All that glitters: the demand for gold is soaring. But some of the methods used to mine gold today take a heavy toll on the environment.

• Author: Perlez, Jane
• Position: ENVIRONMENT

For thousands of years, people have been willing to do just about anything to acquire gold, even kill or conquer for it. In the early 1500s, King Ferdinand of Spain laid down the priorities as his conquistadors set out for the New World. "Get gold," he told them. "Humanely if possible, but at all costs, get gold."

Today, the push to "get gold" has little to do with building empires. It is mostly about the soaring demand for jewelry in places like India and China, the largest- and third-largest consumers of gold mined today. (The U.S. is second.) And it is also about gold as an investment during troubled times. At around $600 an ounce, the price of gold is higher than it has been in 25 years.

During the California Gold Rush, which started in 1849, gold was plentiful and relatively easy to mine with simple hand tools. Now, it's a lot harder. Much of the gold left in the Earth today is in the form of microscopic particles: Mining and refining that gold, much of which is located in the poorest corners of the world, often results in enormous damage to the environment.

Consider a ring containing three ounces of gold. For each ounce, miners may dig up and haul away 30 tons of rock and sprinkle it with diluted cyanide, which separates the rock from the gold. Workers at some of the largest mines move 500,000 tons of earth a day, pile it in mounds that can rival the Great Pyramids in size, and drizzle the ore with cyanide solution for years.

TOXIC WASTE

"You can mine gold ore at a lower grade than any other metal," says Mike Wireman, a mine specialist with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. "That means big, open pits. But it must also be easy and cheap to be profitable, and that means cyanide."

Many of these "open pit" mines have become the near-equivalent of nuclear-waste dumps. Although a significant amount of gold is still mined in the United States and other developed countries, about 70 percent of the world's gold is now mined in developing countries like Peru, Guatemala, and Ghana. Those are the places where the real battle over gold's future is being waged.

Gold companies say they are bringing good jobs, tighter environmental rules, and time-tested technologies to their new operations. But environmental groups say companies are mining in ways that would never be tolerated in wealthier areas. People who live closest to the mines say they see too few of mining's benefits while bearing too much of its burden. In Guatemala and Peru, people...