Most gold isn't used for essential services. While a small amount is bought by investors or used in electronics, more than 80 percent is made into jewelry -a lucrative pursuit. In the United States, a piece of gold typically sells for at least four times the value of gold. Yet few jewelers can tell you where the gold in their products originated. As a result, it's currently impossible to know if the gold we buy comes from a mine that dumps toxic waste in rivers, violates workers' rights, digs up wilderness areas, or evicts communities under the threat of violence.

Between 1995 and 2015, approximately half of the gold produced worldwide has or will come from the traditional territories of indigenous peoples, whose land rights are often not clearly recognized. Even when indigenous groups hold legal title to surface lands, some governments sell off the subsurface rights to mining corporations.
Metals mining is the number one toxic polluter in the United States, responsible for 96 percent of arsenic emissions and 76 percent of lead emissions.
A single gold mine in Papua New Guinea—Ok Tedi—daily generates 200,000 tons of waste per day, more than all of the cities in Japan, Canada, and Australia combined.
Between 1990 and 1998, more than 30,000 people were displaced by gold mining operations in the district of Tarkwa in Ghana.
120,000 tons of toxic waste spilled from the Baia Mare gold mine in Romania in 2000, contaminating the drinking water of 2.5 million people and killing 1,200 tons of fish.
In 1996, Pik Botha, then South Africa's Minister for Mineral and Energy Affairs, estimated that in his country, each ton of gold mined costs 1 life and 12 serious injuries.

No Dirty Gold (www.nodirtygold.org) is a consumer campaign seeking to change the way gold is mined, bought, and sold.
Earthworks (www.earthworksaction.org) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting communities and the environment from the destructive impacts of mining.
Mines and Communities (www.minesandcommunities.org) provides links to mining activist sites and information about mining companies and affected communities.

From De re metallica by Georgius Agricola (Georg Bauer), 1556

But besides this, the strongest argument of the detractors is that the fields are devastated by mining operations, for which reason formerly Italians were warned by law that no one should dig the earth for metals and so injure their very fertile fields, their vineyards, and their olive groves.
Also they argue that the woods and groves are cut down, for there is need of an endless amount of wood for timbers, machines, and the smelting of metals.
And when the woods and groves are felled, then are exterminated the beasts and birds, very many of which furnish a pleasant and agreeable food for man.
Further, when the ores are washed, the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away.
Therefore the inhabitants of these regions, on account of the devastation of their fields, woods, groves, brooks and rivers, find great difficulty in procuring the necessaries of life, and by reason of the destruction of the timber they are forced to greater expense in erecting buildings.
Thus it is said, it is clear to all that there is greater detriment from mining than the value of the metals which the mining produces.