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A few years ago at the so-called “Green Oscars,” celebrities were showing up in hybrid cars, talking much talk about going carbon neutral, recycling their lives and all the rest. And truly, they looked Hollywood fabulous as they did so.

On the night in question, Naomi Watts wore a Chopard 85-carat triple-strand diamond necklace, 12-carat diamond earrings and a 16-carat sapphire and diamond cocktail ring while later telling reporters, “I opted not to go for a limousine. The hybrids are just what it’s all about and we’re just doing what we can to try and change the environment.”

This celebrity bling-bling trend has not abated. Angelina Jolie, who has some pretty solid eco-credentials and not too long ago donated $5 million to fund a wildlife sanctuary in Cambodia, showed up for the 2009 version of Hollywood’s big evening wearing 115-carat Columbian emerald drop earrings and a matching 65-carat ring.

Or Cameron Diaz, who once had her own green reality show and went on the stump to promote Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, appeared at this year’s MTV movie awards wearing a metal cuff decorated with diamonds set in white gold.

This was just a little while before she appeared on The Tonight Show talking about her green passions. “It’s one of those things that’s a lifestyle choice. I was brought up that way, so it’s something I automatically do.”

Well not so fast, Ms. Diaz.

Let’s talk about the lifestyle choice of all those glittery baubles. First off, jewelry is not clothing. It does not keep us warm. It will not feed our children. Other than announcing one’s personal wealth to others, it serves no utilitarian function. Albeit considering what we know about sexual selection (and the relationship between money and security), that’s no small function, but seriously, at what cost?

Since September 11, 2001, gold’s price has risen more than 235%. In 2007, this generated a record-high $53.5 billion in sales. And, as Brook Lamar pointed out in his excellent 2009 National Geographic story, “The Real Price of Gold,” the expense is not only financial:

For all of its allure, gold's human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world's richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It's an invitation to destruction. But there is no shortage of miners, big and small, who are willing to accept.

The damage these miners are doing both to themselves and to the environment is considerable. There are now between 10 and 15 million so-called “artisan miners” working in the world today, most of them with tools that haven’t changed in more than 100 years. These tools include mercury, used to separate gold from rock, and cyanide, which is sprayed onto the gold after separation.

Well, mercury is toxic to pretty much everything, and one-third of all the mercury contamination in the world—according to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) estimates—comes from artisan gold miners. Cyanide, meanwhile, is even deadlier. A dose the size of a grain of rice is enough to kill a human, while one-millionth of a gram (per liter of water) is enough to kill a fish.

This doesn’t include the arsenic, selenium and lead that are also chemical effluents from gold mining. Nor does it account for the 79 tons of mine waste produced for every ounce of gold recovered. In fact, the trade-off for an average wedding ring is the removal of 250 tons of rock and ore. In Indonesia, this removal recently turned a several-million-year-old, 1,800-foot-high volcano into a pit—a dead zone now extending 1,500 feet below the sea floor.

Diamonds might be even worse. Most diamond mines are pit mines and they do the same kind of damage as other pit-mining operations. How much could that possibly be? A ‘girl’s best friend’ has just about ruined Angola. The mines there have devastated large tracts of land, poisoned local water, forced indigenous populations to relocate, and removed their primary livelihood.

Kono, the heart of Sierra Leone’s diamond district, has lost all of its once-rich agricultural soil. Most of the fields are buried beneath mining debris. “Scarred” is a common word people use to describe what’s left.

Silver, rubies, emeralds… this list goes on, as does the devastation. Mining, pound for pound, produces half the garbage in the world.

Half!

Even more alarming than that, most mines—as Lamar pointed out—occupy very fragile territory. The roads cutting in and out of these lands provide access to fresh tracts of pristine forest for loggers and anyone else trying to make a quick buck off old-growth hardwoods, contributing both to deforestation and to a precipitous drop in biodiversity.

Perhaps worse for biodiversity than the mines themselves are the miners. In the Peruvian Andes sits the world’s highest town, La Rinconada—one of the frontiers of the modern gold rush. Thirty-thousand miners have shown up there in the past few years. So ask yourself a simple question—what are these 30,000 people eating?

The answer, of course, is anything they can get their hands on. For this reason, the population of mountain tapirs in Peru has dropped to around 200. The yellow-tailed Woolly Monkey is down to 250. Even the Spatuletail Hummingbird, the regional bird for Northern Peru, has recently been put on the endangered-species list.

Now, I know there is no way to run our modern society without mining. We need copper for wires, we need bauxite for aluminum, we need silicon for computer chips. These are the difficult no-win situations that require some serious deep-thinking fixes.

But we don’t need more gold or diamonds (sure, we use them for industrial purposes, but we could very easily repurpose what we’ve got and not have to mine more) or rubies for anything beyond ornamentation.

Jewelry is about ego and nothing more. And, seriously, when it comes to the environment, haven’t our egos already done enough damage?

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