Coal: An irrational History
(please email masseyperc@gmail.com for the password)
Delia Falconer
University of Technology Sydney
Everyday life in an extractive energy system: Emotions and affects in a former coal mining community in South Wales, UK
Mel Rohse and Rosie Day
Anglia Ruskin University / University of Birmingham
Unveiling the political economy of fossil extractivism in Colombia: Understanding coal phase-in to facilitate a just-and-timely phase-out
Felipe Corral Montoya
Technische Universität Berlin
Fire, Water, Coal: Past and Future Disasters in Australia's Hazelwood mine
Tom Doig
Massey University
Comments 11
Kia ora koutou, and welcome to this panel on that most notorious of ‘little black rocks’: coal. Thank you Delia, Mel, Rosie and Felipe for your diverse insights and approaches, which encompass political economy, oral history, literary journalism, personal reflection and geology.
To start things off, it seems that a key theme to emerge across all these presentations is the idea of coal as fetishised object, and coal mining as fetishised activity – whether it’s Scott Morrison’s infamous parliamentary coal-fondling, or the residents of Ynysybwl’s ‘attachment’ to the ambience of coal-mining (the dust, the noise, the lights at night), or the enshrining of coal as ‘convenient’ and ‘reliable’, in Colombia (and elsewhere).
What does the panel make of coal/coal-mining as a fetishised commodity/activity? Do you see your own work as, as Felipe put it, seeking to ‘unmask’ some of the mystique (and PR, and misinformation) surrounding the industry?
On a related note, it strikes me that all the panellists (including myself) are narrating different histories of coal: be they ‘irrational’ (Delia), ‘atmospheric’ (Mel and Rosie), ‘unmasking’ (Felipe) or straight-up ‘disastrous’ (myself). Any thoughts on this? Which discursive/storyelling strategies seem most promising, in your attempts to get people thinking differently about coal?
Hey Tom,
Thanks a lot for bringing those presentations together in your comment – it’s not an easy job! Here are my thoughts on all the four points you raise above, and I’ll post some questions to the other panellists in a separate post.
1/ On coal as a fetishized activity: I don’t know if I would say that it was fetishized in Ynysybwl but there was certainly an amount of nostalgia that we interpreted from the oral histories. In our view, this was partly a result of the oral history method itself and the encounter between the interviewee as storyteller and the interviewer as listener. The interview had its own atmosphere if you like, and nostalgia was part of that. But we tried to guard ourselves from understanding this negatively. Nostalgic testimonies are easily dismissed. Here however, we argue that it was used as a coping mechanism in the face of a dramatic change (the closure of the mine, equated to the end of a way of life). We would also say that people’s stories were complex, and they weren’t all longing for the past and a return to coal. Many expressed positive feelings at the valleys being clean again and there was a palpable sense of relief about the hardship of the men’s work in the mine and the women’s work in the homes being left behind. We discuss this in more detail in the paper if anyone would like to find out more 🙂
2/ On work ‘unmasking’ the mystique of the industry: This wasn’t our intention when setting out on the research. This part of the wider project had people, communities and their everyday life at its heart, and it’s in that context that the mining industry and its legacy were discussed.
3/ On different histories of coal: that’s a nice way of putting it Tom, thanks for this observation. What this makes me reflect on is how complex and multifaceted those issues are. I think we can look to the past to imagine the future and look for ways forward in the energy transition, and being aware of and bringing together all those different histories strike me as crucial (but also challenging) in our efforts. The question this raises for me is how do we work across disciplines and across those histories to imagine a coal-free world.
4/ On storytelling methods to get people to think differently about coal: thanks for this question. I’ve found oral histories to be a very powerful to make audiences think about a particular issue. In the Stories of Change project, we were particularly lucky to work with creative practitioners. In the particular part of the project Rosie, David and I were involved in, we worked with Lisa Heledd Jones (@lisaheleddjones) and Iain Peebles from Storyworks UK (http://storyworksuk.com/). They edited the oral histories of Ynysybwl into short audio clips that could be shared widely and they also created digital stories (voice and images) from interviews we carried out in Treherbert, another former mining village. A poignant example is here: https://storiesofchange.ac.uk/node/233. We then used those as part of interactive exhibitions in both villages to have conversations with local inhabitants. The stories proved to be highly engaging, and prompted conversations with visitors about the future of energy (Lisa and I have written chapters in the project book about those exhibitions, which you can download for free from here: https://issuu.com/energeticbook/docs/energeticv09sp).
