This content was first published on IGR – Italian Gemological Review no. 2 in 2017. The information provided here is therefore current as of the original publication date.
Introduction: Naive delights in Tsavo
Tsavo, Kenya, July 06th 2005: I was traveling to Africa for the very first time. We just had our first day in the field. It was a great one as we could visit the John Saul Ruby mine, that was then the most important ruby mining operation in East Africa. As we were leaving the mine, located inside Tsavo National Park, we drove by to the water hole created by the miners. But we were not alone. Coming out from the bush a large group of elephants appeared moving out of the bush. Covered in Tsavo red dust, about one hundred of these giants, were coming to drink near the ruby mine. It was just magnificent (Figure 1). Something was obvious to me: here in Africa, gem mining and nature were obviously in harmony. I was just delighted.
I first heard about Tsavo watching the hollywood block buster «The ghost and the Darkness» (1996) based on the famous story about two men eating lions who bring terror and stopped the work on a railway project in 1899 (Patterson, 1907). Since then Tsavo was for me synonimous with raw African wilderness. So going there to visit my frist gem mines in Africa was something I was very excited about. Witnessing there that herd of elephants less than one hundred meters from that ruby mineinside Tsavo National park, it was just something that I was only expecting to see in my dreams… As a young gemologist in love with Nature: I was definitively in love with the field in Africa.
That day was just a prelude to a wonderful week. Indeed few days after we went to visit Campbell Bridges, a man claiming to be not only a gem miner but also a conservationist: Thanks to him, the green variety of grossular garnet is now associated with Tsavo National Park as «Tsavorite» (Pardieu, 2008).
After numerous visits to Tsavo since 2005, now each time I see a ruby cabochon from the John Saul Ruby mine or a Tsavorite (Figure 2), even if the stone is not the most beautiful in the World, I’ve a special feeling for it, a feeling that feeds from these wonderful memories I had about Africa and Tsavo!
Tsavo is not the only region in Kenya or in East Africa where I visited gem deposits associated with beautiful Nature: visiting the ruby deposit near Baringo, I was amazed to see on nearby lakes millions of pink flamingos with colors matching those of the rubies mined nearby. Next door in Northern Tanzania many gem producing areas are also located near National Parks: Emeralds and Alexandrites are mined in the south of the Manyara National Park. Fine rhodolite garnets are mined near Tarangire, Rubies are mined at Longido and Spassartine garnets are found at Loliondo near the Serengeti. In the Umba Valley garnets, sapphires, zircons and tourmalines are found near Mkomazi National Park. In central Tanzania, Mahenge is famous for its rubies, spinels and garnets. It is located nearthe Selous Reserve and to travel there I could each time enjoy a nice drive through Mikumi National Park and see buffaloes, girafes, elephants and antelopes. In 2016 I had even the chance to see a leopard crossing the road in full day light just in front of our car! In the south of the country the sapphire producing area at Songea and Tunduru are located on both side of the wildlife corridor linking Selous in Tanzania with the Niassa National Reserve in Mozambique.
Each time I travelled around East Africa to visit gem mining area, it was obvious to me that some synergies could be possible between the gem trade and conservation. As what better way to promote the gems from the mineral world than to associate them with these true gems of the living world that are African National parks?
Mozambique: when reality shakes a naive vision
In September 2009, my naive optimistic vision suffered a reality check. I was traveling in Mozambique to try to visit the two new ruby deposits recently discovered in Northern Mozambique in Niassa and near Montepuez. While trying to visit the deposit in the bush in Niassa while we were on motobikes we were ambushed by a group of men and found ourselves with AK47s pointed on our faces. I do remember that one single word passed to my mind «S**t ». I thought our last day had come.
