A Thing I Wonder

Is that toilet wired?

Not that I'm wandering about in gold chains and track suits, but: Will growing environmentalism reduce interest in gold jewelry? If even frequent meat-eaters turn away from veal because of the way the animal is treated or avoid factory farm eggs for similar reasons, will people avoid gold jewelry if they know how cyanide is used to retrieve the gold from rock?

One year at a conference in Texas I asked a South American engineer about gold mining in Chile. He'd worked at a site around which birds had stop coming. For a 10-mile radius.

It was a mining site his company had been called in to fix.