Hello everyone! Thanks Tom for the questions and for chairing the panel. To begin, I see our work as an attempt to fundamentally question the idea that (coal) mining is a necessary activity (in the XXI century) that allows to justify its great social and ecological damages, both at local and global levels. The narrative that large-scale mining is socially or economically desirable, despite the ecological, ethnic and cultural destruction it almost always produces, needs to be countered from all possible angles.
Tom’s presentation on the Hazelwood mine constitutes, from my perspective, the perfect example of how mining companies have managed to convince communities and governments of initial convenience (e.g. jobs and revenues), via an indeed fetichised fixation on short-term financial aspects. By distracting from the often perpetual damages that mining activities can cause to communities and Nature, any precautionary measure can be overshadowed by the manifest “convenience” of economic revenues resulting from natural resource extraction. As the account of Hazelwood’s fire & water tragedies shows, such incidents are not mere “externalities” or exceptional events occurring around mining. They constitute inherent characteristics of large-scale projects mediated by the dependence and conflict of interest between mining companies, oversight agencies and local actors.
To reply to Tom’s second question, I think that a multi-layered communication strategy that can cater to different audiences (e.g. local ethnic or indigenous communities, urban middle class living away from mining peripheries, technocrats, etc.) is urgent. With it, we could begin shifting from a “principle of hope” according to which mining may have probems, but we will somehow manage to resolve them, to a “heuristic of fear” (check this out: http://nature-economy.de/elements/ignorance/). This “heuristic” can be the basis of a precautionary principle that shifts the burden of proof from those to be potentially affected by large-scale (mining) projects, to those that will allegedly bring “progress & development” with those very same projects. If there is anything that can be learnt from the Colombian experience, it is that social, cultural and environmental decay have been a constant of large-scale mining projects, while expected economic or “development” results have remained largely absent. Why then does government, corporations and the public opinion in general remain so deeply attached to the aforementioned “principle of hope”? That is the question I sought to answer in the paper.
Going to the paper by Mel Rohse and Rosie Day, I think it highlights the necessity to work in an inter- and transdisciplinary manner, if one wishes to not only understand how our energy system works and came to be, but also how to possibly reform it to the core. The affective dimension of energy transitions is an often overlooked aspect that may hinder any ambitious policies to overcome fossil fuels in the near future. Hence, I’d like to ask the authors what their take on acceptability issues (e.g. of closing down coal pits or mines) is, given the affective nature of mining in such mono-product societies such as many Welsch, German or Colombian municipalities. Do we have to wait until mine closures are a thing of the past to deal with the affective void they may leave on site? Can we (as researchers/activists) work preemptively to begin creating new atmospheres and affective links to the process of change (e.g. towards renewables) in mining communities? Will that increase the acceptance of ambitious coal phase-out policies, for example?
Last but not least, after looking and reflecting on Delia Falconer’s presentation, I remember Tom’s question on our respective histories of coal. As much as many debates on coal, its extraction and (in)convenience have actors that try to get ahold of “objetivity” by stating that their view is “not political”, I consider that all our accounts shows the importance of where to put the spotlight. Whether that is a conscious and deliberated decision or a non-decision, in the end each history (affective, polit-economic, irrational or disastrous) has a deep political content with profound functional effect, regardless if these are intended or not. From my perspective, this highlights the role of researchers as educators on one hand; agents of reflection, discussion and critical thought. On the other, it brings us back to the often mentioned issue of researching in “the ivory tower”. If we as researchers need/want to increase awareness on different interpretations of the histories of coal (and other extractions), and know that researching or publishing will not suffice, how to engage the wider public? What legitimizes us asume guidance roles in such an endeavor? As Mel & Rosie’s presentation may hint, co-production of knowledge can be a good start. In the tradition of social scientists such as Orlando Fals Borda, I would perhaps go a step further into suggesting that participative projects that actively go beyond subject-object relationships in research and engage participants in the selection of methods, research question and analysis, could enable the creation of a common, critical, holistic history on extraction. Shared knowledge can be the seed of transformation.