Luckily for us, despite their unconventional aspect (one of them was wearing an Osama Bin Laden shirt gloryfying 9/11), these men were a mix force composed of Niassa Rangers, Mozambican policemen and immigration officers. That was clearly a misunderstanding: we were traveling with authorisations from the regional mining officer and the chief of district, we had with us a technician from the ministry of mines and a policeman in uniform. On their side, they were sent from other authorities with strict order to arrest all people trying to go to the mining site and they were not informed about our visit. They were thinking we might be the people financing the illegal ruby mining. Before the issue to be cleared, we spent three days in detention in the bush (Figure 5). It was not really what I would call my best time ever in Africa as these guys were tough with us. During that first expedition to Mozambique we didn’t succeded to visit any of the two ruby deposits I wanted to visit, but all things considered, at the end, it was far from being a waste of time either. Indeed thanks to that misadventure I was put in contact with the Niassa National Reserve management. They invited me to visit them in Maputo and discuss with about the problem they were facing with ruby miners invading the reserve. I returned then to Mozambique to meet them and I spent 3 days discussing with them. At the end they allowed me to visit that new ruby deposit in Niassa. Few days after I was back to Niassa with the great surprise of some of the men who detained me in the bush few weeks before as that time they were asked to provide me security. It was quite ironic. The visit went very well and the Niassa Reserve sent me an invitation to attend their annual congress in Pemba in December 2009 to give a talk about the ruby trade; then they told me that I could have an opportunity to meet and discuss with the people from the Montepuez area I was still not able to visit. So I returned to Mozambique and there I was able to meet and discuss with many conservationists and tourist operators. Finally I could get introduced to the people from Mwiriti lda who had the mining license near Montepuez. After some discussions, they agreed to let us visit their new deposit. We had the pleasure to be the first foreigners to be able to visit it. Back in Thailand I could work on a extensive study of that new material that soon became the world leading source for rubies (Pardieu & al, 2009). That report interested Gemfields who then approched Mwiriti and eventually in 2011 entered in a partnership with them to work in the area.
That adventure remains for me a classic example about how, when you stay positive and never give up, you can go from a disastrous start into a final success.
Meeting and working with conservationists in Northern Mozambique and being allowed to visit these new ruby deposits. I realized that Niassa, like Tsavo, was a very special place in Eastern Africa, and doing so I learned a lot about conservation and was able to think about how conservation and gemology could benefit from each other: Niassa is one of Africa’s largest protected area and it is very difficult to access. Its isolation was actually a chance as it protected its authentic aspect. But at the same time as Niassa has difficulties to attract tourists, it is difficult to find ways to finance conservation there. Traveling there takes time, and it is costly. Beyond that it is not really a photo-tourist friendly place: there the bush is thick and animals are not as easy to see as in the open plains of the Massai Mara, the Serengeti, or the Ngorongoro. Finally the area is also plagued by tse tse flies and mosquitoes.
For a country like Mozambique, with an economy plagued by wars during most of the second half of the 20th century, the priority for the government is not on conservation but on people. So with few tourists and limited government support, finding the necessary money to protect Niassa from its numerous threats is very difficult. The Reserve management decided then to make a choice that was controversial for many conservationists: Niassa became a laboratory for «conservation friendly trophee» hunting. The principle is the following: as animals reproduce and die, wildlife can be seen as a renewable resource. If an area is well managed, then the number of animals should be able to grow thanks to the revenue collected from hunting as trophee hunting is mainly targeting old males that had enough time to reproduce and who will anyway die one day… In order to study and follow that, the Niassa Reserve hired some scientists to study the animal populations, to evaluate the threat they face (including the impact of hunting) and to find out what is the best practical solution for Niassa. Dr. Colleen Begg and her husband Keith came then to Niassa. The hunters agreed that, for them, the higher the number of lions, the higher the number of lions they will be able to sell to their customers (Figure 6).
I met Colleen and Keith Begg for the first time at the Niassa Reserve congress in 2009 when Colleen gave her talk about the status of the lion populations in 2009. She was happy to say that, as hunters were not shooting anymore lions less than 6 years old the past few years, she was feeling that trophee hunting as it was done then was only a minor threat for the survival of lions in Niassa. On the other hand, the destruction of habitat due to illegal logging, agriculture and bush meat snaring were the main threats. To my surprise, she also put gem mining as a higher threat to lion populations compared to trophee hunting… I was stunned. How come a conservationist, who was obviously not pro hunting, could see the trophee hunting industry as an ally for conservation and the gem industry as a threat?
