If you’re wearing gold jewelry right now, there’s a good chance it came from an illegal mining operation in the tropics and surfaced only after some rainforest was sacrificed, according to a team of University of Wisconsin–Madison researchers and alumni who studied regulatory efforts to curb some of these environmentally damaging activities in the Amazon.
The researchers, including Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor of Geography Lisa Naughton, investigated mining-related deforestation in a biodiverse and ecologically sensitive area of the Peruvian Amazon to see whether formalizing and legalizing these mining operations might curb some of their negative effects…