The Earth and Indigenous peoples are dying for our Gold obsession! Choose the Right to Life over gold profits!

photo: Barrick Gold Corporation

Gold is a colonial relic that we urgently need to recognize as essentially worthless – the deforestation, pollution and catastrophic impacts on water, wildlife and Indigenous communities is mainly for futile and superficial jewelry and financial products.

The only useful function of gold – around 10% of the total extracted – is for electronics, etc.

photo: Barrick Gold Corporation

Nothing says “I love you” like… 20 tonnes of mine waste?! That’s how much waste rock is dug up and discarded to produce the amount of gold in a single ring!

Is this you?

ALL GOLD, LEGAL & ILLEGAL, causes contamination of the area’s water, soil, air, wildlife & Indigenous peoples! It’s not possible to tear up the ground to extract gold using cyanure or mercury & create toxic waste without destroying the environment!

**Yanomami child playing in a river**
**photo: Barbara Crane Navarr**

Yanomami in Brazil and Venezuela and other Indigenous families all over the world use the rivers and streams near their communal homes for drinking water, bathing and cooking. The invasion of Indigenous territories by thousands of illegal gold miners is leaving forests devastated as well as rivers and fish poisoned by the toxic mercury used in the gold mining process. The illegal gold mining dredges run on diesel fuel that contaminates the atmosphere with smoke and fumes.

**Dredging barges used by illegal gold miners in Indigenous territory**
**photo: Divulgação**

«The gold miners are destroying our rivers, our forest and our children. Our air is no longer pure, our game disappears and our people weep and cry out for clean water. We want to live in peace. We want our Yanomami Territory back.»

Yanomami children in the contaminated river near their home
**photo: Reprodução/Twitter @Dario_Kopenawa**

« My grandparents fished to feed the community in this river. Now it’s just sludge, gasoline, diesel and mercury contamination. Fish die and our Yanomami land is dying.

We Yanomami suffer, we don’t have peace. The gold miners destroy our houses (Yanopë), destroy our forest (Urihi), destroy our spirituality of the shaman and spirits of the forest (Xapori and Ayakora).

The gold miners took everything, our safety & our health. »

Júnior Hekurari Yanomami

**Deforestation and contamination by gold miners in Indigenous territory**
**photo: ISA**

This madness must stop!

Please help end the cycle of deforestation and devastation!

The consumption of this unnecessary, environment-ravaging product fueled by publicity that attempts to convince the gullible that owning gold confers glamor or worth must end!

The power and responsibility lies with us, the consumers. If we purchase gold or other products from deforestation, we’re complicit.

Please boycott all products from deforestation; gold, palm oil, beef, soy, exotic wood, gemstones, etc.!

Please purchase locally-sourced, in-season items that aren’t transported from 3000 kilometers away!

For more details regarding the merchandising of gold using the Yanomami and trees, please see here:

The GENOCIDE of the YANOMAMI and the DEATH of NATURE for Gold and Diamond Merchandise – The ART of GREENWASHING by the MERCHANTS of GOLD – in their own words…

and here:

13 Reasons Why You Should Boycott Gold For The Yanomami People

For more details regarding the global “legal” gold corporations, please see here:

Legal Gold and Illegal Gold – If Barrick Gold Corporation or wildcat prospectors were digging for gold in your back yard and contaminating your only source of water with cyanure or mercury, would you still decorate yourself with gold jewelry, watches and accessories?

LEGAL GOLD – Stand with communities affected by « legal » Gold mining!

ILLEGAL GOLD – Stand with communities affected by « illegal » Gold mining around the world!

Please Boycott Gold!

About Barbara Crane Navarro - Rainforest Art Project

I'm a French artist living near Paris. From 1968 to 1973 I studied at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, then at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, for my BFA. My work for many decades has been informed and inspired by time spent with indigenous communities. Various study trips devoted to the exploration of techniques and natural pigments took me originally to the Dogon of Mali, West Africa, and subsequently to Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil. Over many years, during the winters, I studied the techniques of traditional Bogolan painting. Hand woven fabric is dyed with boiled bark from the Wolo tree or crushed leaves from other trees, then painted with mud from the Niger river which oxidizes in contact with the dye. Through the Dogon and the Yanomami, my interest in the multiplicity of techniques and supports for aesthetic expression influenced my artistic practice. The voyages to the Amazon Rainforest have informed several series of paintings created while living among the Yanomami. The support used is roughly woven canvas prepared with acrylic medium then textured with a mixture of sand from the river bank and lava. This supple canvas is then rolled and transported on expeditions into the forest. They are then painted using a mixture of acrylic colors and Achiote and Genipap, the vegetal pigments used by the Yanomami for their ritual body paintings and on practical and shamanic implements. My concern for the ongoing devastation of the Amazon Rainforest has inspired my films and installation projects. Since 2005, I've created a perfomance and film project - Fire Sculpture - to bring urgent attention to Rainforest issues. To protest against the continuing destruction, I've publicly set fire to my totemic sculptures. These burning sculptures symbolize the degradation of nature and the annihilation of indigenous cultures that depend on the forest for their survival.

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