Well the facts were clear when we study what happened in Niassa after the discovery of rubies in 2008 about 30 kilometers from M’sawize village. Miners from all around the region started to work in an area previously populated with a lot of wildlife (Figure 7). Soon more than 1,000 people were active digging for rubies. Each day, tens of noisy motorbikes were going back and forth between the new mining camp and M’sawize to supply the miners and trade stones. The area was transformed within few weeks into something looking much more like a first World War battlefield surrounded by piles of trash than an ideal African natural reserve. As miners were making money and as food was difficult to bring to such a remote area, professional poachers started to operate around to supply to miners. Illegal mining camp like this where police and rangers are not welcome are perfect logistic bases for professional poachers to hide and thrive. During my visit to the Niassa Reserve headquarters in Maputo, people told me that near M’sawize during the gem rush the hunters met twice poachers armed with AK47’s hunting buffaloes and actually the main reason why my team was detained and treated like serious suspects was that our driver (the only guy in the area with a car to rent) was suspected to help poachers operating in the region.
With the cumulated effect of disturbance and poaching, soon wildlife was wiped out from the area. For the company owning the hunting concession, the story was a total disaster: not only because wildlife was gone, but also the good relations they built over the years with local communities had also been damaged because of the conflict over mining. For the Reserve management, the danger was clear: if its tourist operators were forced to leave because they could not operate anymore in Niassa, then they would have to find another way to the infrastructure in the Reserve, to pay for their anti-poaching scouts and finance conservation.
Obviously for the Niassa Reserve management, for the hunters and the conservationists, the gem industry was clearly to add to the list of Niassa enemies along with poachers and illegal loggers. Few days after the Niassa Reserve congress finished, Avatar, a new Hollywood block busterhit the screens. Watching the movie with the memories of my recent experiences in Niassa, it was clear to me that the image of the gem industry could be soon at risk if new conflicts were going to occur between conservation and gem mining. My hopes for an harmonious relation or even a synergy between gems and wildlife in Africa like the one Campbell Bridges initiated with his association of Tsavo and green grossular garnet had taken a serious blow. And that was particularly true as Campbell Bridges had been assassinated few months before in Tsavo, trying to defend his rights to mine Tsavorite.
Madagascar: a growing conflict between conservation and gem mining
Soon I could see that my fears became reality. While traveling around Madagascar from 2005 to 2011, I could witness some gem mining activities near National Parks: sapphires were mined near Ambondromifehy in the North of the Island inside Ankarana National park since 1996. In the south, small scale mining for sapphires was also taking place in some part of the Isalo and Zombitse-Vohibasia National parks after the discovery of the massive sapphire deposit around Ilakaka and Sakaraha. The issue was then not making headlines, but it was serious enough for a study about “Artisanal mining rushes in Protected areas and a response toolkit” to be commissioned by several institutions including the WWF, The World Bank and The Tiffany Foundation. It was completed in June 2012, few weeks after an important discovery took place near Didy village close to Ambatondrazaka town in North Eastern Madagascar.
After Ambondromifehy and Ilakaka, Didy was the third time within less than 20 years that Malagasy protected areas were getting invaded by unlicensed gem miners. Nevertheless the report written by Ruppert Cook and Thimothy Healy (Cook & Healy, 2012), remained quite confidential and neither the government or the media seemed to take the issue very seriously into consideration. For most people in the trade business was going as usual and thus there was nothing much to worry about.
The discovery near Didy was nevertheless just the beginning of something more serious. If the forest covered region located East of the line linking Moramanga, Ambatondrazaka and Andilamena had experienced few gems rush since 2000, first, so far all these discoveries took place outside of the corridor linking the two national parks of Ankeniheny and Zahamena also known as CAZ (Figures 8 and 9). Then the new discovery near Didy was very different, as this time the quality of the stones was really excellent. The rush attracted many buyers. As competition raised, prices went highand in a world where mobile phones were now present even in remote villages (that was not the case 10 years before) more and more miners decided to try their luck as I could witness when I visited the rush: more than 10,000 miners from all over the island went to mine near Didy (Pardieu, 2012).
