Part 1 — Keystone Industry: How mining became the planet’s unlikely saviour

Want to do something positive for the planet? Try investing some of your money in mining shares. 

This suggestion may make some greens see red. But as the global economy embarks on a clean energy transition to douse the flames of climate change that are scorching our burning planet, an inconvenient truth stands out: slashing greenhouse gas emissions (GGE) cannot be achieved without mining.

Indeed, civilisation as we know it – and the levels of economic development required to heal and protect the environment – are also simply not possible without building more mines.  

That leaves us with two stark options.

“You can reduce the world to the living standards of the 1800s and we can all go and do some subsistence farming, or you increase mining output,” Duncan Money, a noted mining historian, told Daily Maverick in an interview. 

Life in a world without mining would, in the famous words of the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, be “nasty, brutish and short”. 

If you think that’s extreme, consider this: the device that you are reading this story on is entirely comprised of metals produced by the mining industry. These include silver, gold, platinum, palladium, iridium, copper, lithium, cobalt, manganese and rare earth elements. 

If you have a pacemaker to keep your heart ticking, it contains mined metals, including platinum. If you have a dental implant, it was made from mined material. Ditto if you own a car, not to mention all of your household appliances. 

This list could be endless. But you get the picture.

And we need more mines at a time when new deposits of crucial metals such as copper are not coming online fast enough to meet future demand. 

“The challenge at the moment is that we are not developing new mines at the required pace compared to the amount of metals that we need,” Glen Nwaila, director of the African Research Centre for Ore Systems Sciencec, School of Geosciences at Wits, told Daily Maverick.

Keystone industry 

“If it’s not grown, it’s mined” is a phrase often used by Anglo American.

One useful way to view this terrain is through the prism of gross domestic product (GDP), the main measurement used to gauge the size and performance of a national economy. GDP is the total value of all finished goods and services produced in an economy over a specific time frame. 

All of the goods produced in any economy today are the end product of stuff that has been either grown or mined. And many of the services would not be possible without mining. 

Financial transactions – including banking, buying stuff with a tap of your card or a zap on your phone, currency trading, the buying and selling of equities – all take place via devices and platforms cobbled together from minerals and metals that have been mined. 

There are no estimates on mining’s direct contribution to global GDP, but there are plenty for national economies. In South Africa’s case the sector accounts for just over 6% of GDP, according to the Minerals Council SA. 

But it punches way above its weight. Virtually all of the other goods and most of the services that add up to GDP would not be produced without mining. 

And this includes almost all of the foodstuffs grown commercially. 

Irrigation systems, tractors, combine harvesters, fertilisers, agriculture commodities trading and the GPS technology that is the backbone of precision farming and rising crop yields – it is all rooted in mining. 

If you want to grow a crop without the aid of any technology enabled by mining, you are going to dig the soil by hand, plant the seed by hand, pull out the weeds by hand, and pick your harvest by hand. Unless, of course, you can fashion a shovel or hoe from sticks and stones. 

To paraphrase Anglo, if it’s grown, much of it is growing because of mining. Without mining, there is no commercial farming beyond a few examples such as livestock grazing on unfertilised pastures or wild berries and mushrooms harvested for sale – and even these products need to be processed and taken to market by routes that begin with underground ore. 

And ultimately, there are virtually no other goods and services. 

In short, without mining, there is no GDP. 

Biologists and ecologists speak of “keystone species” – apex predators or massive herbivores such as lions and elephants that play an outsized role in an ecosystem. Like the keystone of an arch, if such species are removed, the system starts collapsing.

For better or worse, that is the role that mining plays in the global economy, and by extension, society. It is the “keystone industry”. Remove mining, and GDP crumbles and collapses into a dystopia worthy of Hobbes. 

There are critics galore of the concept of GDP who regard – not inaccurately – that its need for constant growth is extracting a grim toll on the biosphere. Such a vantage point calls for less mining, not more. 

“By itself, growth is nothing,” writes the Canadian scientist and public intellectual David Suzuki in his 2010 book The Legacy. “How can growth be the goal or purpose of any economy? It is the context in which growth occurs – what caused the growth, what the increased economy is to be used for, what the impact of that growth will be on people and ecosystems – that is all important.” 

