I am by no means a mining expert, but most of my exposure comes from east-coast US, where a lot of the mines (well...a lot of the mines you hear about - there could a great many very nice mines that I never heard of) have problems with acidic wash off, strip mining, etc.
I know SOME of the issues I've listed are impacted by modern environment regs (at least until those get rolled back under the current lawmakers), but I don't know if they all are.
Can you expand your point?
Perhaps I just haven't found it yet, but I haven't read articles about organic / permaculture farms in the amazon poisoning river systems, poisoning the land, causing increased rates of cancer in the local populations, corrupting local politicians etc etc
More than either of those things though, a heavy meat diet is much more inefficient than a vegetarian one. And if I'm not mistaken, a lot of the rainforest is becoming pastures for raising cattle.
You would be incorrect. The modern food distribution system is a high-volume, low-margin system that runs incredibly efficiently and any advance you could come up with that can squeeze even a tenth of a percent more energy efficiency into the process would make you incredibly wealthy. There are an order of magnitude more 'food miles' racked up when consumers drive to the local grocery store and return home that went into delivering that food to the store in the first place.
In fact, local food is often _less_ efficient in terms of transportation energy costs because it lacks the economies of scale and the efficiencies that come from that in the regular food distribution system.
Definitely. The biggest damage to the Amazon rainforest is the development of farms. People advocating for more inefficient farming (e.g. 'organic', 'local') are doing significantly more damage to the environment than extractive mining. One important caveat, I'm only applying this to modern mining operations like those in US/Canada that follow pollution regs.