As it took place inside the CAZ protected area, soon the authorities reacted. Some soldiers were sent and a mouse and cat game started there. With that rush many local people (gold prospectors, farmers, hunter gatherers) learned about gems and their value and, as it was to be expected, other discoveries then followed. In 2015 very fine rubies were discovered in the forest near Ambodivoangy village inside the Zahamena National Park (Pardieu, 2015), about half way between previous discoveries near Didy and Andilamena. Again as I could witness more than 10,000 people rushed there. For me one pattern was becoming more and more obvious: the whole forest covered region, including the CAZ protected area, from East of Andilamena in the North to Moramanga in the south (and possibly further) was looking like a giant ruby and sapphire deposit waiting to be discovered. The geology was supporting that hypothesis. When in October 2016 a new find took place near Bemainty village, again inside the CAZ, few people wereactually surprised. But what was truly surprising was the quality of the stones found as within few weeks some of the best blue and orange sapphires ever found in Madagascar were mined from this area. As a consequence, rapidly more than 40,000 artisanal miners rushed there (Pardieu 2016, 2017, Perkins 2016).
With such a number of miners moving there, this time things were not going unnoticed. Prices rapidly went crazy and Tana, the Malagasy capital, was full of rumors. Indeed many people in Madagascar willing to hide their money were investing in sapphires as gems are easier to hide and move than gold or cash. In april 2017, Edward Carver, a young journalist working for Associated Press who just arrived in Madagascar gathered some of all the sensational info he could get here or there (including from my own reports and videos published few months before) and on April 2nd 2017 he issued for Associated Press a short but very astonishing one sided paper that went viral after its publication by the Guardian. Few days after, Conservation International, the powerful Washington based environmental lobby managing the CAZ on behalf of the Malagasy government, published a statement about the issue condemning gem mining inside the CAZ and calling on the Malagasy government to help them «to put an end to this illegal activity» (Figures 16 and 17).
The next day, on April 6th, CNN followed with its own article (Figure 18). If it was less one sided that the one published by Associated Press, it came with a catchy title “New sapphire rush in Madagascar may threaten rare species” just over a lemur photograph. Finally the BBC sent a correspondant and his team to the new mining site. In July 2017, after their return, a series of videos were published by the BBC suggesting that sapphire mining was threatening lemur populations and including an interview from a Malagasy conservationist calling for the boycott of sapphires from Madagascar: my fears were coming true as it was not exactly the type of promotion that the sapphire trade was needing.
It is increasingly clear that in Madagascar, environmentalists in charge of conservation are looking at the sapphire industry as an “enemy” who is a greedy, complicit and guilty partner in supporting and profiteering from illegal environmental destruction. And this time the press seems to be very interested to cover the story and not exactly in a fair way.
In the recent video coverage by BBC, we can see that, as when Rosey Perkins and myself experienced while visiting the area few months before the BBC team, the BBC journalists were able to hear lemurs in the jungle near the new mining site. Well, if each visitor arriving on the mining site is able to hear lemurs while standing at the mines, even one year after the beginning of the mining activity, it means one thing: the impact of sapphire mining on the lemur population is not as bad as what the BBC is telling. Actually I would have been more concerned if they had not heard any lemurs. The BBC also blames sapphire miners for the deforestation. Well, while visiting the area in Feb 2017 and discussing with people, I found out that the miners have settled in an area that was previously burned by farmers practicing slash and burn type agriculture, a practice locally known as “Taavy” which is known as the main threat for Madagascar forests. When the forest was cleared by the farmers, gold miners came reportedly prospecting and the sapphires were then discovered. The gem miners came and started working. Because of the Taavy, there was plenty of dry wood available in the area for cooking or construction (Figure 19). So unlike what BBC claims, the gem miners cannot be seriously taken as responsible for most of the forest destruction that occurred there. However, when the wood available in the Taavy will be exhausted, it is expected that the damage will increase. But it seems that the BBC was here more interested in getting a catchy story than in seriously investigating the matter. Actually in my opinion, the main issue associated with gem mining near Bemainty is not about poaching lemurs or cutting trees, it is more about siltation: as miners wash gem rich gravels, the clear stream going through the area is transformed into a muddy channel. All plants, fish, insects depending on this stream will suffer from the siltation issue. This seriously affects all the ecosystem over tens of kilometers down the stream from the mining site. But well, people from BBC obviously don’t really have more expertize in conservation than in the gem trade and came with a script rather than with the will to investigate what was going one and produce a fair coverage of the gem rush. The reality is that the media are hungry for horror stories.