There has clearly been a direct link between the dramatic mushrooming of economic growth rates spurred by mining since the industrial revolution and the surge in greenhouse gas emissions heating our planet, as well as countless other examples of environmental damage and destruction. 

But it’s also the case that an affluent society or economy has the capacity to address threats to the biosphere – as well as a middle class that has the time to care and resources to devote to such issues as it is not trying to simply survive day-to-day and hand-to-mouth. 

Climate change linked to the burning of fossil fuels is currently casting a dystopian shadow over our fragile planet. And the key to contain this unfolding crisis is through mining. 

Electric vehicles, hybrid vehicles, hydrogen fuel cells, hydro plants, solar panels, wind turbines – all of the things required to reduce fossil fuel emissions – would not exist without mining. 

Jekyll and Hyde

Clio, the mythical muse of history, is wearing a wry smile at this ironic turn of events. 

Soaring CO2 emissions since the late 18th-century industrial revolution have been unleashed, directly and indirectly, by mining. And the only way to dig ourselves out of this mine-made hole we find ourselves in is to mine more – a lot more. 

On history’s grand stage, Clio has cast the mining sector in a starring role as both Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – it has been a force for both immense good and monstrous evil. 

With the possible exception of the oil and gas sector, no industry has inflicted so much environmental damage and social misery while simultaneously raising global living standards.

Ancient history has traditionally been defined by metals – and hence mining. That speaks to mining’s outsized or keystone role in history and how it transitioned civilisation from the Stone Age.

The Stone Age – which lasted millions of years – was replaced around 3,200 BCE by the Copper Age, then the Bronze Age from 2,300 BCE to 700 BCE, followed by the Iron Age from 700 BCE to about the time of Christ. 

Early mining of coal has been uncovered in southern Africa from 40,000 years ago, but it was the replacement of stone tools with copper about 3,700 years ago that set the trajectory of human development at a new and dizzying pace. 

The rest, as they say, is history. And the impacts – good and bad – have been many. 

“Buried like moles beneath the crushing weight of the earth, and without a breath of fresh air in their burning lungs, they simply went on tapping,” is how Emile Zola stirringly described trapped miners in his searing 1885 novel Germinal about a violent coal strike in France and the subsequent disaster that befell the mine. 

The tectonic forces of mining have shaped the histories of all countries, and in some – such as South Africa – its impact has been massive and goes beyond its keystone contribution to GDP and climate change.  

The late 19th-century discovery of mother lodes of diamonds and then gold triggered an industrial revolution in South Africa, transforming it from an agricultural backwater into an economic powerhouse. 

It also laid the economic foundations for the apartheid regime. Classifying the former Homelands as separate, independent countries was useful to state and business alike. The mining sector relied on migrant labour – which could be ruthlessly exploited to contain wages – and this pool of workers was drawn from these islands of rural poverty and impoverished neighbouring countries. 

More than 80,000 miners have been killed on the job in South Africa since the advent of industrial-scale mining, while occupational diseases such as silicosis have also extracted a grim toll. South African history has been marked – or marred – by mining tragedies such as the Marikana Massacre.

But South Africa’s mining industry has come a long way from its colonial and apartheid pasts. Wages and working conditions have risen dramatically over the past few decades.

The Minerals Council this week released #MiningMatters 2025, an independent study into the broad impact of mining in South Africa. 

“Mining provides well-paid jobs. The average annual wages within the mining industry in 2024 were R577,597 for high-skilled workers, R328,996 for semiskilled workers and R246,924 for those in low- and unskilled roles,” the council said. 

“Nationally, the average wages for the three skill levels were R400,958, R205,851, and R113,083.” 

In 2001, the average annual remuneration paid to mine workers was R59,784. According to an inflation calculator, South Africa’s cumulative inflation rate since then has been about 260%, and this trio of average wages all exceed inflation over that period by a significant amount. 

Such trends have many drivers. These include government regulations, union activism and the corporate embrace of ESGs – environmental, social and governance concerns.

This also reflects wider developments as the global mining industry seeks to portray itself as critical to the green energy transition. 

Indeed, it has e merged as the planet’s unlikely saviour. We will explore this new keystone role for the industry in parts 2 and 3. DM

Read part 2 of the series here: The new minerals rush to save the planet from mining’s legacy

Read part 3 of the series here: The headwinds that beset mining’s new role as the planet’s unlikely saviour