This content was first published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review no. 7 in 2019. The information provided here is therefore current as of the original publication date.
He lived in a hut on the trees. They say that some leopards watched over him. He passed away in August 2009, mortally wounded in his mining concessions in Kenya during an assault by illegal miners. His name was Campbell Bridges and was a Scottish geologist who became famous for discovering tsavorite.
He was an enlightened person, he knew the laws of marketing. He was the first to identify tanzanite that he placed, with Tiffany, on the Olympus of gems, without ignoring, though, that, in that continent which gave him so much and where he lived, there were countries left prey to underdevelopment. He was the first to highlight the theme of preservation. He showed that employment could be created in big natural parks using the means and resources made available by the extraction industry itself for the environmental cause, starting from the Tsavo one.
Ten years after the death of Bridges we see no change in the direction of the current draining raw materials from the South to the North of the world where the keys of luxury industry are found and where most of the added value is deposited. African gems (and not only) have often something to do with the post-colonial difficulties, with the oligopolistic selfishness of élites, with the widespread corruption, with the rigour of the big international financial institutions, with the government centralism indifferent to remote areas, with the division into opposing groups and tough tribal fringes.
Despite the known frailty and impoverishment of the countries that would have the natural resources to be, instead, very rich, over these, which are the structural economic underlying causes, often an imprecise and misleading picture prevails that frequently reduces the question to sensationalism. Gems, convenient metaphors of capricious luxury, of squanderings for non-essential goods, are a very easy target for simplistic exhibitions of the good radical chic conscience, as it was named by the pitiless pen of Tom Wolfe. Why should we drill the planet if we can have synthetic diamond and rubies?
Nat Geo heavily accused the miners of the sapphire rush in Madagascar in 2012 of deforesting 10,000 acres of a protected area, putting lemurs at risk of extinction. But, may be, 40,000 prospectors are the effect of extreme distress more than the cause of environmental disasters. In this issue, Vincent Pardieu, interviewed by Simon Dussart, explains how his Field gemmology, among other things, can gather enough data to check and refute the ground for such heavy claims. The prestigious American magazine had to rapidly go back rectifying and changing both title and texts of the incautious article.
Could this be due to the fact that stones have to do with society, media, economy and communication?
By Paolo Minieri, published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review #7, Summer 2019
