We hiked along a twisting, curse-worthy trail down the craggy face of Brownsberg plateau, hacking our way toward Witi Creek. I had been told by the administrators of the Central Suriname Nature Reserve that many of the waterways that snaked through the country’s only national park on the northern edge of the Amazon were dotted with illegal gold mines, but I wanted to see for myself. The miners—still known as pork-knockers from the era when they survived in the bush on salt pork and scrabbled cutbanks with pickaxes and pans—now worked with bulldozers and backhoes, hydro cannons and towering sluices, and employed a mercury separation process that was steadily poisoning the tributaries of the Suriname River. I followed my guide, crisscrossing the creek, ducking under downed limbs and fording at shallows, until we came to a sudden shaft of sunlight. We stepped from the trees onto the lip of a road ripped through the forest and picked our way up the muddy ruts to an open expanse the size of a football stadium. Gravel piles, some more than ten feet high, were heaped all around. We scrambled up one to see giant pools filled with stagnant water turned emerald by contaminants. The Surinamese government estimates that more than one hundred fifty square miles of its virgin rainforest have been leveled and more than three-quarters of the native fish species extirpated by such mining—and for what?
