Here you can listen to an interview with Andri Magnason on BBC Radio 4, sunday the 10th of the 10th of 10. Andri is somewhere after half an hour of the program. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v6dmf/Broadcasting_House_10_10_2010/
The Hungarian Aluminum disaster has brought the impact of the global aluminum industry into the light of the international media. In Dreamland I write about some of those issues. In the film Dreamland you can see that many of the most pristine areas in Iceland have been marketed as potential energy for the aluminum industry. Chris Bayliss, the spokesperson of the International Aluminum Institute responds to the comments in my interview. One of the terms he uses regarding the aluminum industry in Iceland is the term “Stranded energy”. If you come to Iceland you can see roaring waterfalls, walk around the untouched geothermal areas in the highlands or look at the largest nesting place of pink footed geese in the world. All those areas are called “stranded energy”, or “still untapped recourses” by the aluminum industry. You might call it nature.
Chris also talks about ethics and strip mining in West Africa, Brazil and other places in the world as “development through the efforts of the aluminum companies”. That is one of the issues in my book – Dreamland. I wonder if it really brings in real development or only addiction, corruption and then an economic recession when the resource has been mined.
It seems like the “resource curse” can be quite well applied to bauxite and the smelting addiction of Iceland. While I was writing Dreamland I talked to a lot of people. So I have known the background and people involved in some of the struggles. Very recently the Adivasi people of Orissa in India won a huge victory when they managed to prevent the strip mining of their holy mountain for bauxite.
The Aluminum Disaster in Hungary is not an isolated issue. People in Jamaica, Vietnam, Brazil and many more areas have had great problems because of this industry and the history in Australia is not nice either. For more information – Dreamland, the book and documentary are available and a new book by Samarendra Das is very interesting: Out of this Earth: East India Adivasis and the Aluminum Cartel.
Jamaica:
Vietnam:
And Guinea West Africa talking about development: