.chrispollon.com

Christopher Pollon is an award-winning Canadian freelance journalist who as been published by National Geographic, the Guardian, Mother Jones, The Walrus, the Globe and Mail, and many more. Details at ChrisPollon.com.

Commentary by Sara Ghebremusse, the Cassels Chair in Mining Law and Finance at the Faculty of Law, Western University.

Sara Ghebremusse received her doctorate from Osgoode Hall Law School and writes, in the areas of mining law and governance, law and development, transnational law, and human rights, with a particular focus on Sub-Saharan Africa.

Introductions by Shin Imai, Professor Emeritus, Osgoode Hall Law School.

Sponsored by the Nathanson Centre and the Justice and Corporate Accountability Project.