The Latin word for gold, aurum, is the source of the symbol Au. This most famous of all metals has been known since pre-history. People have coveted gold for as long as they had the notion to covet. I know the Bible has some notions about coveting.

Here’s the problem with gold:

This is what gold mining looks like today. The image is from a massive open pit gold mine in Australia called, fittingly, The Super Pit.

I had the opportunity to visit an open pit gold mine many years ago. It was the McLaughlin Mine near Clear Lake, California. Homestake Mining operated McLaughlin from 1985-2002 and produced about 3.5 million ounces of gold. The property is now part of the University of California system and the reclaimed land is a natural preserve. What I remember most was the gigantic scale of everything. The haul trucks were particularly impressive. They had the biggest tires I’d ever seen! The crushers, where the ore was processed, were enormous and took huge amounts of power.

Gold is a superb material for electronics and has other valuable industrial applications. But most gold—almost half of the world’s production—goes into making jewelry. What’s left becomes the bullion in bank vaults and investment portfolios.

That’s a lot of digging, a lot of energy expenditure, and a lot of big messes for stuff that is mostly useless. We impart a lot of value to gold, and we have a lot of expectations about it. It’s supposed to always be valuable, no matter what else is going on in the world. That’s it’s magic. There are folks who think we should go back to the gold standard of yesteryear. Gold is that powerful—it will fix our economy!

In the meantime the 3000 or so metric tons (tonnes) of gold that are dug up every year around the world leave a large environmental footprint. Open pit mining has a poor track record when it comes to land stewardship. I’m not so sure precious metals are all that precious.