CHE Environmental Colloquium: Ruth Goldstein - "Mercury Rising: Conflict Metals, Alchemy, and Planetary Health"

This presentation examines the contaminated colonial and alchemical legacies that inform the roles that gold miners and chemists play in current extractive rainforest economies that utilize mercury. Efforts to track and mitigate, if not eliminate, the use of mercury in ASGM cite the damaging effects for maternal/fetal health. This paper concludes with questions of environmental and economic justice, with the aim of revising toxic endings to mercury rising in human bodies and earth’s thermometer.