Last Sunday, 50 masked men armed with Molotov cocktails stormed a gold mine in northern Greece. After torching bulldozers, trucks, and portacabins belonging to Canadian mining company El Dorado and its Greek subsidiary Hellenic Gold, the group used tree trunks to block police and firefighters from reaching the site. If all that destruction of machinery and reliance on the bountiful gifts of Mother Nature for protection sounds like the work of an incensed rattan basket of ecocampaigners, that's because it was. In fact, it was just one of many recent moments of drama unfolding around the opening of a gold-mining site in Skouries, one of the oldest forests in Greece.       

In 2003 Hellenic Gold, followed by El Dorado, obtained the rights to mine the $12 billions' (£7.8 billions') worth of gold and copper snoozing beneath the mountain area. The deal saw the Greek state receive just €11 millions' (£9.5 millions') worth of compensation for the mines, and, in addition to losing the government some money they could have probably done with, pissed off all the local residents. Besides a part of the ancient forest being uprooted, residents are also worried about the mine's effect on tourism, agriculture, and fishing. They're all pillars of the local economy, and they're all at risk of being devastated by the pollution a mine tends to churn out.