Workers clear debris within a former processing plant as part of preparations to reopen the Panguna copper and gold mine.
In an article for The New York Times, Victoria Kim asserts that although rising demand for copper has fueled interest in Bougainville’s Panguna mine in Papua New Guinea, some fear that a rush to reopen risks return to violence.
The years had covered the skeletal structures of the abandoned mine with rust, filling its shafts with sludge and debris several stories deep. Green leaves sprouted from crumbling industrial equipment. What was left of a water pump station was repurposed as a church, with steel beams for pews.
Four decades ago, the vast Panguna mine on Bougainville, an island on the eastern edge of Papua New Guinea, abruptly shut down. It closed after sabotage by residents irate that less than 2 percent of the wealth generated by the Australian-run copper and gold mine went to the local community, even though it obliterated whole villages and buried swaths of land downstream in mine waste.
