[bjowen]

> The environmental damage of open pit mining operations is nothing compared to the environmental damage and visual pollution of a large city

Eh? These processes liberate vast amounts of heavy metals, arsenic and other environmental contaminants, making byproducts like poil and tailings are super toxic and expensive to deal with, and mining companies have a tendency to vanish before the cleanup is done. When these leak or fail, they often do so into water supplies for cities or isolated communities who have the serial insults of being displaced and then poisoned. Have a search for “tailings dam failures” or superfund sites, for that matter.

The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”

There are complex and intersecting interests here, and the tech industry acting like resources in someone’s country are there for the tech industry to exploit as of right, are a really good example of how colonialism continues to cause suffering and the inequalities it promises to emancipate us from.

[roenxi]

> The lands in question in the Pilbara are the ancestral property of various first nations, and after a couple of centuries of it, are a bit wary of blokes turning up saying “well we need your resources we’re taking them.”

This perspective, while common, is a baffler in context. Start by assuming Aboriginal Australians aren't stupid. Note that whoever owns the land will, assuming they are intelligent or compassionate, develop it to support the the seething mass of humans who need steel.

Aboriginals don't live like poor people because they have a deep philosophical connection to lousy accommodation and dodgy services. They live that way if and only if they are poor. We can respect that, we can acknowledge the dignity of generations of a lifestyle without the comforts of industrialisation, we could potentially accept that there is no need to integrate them into an industrial culture by external policy (I argue we should leave them to it as far as government policy goes, but I tend to lose that sort of argument). Give them standard ownership rights a vast amount of valuable land and they'll choose to live like people who own vast amounts of valuable land. Particularly given that there are about a billion people in Asia who will be vastly better off if they have more cheap steel - that argument should melt any heart, particularly given the amount of profit involved as a motivator. The minerals will get mined.