Tiny Mining: Mine yourself
Increasingly the world needs minerals to make things like electronics and other consumer products that we use every day.
The process to secure these valuable mineral is becoming increasingly expensive and it is obviously extremely environmentally destructive.
What we haven't as yet fully-explored, is the sustainable mining of these important minerals from our own bodies, which are essentially full of exactly the same minerals and elements needed; that is until now.
Enter a fringe, open community of chemists, geologists, artists and practitioners of plants and metal magics and alternative medicine who practice something called Tiny Mining.
Tiny Mining is the act of mining the human body for minerals.
Their main objectives are:
– to explore and exploit the living human body for more than 20 precious and rare earth minerals;
– to share resources and support for the DIY exploration of interior prospects through community sweatshops, documentation and video tutorials.
We believe that the earth should remain as pristine and untouched nature; we have no desire to carry on extracting resources from a depleted world, polluting and laying waste to the landscape. Saving the planet is now a matter of becoming sensitive to our own geological being. - via
The Tiny Mining process starts with a special diet - eating things like Shiitake mushrooms, oysters, dark chocolate (doesn't sound terrible), while at the same time avoiding other things like garlic. Practitioners then go through a series of procedures and drink special potions to help with the extraction of the elements from the body.
It might sound like something out of a bizarre science fiction novel, but as the saying goes; 'any decent idea about the future needs to at first sound utterly ridiculous.'
Everything you need to know is laid out in a free 140+ page Tiny Mining handbook if you are curious to give it a go for yourself. Otherwise just watch the instructional video above for the lowdown on what it entails.
Obviously the Tiny Mining community and their ideology is not exactly mainstream, but what this group's thinking does highlight is a refreshing willingness to ask interesting questions of where and how we go about sourcing the resources that we need for our modern lifestyles.
Why do we just blindly assume that we need to blindly extract from nature before we attempt to extract from ourselves?
If we ourselves are the source of the materials needed to power our lifestyles, does that then make this the ultimate, extreme example of circular design? A radical version of the Maker Movement 2.0?
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