*not a real Mines and Money ad… but it might as well be!


As you read this, London is playing host to an unsavoury gathering of shady miners and their wheeler-dealer financiers. Over 2,500 people – including top brass from 150 of the world’s biggest mining firms – are getting together at the Mines and Money conference for the next four days. They will be sharing tips and cutting deals to extract more profit from the Earth, the climate and the many communities that happen to be unlucky enough to be situated above mineral supplies.
Can you Tweet using the #MMLondon2015 and #MinesAndMoney hashtags, to remind those inside that the world is not theirs to carve up for private profit? If enough of us do so, we will flood their online discussion with the kinds of truth about mining that the whole conference was designed to hide.
Here are a few suggestions:

…Or be creative – force those in attendance to face up to the realities they are creating for communities all over the world. Just include the #MMLondon2015 and #MinesAndMoney hashtags in your tweet (and RT tweets from other critical voices), and it will reach the conference delegates on the inside.
The conference features:

  • Vedanta – currently under investigation over financial, environmental and labour violations around countless mining projects in India and Zambia.
  • PetroPavlovsk – an Indigenous community leader who opposed one of their mines has been sentenced to 5 years in a maximum-security Russian penal colony.
  • RioTinto – whose Oak Flat mining license was inserted into the fine print of a national defence bill in Arizona, without consultation with the Apache Indigenous peoples, for whom Oak Flat is sacred land.

This event is an insult to communities, the world over, who are facing the sharp edge of mining. So let those inside know what you think.