Indonesia's Mining Controversy & Hirata's The Rainbow Troops

From yesterday’s Reuters article, “Indonesia softening mining policy after industry backlash:”

Indonesia appears to be softening a controversial mining policy amid industry criticism and legal challenges to rules whose implementation could cost Southeast Asia's largest economy up to $10 billion a year in lost exports...

Last year Indonesia asked all miners to submit plans to build refineries or smelters ahead of a January 2014 ban on raw mineral exports. Until then a 20 percent tax on ore exports has been levied.

Deputy Energy and Mineral Resources Minister Susilo Siswo Utomo said the focus is to add value to exports, and for that smelters need not necessarily be built. "The word process does not mean you have to build a smelter. Sometimes you need to wash, to separate the soil and mud. This is also processing," Utomo told an Australian mining conference in Jakarta on Tuesday.

For a novel set in an Indonesian mining town, try The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata:

Ikal is a student at the poorest village school on the Indonesian island of Belitong, where graduating from sixth grade is considered a remarkable achievement. His school is under constant threat of closure. In fact, Ikal and his friends—a group nicknamed the Rainbow Troops—face threats from every angle: skeptical government officials, greedy corporations hardly distinguishable from the colonialism they’ve replaced, deepening poverty and crumbling infrastructure, and their own low self-confidence.

But the students also have hope, which comes in the form of two extraordinary teachers, and Ikal’s education in and out of the classroom is an uplifting one. We root for him and his friends as they defy the island’s powerful tin mine officials. We meet his first love, the unseen girl who sells chalk from behind a shop screen, whose pretty hands capture Ikal’s heart. We cheer for Lintang, the class’s barefoot math genius, as he bests the students of the mining corporation’s school in an academic challenge.

West Virginia Coal Mining, Mountaintop Removal, & Pancake's Strange as This Weather Has Been

From yesterday's Huffington Post editorial "Mountaintop Removal Coal Mining Poisons Appalachia's Waterways:"

I remember the first time I saw a mountaintop-removal coal mining site - Kayford Mountain in southern West Virginia. Those images have never left my mind - a barren landscape where there was once lush forest. And right around the destroyed site, homes where people were trying to live despite having the world blown up next door. Their lives are never the same when a mountaintop-removal coal mine starts blasting. One major loss for these families is clean water... Pollution from mountaintop-removal mining has poisoned many of our streams making them dangerous for certain fish and other aquatic life. 

Mountaintop-removal is the process by which companies use explosives to remove the peaks of Appalachian mountains in order to get at the coal underneath. They then dump millions of tons of rubble and toxic waste into the streams and valleys below the mining sites.

For a novel about West Virginia coal mining and mountaintop removal, read Ann Pancake's Strange as This Weather Has Been:

Set in present day West Virginia, Ann Pancake’s debut novel, Strange As This Weather Has Been, tells the story of a coal mining family -- —a couple and their four children -- —living through the latest mining boom and dealing with the mountaintop removal and strip mining that is ruining what is left of their mountain life. As the mine turns the mountains to slag and wastewater, workers struggle with layoffs and children find adventure in the blasted moonscape craters.

UPDATE:  a longer review can be found at the In This Light blog.

Moon Mining & Hickam's Crater

Last week the BBC featured the article "What if you could mine the Moon?:"

Space exploration has long been about reaching far off destinations but now there's a race to exploit new frontiers by mining their minerals. When Neil Armstrong first stepped on the Moon in 1969, it was part of a "flags and footprints" strategy to beat the Soviets, a triumph of imagination and innovation, not an attempt to extract precious metals. No-one knew there was water on that dusty, celestial body. What a difference a generation makes. Mysterious and beautiful, the Moon has been a source of awe and inspiration to mankind for millennia. Now it is the centre of a space race to mine rare minerals to fuel our future - smart phones, space-age solar panels and possibly even a future colony of Earthlings. What might be on the Moon?

• So-called rare-earth minerals, which are used in a range of technologies. Currently, they are refined almost exclusively in China 
• Water frozen in the dark recesses of polar craters, which according to Nasa can be split into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen for breathing 
• Helium-3 (He-3), which apparently exists in abundance on the Moon. Some believe He-3 could be a future energy source 
• Valuable titanium deposits 

  What could moon mining be like? To find out, try Homer Hickam's Crater:

It's the 22nd Century and a tough, pioneering people are mining the moon to produce energy... Crater Trueblood, an orphan, loves his life in Moontown, a frontier mining settlement. Just turned sixteen, Crater is already a seasoned Helium 3 miner, hoping someday to be a foreman on the scrapes. But "the Colonel," the man who owns the mine, has a different plan for Crater...[for him to] shepherd a convoy of Helium 3 trucks across a forbidding river of dust...

UPDATE: Now that I've gotten a little further into the book, I feel it's only fair to warn readers that the dialogue can be a bit cliched. But I think Hickam more than makes up for it with his creative descriptions of what a moon mining boom-town would be like.

UPDATE II:  there's a longer review of Crater over at the Moon and Back blog.