Christopher Pollon is the author of Pitfall: The Race to Mine the World’s Most Vulnerable Places, from which this essay has been adapted. At Barrick Gold Corporation’s 2021 annual general meeting, I was waiting in an online queue with a few other journalists when my turn came to ask a question to chief executive Mark Bristow, who at that moment presided over the second-biggest gold mining company on Earth. “At a recent mining conference, you were talking about ESG [environment, social and governance issues] and said, ‘Everyone uses metals from mining every day, but it’s an unloved industry, and we’ve...