In the wide, quiet spaces of BLM land, I heard echoes of a past we’ve buried—and a future we still might save.
The Bureau of Land Management oversees an astonishing 245 million acres. "How on earth had I never heard of these lands?" asks Josh Jackson.
This week, Longreads shares an excerpt from Jackson's new book, THE ENDURING WILD: A JOURNEY INTO CALIFORNIA'S PUBLIC LANDS, out on June 24 from Berkeley publisher Heyday. In the book, Jackson sets off to explore California's overlooked wilderness. Our excerpt zooms in on Jackson's time in Bodie Hills in the Eastern Sierra, and he discusses the tragic legacy of gold mining in the state.
For many gold mining corporations, their practices can be distilled into a simple formula, as evidenced by a century and a half of environmental destruction and abandoned mines across the West: Find the mineral, devastate the landscape, take the money, and then abandon the site once profits inevitably dwindle.”
When viewed from the perspective of today, the harsh reality of boom-and-bust gold mining becomes clear: The brief boom benefited only a fortunate few. The bust was for everyone else.
Canadian David Hobby, fresh from the California gold fields, put on his best shirt and styled his long hair in banana curls for this portrait made in San Francisco in 1850.
The breakthrough is reminiscent of that old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin who can spin straw into gold, only these scientists use dairy.
"Scientists have developed a way to dramatically reduce the cost of recycling certain electronic waste by using whey protein.
Their method allows for the easy recovery of gold from circuit boards at a cost of energy and materials amounting to 50 times less than the price of the gold they recover—these are the numbers that big business likes to see.
Indeed, the potential for scalability depends on this sort of cost savings, something traditional e-waste recycling methods just can’t achieve.
Professor Raffaele Mezzenga from ETH Zurich has found that whey protein, a byproduct of dairy manufacturing, can be used to make sponges that attract trace amounts of ionized gold.
Electronic waste contains a variety of valuable metals, including copper, cobalt, and gold. Despite gold’s public persona as being either money or jewelry, thousands of ounces of gold are used in electronics every year for its exceptional conductive properties.
Mezzenga’s colleague Mohammad Peydayesh first “denatured whey proteins under acidic conditions and high temperatures, so that they aggregated into protein nanofibrils in a gel,” writes the ETH Zurich press. “The scientists then dried the gel, creating a sponge out of these protein fibrils.”
The next step was extracting the gold: done by tossing 20 salvaged motherboards into an acid bath until the metals had dissolved into ionized compounds that the sponge began attracting.
Removing the sponge, a heat treatment caused the gold ions to aggregate into 22-carat gold flakes which could be easily removed.
“The fact I love the most is that we’re using a food industry byproduct to obtain gold from electronic waste,” Mezzenga says. In a very real sense, he observes, the method transforms two waste products into gold. “You can’t get much more sustainable than that!” ...
However the real dollar value comes from the bottom line—which was 50 times more than the cost of energy and source materials. Because of this, the scientists have every intention of bringing the technology to the market as quickly as possible while also desiring to see if the protein fibril sponge can be made of other food waste byproducts.
E-waste is a quickly growing burden in global landfills, and recycling it requires extremely energy-intensive machinery that many recycling facilities do not possess.
The environmental value of the minerals contained within most e-waste comes not only from preventing the hundreds of years it takes for them to break down in the soil, but also from the reduction in demand from new mining operations which can, though not always, significantly degrade the environments they are located in.
[Note: Absolutely massive understatement, mining is incredibly destructive to ecosystems. Mining is also incredibly toxic to human health and a major cause of conflict, displacement, and slavery globally.]
Other countries are trying to incentivize the recycling of e-waste, and are using gold to do so. In 2022, GNN reported that the British Royal Mint launched an electronically traded fund (ETF) with each share representing the value of gold recovered from e-waste as a way for investors to diversify into gold in a way that doesn’t support environmentally damaging mining.
The breakthrough is reminiscent of that old fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin who can spin straw into gold. All that these modern-day, real-life alchemists are doing differently is using dairy and circuit boards rather than straw."
Brazilian police with support from Interpol have destroyed 277 dredges used in illegal gold mining along the Madeira River in one of the lar
By STEVEN GRATTAN - MST, November 3, 2025
Brazilian police backed by Interpol have destroyed hundreds of dredges used in illegal gold mining along the Madeira River, in one of the biggest coordinated crackdowns yet on criminal networks operating across the Amazon Basin.
Whenever someone promises you that a new opportunity they're telling you about is a goldmine, take a moment to remember just how many people through the course of history have lost absolutely everything mining for gold.
