“It’s like Texas”: variations on informal gold mining in Central Kalimantan

Indonesian Borneo’s Central Kalimantan province is home to unlicensed small-scale gold mining supporting thousands of miners and creating significant environmental impacts. The Hampalit gold rush in the late 1980s drew 10,000 miners, transforming the landscape into a moonscape. Today, migrant miners continue to work in isolated shanties, using dongfen engines to extract gold with low recovery rates and risking safety in pursuit of meager profits.

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