The Empire project

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Space Colonialism is a thing now

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

With these words, spoken on the campaign trail in 2012, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich pulled off a hat-trick of self-sabotage. The line is a model of rhetorical economy: rarely have hubris, ignorance and jingoism sat so comfortably together in a single sentence.

Gingrich’s ideas about space exploration are not only deluded, but are also outmoded. His words appeal to a conception of Manifest Destiny that is rooted in idealism rather than economics. Despite his hollow talk of the lucrative scientific discoveries and tourist revenue dangling above the stratosphere, Gingrich is clearly a man who wants to boldly go where no man has gone before just ‘cause. This sense of adventure may be laudable, but it is unrealistic. Now, as in the 17^th century, we expand into new frontiers in pursuit of resources, not knowledge.

Enter Deep Space Industries. In January of 2013, almost exactly one year after Gingrich’s comments, DSI declared that it would become the first deep space mining company. DSI will focus on mining asteroids, which are chalk full of minerals like platinum, gold and in-demand elements like Iridium and Palladium.

DSI’s underlying business model of finding scarce resources in inhospitable places isn’t particularly original, but it does bring the international scramble for resources to a whole new level. Throw a few interstellar rockets into the mix and China’s mineral-grabbing efforts in Africa and South America seem positively quaint. Admittedly, DSI’s efforts are still in their infancy, but the company already has its a strategy laid out. In its first years, DSI will focus on unmanned, robotic mining. Manned missions come later, presumably after the earth becomes so thoroughly depleted of resources that space miners become a viable economic option. When that happens, colonies are sure to follow. By the end of our lifetimes, we may even see Gingrich’s prophecy of a moon base come true. But we seriously doubt that it will be American.

Image by Brian Versteeg Studios from the DSI website.

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Empire in VICE

VICE just published this article/photo essay we wrote/photographed about small-scale gold mining in Suriname. 

Read it and weep! Seriously. It’s actually kind of sad.

Continental drift

The beach in front of Elmina Castle has been taken over by gold seekers. Young men looking for a quick buck build gold sluices in the shadow of West Africa’s most famous slave fort. They pile the sluices high with beach sand, then drown the sand with buckets of seawater laced with mercury.

We arrived in Ghana four days ago, but we can’t shake the feeling that we’re still in Suriname. The streets are full of faces that wouldn’t be out of place in the gold camps of Brokopondo. Even the language triggers a sense of deja vu—Akan, a local tongue spoken in Ghana, somehow became “Aukan” on its way across the Atlantic, and is still the lingua franca of Suriname’s Ndyuka Maroons.

But the countries share more than a common ethnic heritage. 225 million years ago, during the time of the Pangea megacontinent, there was no division between West Africa and the Guyanas. The soil here is the same as the soil in Suriname. It nurtures similar crops, and holds similar treasures.

But we’re not here to look for gold. We’re here to look for people in power. 

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De Ware Tijd

Right after we left Suriname, we got a write up in one of the country’s more progressive newspapers, De Ware Tijd. 

They also put up the article on their registration-required website (boo!), but if you want to avoid all that hassle, just click on the fast & dirty cut & paste job we put together on the right and give it a read. 

Direct link, such as it is.

The ecstasy of gold

Or is that “agony”?

In this trailer, we take you into the illegal gold mines of Suriname, where half of the country seems to be seeking their fortune.

We’ve never worked harder to get images. Hope you enjoy them.

The small-scale miners of Suriname

…are risking life and limb for the promise of gigantic gold yields that rarely appear. Click through the slide show to get a taste of their muddy, toxic life.

The Dutch could never make a solid profit from the gold business when Suriname was part of their colonial dominion. From what we saw, the latest generation of miners, many of them descendants of escaped slaves who made their homes in Suriname’s interior, aren’t doing a much better job. It’s not that they don’t find gold. They do. But the expenses associated with the trade—in terms of supplies and machinery— are enormous. And then there are the physical costs. Pits collapse. Ethnic clashes break out in mining towns. Mercury finds its way into everything from the groundwater to the air above the gold camps. 

But there is a sort of honor and courage in what the small-scale gold miners do, which is where the latest film in the Empire series comes in. Shot in two different mining communities in Suriname’s interior, the piece tells the story of a group of Maroon miners trying their best to eke out a living from their ancestral soil. They aren’t backed by a multi-national corporation, and they have only the most basic tools, but they show up every day to earn their living on their own terms. 

Principal photography in Suriname wrapped on May 7th, 2012.

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Railroad to gold

The crew on the remains of the sole railroad line built by the Dutch in Suriname. Known as the Lamaspoorweg, this line was built at the turn of the 20th century for the transportation of gold from the country’s interior to ports in the north. Low gold yields led to the railroad’s demise, but today’s artisanal gold miners use the railroad as a footpath to their gold camps. 

More information about the railroad in Dutch here.

From left to right: assistant Gilbert Lobato de Mesquita, anthropologist Marieke Heemskerk, and Eline Jongsma (with tripod ). Photo by Kel O’Neill.

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First days of shooting

Meet Peppe, a Ndyuka gold miner in central Suriname. Peppe is currently relaxing in front of the remains of a Dutch Army jeep parked by the banks of the Saramacca River.

In addition to being a gold miner, Peppe writes and performs reggae songs in Sranan Tongo.

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El Dorado

Guess what? There’s a gold rush going on in Suriname and its no joke.

Every day, gold seekers travel from the city to the bush, their hired minibuses stuffed with water pumps and pick axes. You can buy these items—along with knee-high waders and vials of mercury—at any of the Chinese-owned supply stores that line Saramacca Straat in Paramaribo. The mining itself mostly happens south of the city, on the ancestral lands of Maroon and Amerindian tribes. Tribal leaders are in on the game, and earn healthy commissions (paid in gold, of course) on everything that comes out of the ground.  

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Dutch explorers came to the Wild Coast of South America looking for gold. In the ensuing centuries, they found some deposits in Suriname, locked away in the impenetrable jungle of the country’s interior. Faced with the daunting prospect of creating the infrastructure necessary to extract the riches, the Dutch quickly shifted their focus to more profitable ventures, like the slave trade and sugar plantations.

Now that gold prices are through the roof and Suriname’s road system is (marginally) better than it was during Holland’s Golden Century, it’s time to take a look at the players behind one of the least documented mineral grabs in the 21st century.

Photo: a freshly-smelted  500 gram bar of Surinamese gold, market price $25,000