Sustainability isn't an option anymore; it's a necessity for any responsible mining company.
I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.
The novel is a totalizing form; it tries to encompass all of human experience.