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The Compostela Valley is located in the Philippines. The discovery of gold a few years ago has turned the area into a booming gold rush region. Many of these prospectors and minors are impoverished individuals that came to try to find gold. Recent environmental changes and natural disasters have made The Compostela Valley unsafe. Geologists declared that there were rifts opening in the tops of the ridges being mined, making the slopes unstable. Recently, after a hurricane inundated the area, several slopes collapsed, killing and injuring many miners.
Bodies of the dead are still being retrieved. This environmental disaster is caused by the dominance of wealthy governments and individuals in two ways. The first way that dominance contributes to this environmental situation is through the social inequalities that exist in the Philippines. The government had closed the Compostela Valley to mining because it was hazardous. Impoverished miners needed to ignore the warnings because their only source of income was from the gold they were mining.
This economic reality forced the poor miners into a situation where they needed to undertake dangerous work so they could survive. In some cases, businesses that were to have closed down were still open and employing the poor so they could continue to make a profit. The second way dominance by rich governments fits into this tragedy is through climate change. Wealthy nations continue to drive climate change by using fossil fuels. They could switch to cleaner energy sources, but this would hurt profits.
The refusal to change has created an ecocrisis in the global atmosphere. Climate change has been linked to stronger storms in the Philippines over the past few years. It is thought that the extreme weather experienced in the Compostela Valley just prior to the landslide was driven by global climate change (Rojas, 2012).BibliographyRojas, Jose. "The Compostela Valley Disaster." Business Mirror [Manilla] 8 Jan. 2012. Print.
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