This is to be worried about as since 2012 and the arrival of gem miners near Didy inside the CAZ, Conservation International is collecting data on an ongoing basis about the damage done in the areas they try to protect. The CAZ was indeed identified for Conservation International who administrates theit on behalf of the Malagasy authorities the key area for their efforts in Madagascar. By going to mine there, illegal sapphire miners are quite literally invading the home turf of, and picking a fight with, a sophisticated well-connected Washington Leviathan. Articulate and exacting documents are being compiled by conservational staff and researchers. These reports will codify the damage done. They will have soon some hard statistics such as numbers of trees fallen, acres destroyed,tons of fuel and pollutants spilt, impact of siltation, names of localized-specialized animals or plantspecies affected by the mining, etc… It is just a question of time before these reports to be completed and published. Then things might become worse as once the gem mining industry in Madagascar or elsewhere will be under the spot-light over the issues of illegal habitat destruction backed with strong data carefully collected over years; it will only take one piece of rigorous investigative journalism,possibly commissioned as a hatchet-job, to turn the gem industry into a punching ball for activists willing to start a reason to fight.
We can just hope that by this time the people interested in the future of the gem industry and of conservation in Madagascar will have taken some time to seat and discuss the issue in order to find a win-win solution for everybody, by that I mean really everybody: the people, the Malagasy government, the gem trade and conservation. This is truly, I believe, in the interest of the gem industry as conservationists are not a movement to underestimate: they are great people to have as friends but they are tough opponents to have. When I see what happened to the once powerful fur industry when it collided with Paul Watson and Brigitte Bardot, I just don’t think that our industry interest is to turn conservationists into enemies.
Follow up on Mozambique
While the situation in Madagascar turned into something to worry about, in Mozambique things actually didn’t turned as bad as I was afraid of, as far as the ruby industry side of the story, but for conservation the worse fears became true: most illegal ruby miners left Niassa after the Government sent troops to close the illegal mining site. Luckily for people in Niassa, another ruby deposit had been discovered near Montepuez. So most of the miners moved there as it was much more convenient for them to work there: first, it was not inside a Reserve, there was a road nearby and a town where buyers could easily base their activities. After Gemfields arrival in 2011, things became more difficult for illegal miners, but most of them remained there. On the conservation side, not only illegal ruby miners had left, but in 2014, Gemfields mining rubies near the Niassa Reserve, decided to support conservation in Niassa as part of their CSR projects. Visiting Colleen and Keith Beggand’s «Niassa Lion Project» in 2015, I found that for them ruby mining was not anymore seen as a major threat for the lion populations as the illegal ruby miners had left, and that they were now receiving some financial support from Gemfields. But sadly for Niassa, they informed me that if illegal ruby miners had left, illegal gold miners had invaded Niassa in large numbers since 2014. Even worse, illegal gold miners are using mercury to extract gold and thus pollution of the rivers with mercury was added to the list of all the problems created by illegal mining (Figures 22 and 23). When I visited the Niassa Lion Project in 2015, I could witness that disaster. Going on a 3 days long patrol with local rangers I could witness them catching more than 100 illegal gold miners as I reported in the documentary published by GIA in 2017 about «Conservation, ruby and gold mining in Mozambique». At that time I was reported that after some aerial surveys the Niassa Reserve was estimating that more than 10,000 illegal gold miners were likely working in different part of Niassa. The worse fears of the Niassa Reserve management became then true as since 2015 elephants poachers obviously took advantage of the presence of the illegal gold miners in Niassa to hide when necessary, get informed about what was going on and then use these villages as bases for their poaching activities without being afraid to be caught by antipoaching rangers, who were not welcome in illegal mining camps. Within the past 3 years the Niassa Reserve lost about 16,000 out of the 20,000 elephants living there before the arrival of the gold miners.
How to go ahead?
