Editor’s letter

Next steps

My eldest daughter was the first to spot them the other day on our way back home from some time in the park: A couple walking in the opposite direction each with an ice cream cone. All three of my kids knew immediately the origin of those treats, and we made a hard left turn. Our local ice cream shop had seized on the first warm sunny Saturday of the year to test the market. The owners had slid the freezer chests of ice cream to the front of the store. Masked and gloved servers were dishing out scoops to people, who were waiting at even intervals along the street. The sidewalk had been temporarily widened by the city, in place of curbside parking to accommodate the extra traffic.

By regular standards, the selection was meagre, but, when you can’t have the experience of sampling the exotic flavours before ultimately settling on the chocolate you always get, there is not much point in carrying the extra inventory to support the pretense.

After more than a month of constrained living, no one seemed too concerned whether an ice cream shop was an essential service. We opted to have cones for lunch and, along with a steady flow of others, rewarded this local institution for its ingenuity.

A month prior, when the coronavirus wave first broke on North America, one of the backers of SilverCrest Metals’ boughtdeal financing balked at bankrolling the company’s development work. It was only one week before that the financers had agreed to buy $75-million worth of shares in the company. CIM Magazine editor Carolyn Gruske reached out to SilverCrest CEO Eric Fier for his take on the situation (“COVID-19 scuttles SilverCrest mining deal,” pg. 18). Problem solving is “in our DNA,” he said and gave a boost of confidence to his team who, he argued, would rise to the challenge.

His response struck me as a bit of bravado at a time when equities traders along with everyone else were losing their heads, but his résumé was on his side and his message at that moment was reassuring. It also anticipated the current moment.

Now, even if we have not completely settled on the methods, we have reached the consensus that, if we cannot go about life the way we did before, we must find some new way to live and work. That will come through the collective problem solving that re-imagines — at least for the foreseeable future — nearly every aspect of daily life, from frivolous trips for ice cream to the myriad processes to find, extract and move mineral resources around the world, to producing this magazine that relates those achievements.

I am eager to see what we come up with.

Ryan Bergen, Editor-in-chief editor@cim.org @Ryan_CIM_Mag

This issue’s cover A Komatsu haul truck at Anglo American’s Mogalakwena Central Pit platinum mine. Courtesy of Anglo American Editor-in-chief Ryan Bergen, rbergen@cim.org Executive editor Angela Hamlyn, ahamlyn@cim.org Managing editor Michele Beacom, mbeacom@cim.org Section editors Carolyn Gruske, cgruske@cim.org; Matthew Parizot, mparizot@cim.org Editorial intern Tijana Mitrovic, tmitrovic@cim.org Contributors Tom DiNardo, Ian Ewing, Lynn Greiner, Cecilia Keating, Herb Mathisen, Avakash Patel Editorial advisory board Mohammad Babaei Khorzhoughi, Vic Pakalnis, Steve Rusk, Nathan Stubina Translations Karen Rolland Layout and design Clò Communications Inc., www.clocommunications.com

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