Antonette Louisse L.

Navarro

Ms. Lani Fe F. Advincula

English for Academic and Professional Purposes

12, October 2017

Mining, is it worth it?

Mining helps improve the employment and community development of

our country, however we should not off-set the potential negatives it does not

just in our environment but also in our well-being.

Yes, a lot of Filipinos had given a chance to have a work, but let us not

set a side how dangerous it may be for them. The health may be threatened

by the air quality in the chamber and the limited ability to move, which can

lead to blood clots. But even without such catastrophes, miners contend with

many daily health dangers from working around dust, heavy metals, hazardous

gases, fumes and loud noises. Just think about the United States for example,

there were 14,500 mines registered in US, a record-low 34 miners of the nation's

352,600 died on the job in 2009 and each year the number of died miners

increases. Plus, mining affects the people around the area like for example,

people living close to mountain strip mines have more birth defects, higher

rates of lung, respiratory and kidney problems. Even the Indigenous

communities who have lived in harmony in forests for thousands of years are

now displace worldwide because of mining. Let us furthermore think about the

environmental consequences of mining. We all know the effects of mining, but

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we are all acting like a baby who don’t know the difference between right

and wrong. Mining can cause air pollution, release of harmful trace element

leads to contamination of surface water and the underground water is also

contaminated due to seepage and infiltration of leached drainage. Mining

also leads to the degradation of soil quality, fertility and makes it toxic. Mining

can lead to deforestation which results in loss of flora and fauna and it directly

affect the ecosystem and its stability as many species are killed due to toxicity

of water and soil and loss of habitat. In addition, mining results in wastage of

land as it neither remain suitable for industrial use nor for agricultural purposes

and it just results in the loss of landscape and beauty of our Earth. Even the

National Geographic reports that 40% of the watershed in western U.S. are

affected by mining pollutants, and there are 500,000 abandoned mines

waiting to be cleaned and reclaimed in the whole country.

We should try to look back on things that we've done, weather it was

good or bad. Let us reflect through our actions and try to think how it changed

everything. On how we replaced beauty to a complete chaos, how we valued

money rather than our own environment and especially how we constantly do

things which aren't good but still continue to do it. Let us not prioritize the things

that we have now, but we should also think of the future generation. The future

lies within our hands. Are we just going to sit down and do nothing or dig down

the roots of these problems and make a stand to a life worth living?