It is easy for journalists to use poor miners working in protected areas to blame the gem industry for the destruction of protected areas and the disparition of endangered species like lemurs as they are an easy, visible target. Now on the other hand there are a lot of things that were done for conservationists to look at the gem industry more as a potential ally than as an easy target. The industry is regularly working on the issue of responsible practices (Archuletta, 2016) but regarding conservation more specifically several ideas could be discussed between key players from the gem industry and conservation.
Studying the issue about mining and conservation in Mozambique, it seems clear that first the main problem (besides mercury pollution) is actually associated to the fact that gem mining is illegal: as mining it is illegal, then other illegal business (like poaching) takes advantage of illegal mining camps. Now if mining could become legal and «conservation friendly» then we could imagine that the inverse could happen as mining sites could be used as logistic bases by rangers working to support conservation instead of the poachers. This is what I witnessed in Tsavo where gem miners like Campbell Bridges were supporting conservation or where ruby mining was done inside the National Park and was providing some support to the local rangers.
Now, if gem mining could become legal in areas dedicated to conservation, the whole issue would become to find a way for gem mining to be «conservation friendly». Gem miners interested in working in protected areas could discuss about mining method minimizing the impact on the ecosystem by avoiding unnecessary logging, littering, siltation issues in streams, supporting anti-poaching, and could agree to rehabilitate the area once mining is completed. Then gem mining (and trading), taking place in areas dedicated to conservation, should also provide some financial support for conservation. This could be done by asking gem dealers or miners to buy some specific licences in order to be able to operate in a given area.
To allow mining (even as small scale conservation friendly mining) to take place in protected areas might be a difficult step for conservationists, but it is clear that to find a solution enabling to replace thousands of illegal miners working out of any control like recently in Mozambique or Madagascar with few legal ones collaborating with conservationists would bea much better situation for conservation and the gem trade. And by that I don’t mean replacing small scale miners by large companies. In times of gem rushes, allowing miners to work under certain conditions as long as they register and join a local association can be an efficient way to maintain public order and keep the rush under control as I saw in different places.
In countries like Australia and Sri Lanka, I could witness that gem mining is taking place under very strict environmental rules to minimize the environmental impact of gem mining. Such rules are far to be perfect, but when pragmatic people from the gem industry and conservationists meet and discuss about these issues, then some win/win type solutions can be found if there is a good will on both sides: after all, when it is set up correctly, a gem mining operation doesn’t create more damage to an area than a hotel. In places like Vietnam, the author could also see that gem mining operations can provide to nearby villages some additional employment opportunities, like fabricating objects such as gem paintings or gem carvings that could be then proposed as souvenirs to tourists visiting the protected area and its region. But these objects could also be used as decoration for hotels, religious or official buildings or even private houses (Figure 28).
But the gem mining industry could also support conservation in many other ways: I think there is a great potential for people in the gem industry to associate their products with good projects and/or good people. The first reason is that if we don’t do that then we will have nothing much to say when people try to associate our gems or our industry with criminal activities or with the destruction of the environment.
This is what I realized after my adventures in Mozambique in 2009. I decided then to start changing the world by changing myself and I decided to support the Niassa Lion Project in order to show to conservationists like Colleen and Keith Begg that not everybody in the gem trade was their enemy. They use to tell me that conservation is about converting people one by one… Well, I wanted to show them that the reverse could also be true. People in love with gem can also convince conservationists that we are not their enemy: I’m not a gem miner or a trader, I was just a gemologist in love with nature. It was clear to me that if more people were doing that this could make a difference. I was thinking that if a jeweller working on a piece of jewelry with, let’s say a panther, could decide to promote and financially support a panther conservation project, that would be great. If that jeweller could be a major jewelry company like Cartier (who is famous to use regularly panthers in their design or marketing) that would be even better, as that would be seen as something many conservationists could see as a positive benchmark. I was then delighted when few years later Gemfields decided also to support the «Niassa Lion Project» as part of their corporate social responsabilities (CSR) activities (Figure 27).
(© Vincent Pardieu / GIA)
But actually we should not wait big guys like Gemfields to do the right thing, anybody could decide to associate their activity in the industry with a good project of idea: gems could support conservation but also why not education, health… The list is not exaustive. After all, gems and jewelry are durable products and the same gem from a given origin, even if it was mined few hundred years ago, could be used to promote and finance a good idea near the place it was produced each time it gets sold. This is the idea about «Conservation Gemstones» that I introduced since my adventures in Niassa (Pardieu 2009, Cartier and Pardieu 2011) and try to promote until today with this article. Actually it is our common responsability as members of the gem industry to show to people working in conservation that we are not their enemies. Supporting conservation (or any other good idea) will not only improve the image of our industry, our business or ourselves when the image of our industry is at a tipping point as we can see with the situation in Madagascar, but it will also make some differences near the places where gems are mined. Supporting good projects will enable us to convert conservationists one by one into the idea that the gem industry is not their enemy. At the end it will also give everybody a better feeling about the gems they are working with/or for the final consumer simply a better feeling about the gems she is wearing and loving.
(© Vincent Pardieu)
About the author
Vincent Pardieu is Field Gemologist & Consultant at VP Consulting.
References
Archuletta, J.L., (2016) « The color of responsability : Ethical Issues and Solutions in Colored gemstones », Gems & gemology, Summer 2016, Vol 52, No2, https://www.gia.edu/gems-gemology/summer-2016-color-responsibility-ethical-issues-solutions-colored-gemstones
Cartier, L.E., Pardieu, V., (2011) « Conservation gemstones : Beyond Fair Trade ? » http://www.conservationgemology.org/Conservation gems beyond Fair Trade.php
Carver, Edward (2017), “Madagascar forest overwhelmed by thousands seeking sapphires”, Associated Press, https://apnews.com/d53ad819318b4440b93e710e97345c51/madagascar-forest-overwhelmed-thousands-seeking-sapphires
Clarke, J. (2012) « Save me from the Lion’s mouth : Exploring Human-Wildlife conflict in Africa » ISBN 978 1 92054 475 1
Conservation International: http://www.conservation.org/NewsRoom/pressreleases/Pages/Statement-by-Conservation-International-on-Illegal-Sapphire-Mining-in-Madagascar.aspx
Cook, R., Healey, T., (2012) “Madagascar Case Study: Artisanal mining rushes in protected areas and a response toolkit”, https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/Bios-Cons-Nat-Pro-691-008.pdf
Monks, K., (2017) “New sapphire rush in Madagascar may threaten rare species”, CNN, http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/06/africa/sapphire-rush-madagascar/index.html
Pardieu, V., Hughes, R.W. (2008) « Tsavorite, an Untamed Beauty », InColor, Fall 2008, pp. 36-45 http://www.fieldgemology.org/Tsavorite_article.php
Pardieu, V., Jacquat, S., Senoble, J.B., Bryl, L.P., Hughes, R.W., Smith, M., (2009b). “Expedition report to the Ruby mining sites in Northern Mozambique (Niassa and Cabo Delgado provinces)”, from http://www.giathai.net/pdf/Fieldtrip_to_Mozambique_December_16_2009.pdf.
Pardieu, V., (2012) « Ruby and Sapphire rush near Didy, Madagascar (April – June 2012) », http://www.giathai.net/pdf/Didy_Madagascar_TH.pdf
Pardieu, V., Vertriest, W., Weeramonkhonlert,V., Raynaud, V., Atikarnsakul, U., Perkins, R., (2017) “Sapphires from the gem rush Bemainty area, Ambatondrazaka (Madagascar)”, https://www.gia.edu/doc/Sapphires-Gem-Rush-Bemainty-area-Ambatondrazaka-Madagascar-v2.pdf
Pardieu, V., Jacquat, S., Bryl, L.P., Senoble, J.B., Hughes, R.W., Smith, M. (2009) « Expedition report to ruby mining sites in Northern Mozambique (Sept. – Dec. 2009) » http://www.giathai.net/pdf/Fieldtrip_to_Mozambique_December_16_2009.pdf
Patterson, J.H. (1907) « The man-eaters of Tsavo »
Perkins, R., (2016) “Thoughts on a visit to a sapphire rush near Ambatondrazaka, Madagascar”, www.roseyperkins.com, http://roseyperkins.com/visit-sapphire-rush-near-ambatondrazaka- madagascar/
Article by Vincent Pardieu, published on Rivista Italiana di Gemmologia – Italian Gemological Review #2, September 2017.