Hi Felipe, all,
thanks for the interesting and pertinent question Felipe about affect and the acceptability of mine closures. This is indeed a thorny issue. In the community that we worked in, we felt that the affective and emotional experiences that we uncovered helped to explain some of the attachment to coal and to mining, but also (and which we didn’t have time to explore in this short presentation) could help to understand how some community members’ feelings about moving on from mining were quite different. So in the present time, it is easy to find quite a lot of nostalgia around mining, and especially from the men who were miners themselves, which can be surprising to outsiders, given the dangers of the job. However, other community members feel that it is a good thing to have moved on from coal, and we found this much more among women. Tentatively, we relate this to the different affective and emotional experiences they would have had in the past – so the miners had strong experiences of friendship, bonding and intimacy from working in the mines together, and that sense of community was never replaced. The women on the other hand had more experience of the emotions of anxiety and fear around loved ones working daily below ground, so whilst there may be for them a void around sense of place and aspects of community, these strong affectual experiences are gladly left behind. I say this to illustrate that the emotions around transition can be quite differentiated and multi-layered.
I do think though, as you allude to, that moving on from coal needs attention to these emotional and affectual aspects before and during the transition, not only afterwards. I think people need a chance to acknowledge and work through these emotions. Also, we concluded from our work that we need to pay more attention to the affectual landscapes of new and alternative energy systems, and to designing them in positive ways – all this so as not to leave only a void that we try to heal later.
Hi everyone, thanks for the very interesting presentations. And thanks for chairing, Tom. Apologies for tuning in late – and for having recorded presentation in the grip of a heavy cold. One thing that struck me quite forcefully on watching these papers was the power of the visuals. While coal might be a heavily fetishised as a commodity, the visual material of the actual workings of the mines (especially in your paper, Tom) felt fairly new to me, in the sense that although coal mines are quite enormous they also seem to have retreated into the “shadowlands” (in Val Plumwood’s terms). Although we’re all “for” coal here in Australian federal and state politics, I don’t think I’d seen any footage of Hazelwood before…and my grasp of the disaster was really vague. One value of the “virtual” paper for me, as a creative writer, was having to think more about what visual images might also tell this story – which relates to how and where coal production is visible (or invisible in its costs, in Felipe’s paper).
Speaking personally, in answer to your question, Tom, my paper is a truncated version of a chapter of a forthcoming collection of personal essays with Scribner (2021), in which my purpose is to try to articulate the feelings of living in the Anthropocene more generally (and so I was very interested by your paper, Mel and Rosie on atmospheres). I’m particularly concerned with trying to capture aspects of our moment of cultural acceleration, which is just as dynamic, strange, extreme as the “Great Acceleration” – and sometimes even beautiful. So coal was enrolled in that more general project of trying to find ways of thinking and talking about the Anthropocene rather than my focus being on trying to make people think differently about coal, specifically. That said, I agree with Felipe: I think any and all strategies are necessary at the moment as fossil fuels hasten ecological collapse. Coal is everywhere in its (global heating) effects but, in Australian discourse at least, quite minimal: reduced in scale to Morrison’s cleaned-up lump of coal brought into parliament, in arguments for “clean” coal. What was interesting to me, in doing my research for this piece, was how ubiquitous coal was in the Victorian era as a highly material and mysterious, almost auratic object (I had to leave out stories like The Story of a Coalmine from Dickens’s Household Words, in which a dreaming young man on a visit to the English north, who is disparaging about coalmining is taken by a coal demon on a tour of mines, loaders, etc.) and how contained discourse is around it. So this was my own angle of attack: to try to denaturalise and “dirty” our way of thinking about coal, and to stir up affect, and to insist on its its unacknowledged centrality to Australian history: to take it out of political or historical discourse. I don’t know, though, that any one way is more effective than another.
Thanks to Delia, Felipe and Tom for some very insightful presentations. There are so many things to discuss, so I’ve picked the theme of justice to start with, which seem to run across all the presentations, although perhaps more implicitly in my own. In Delia’s presentation, although it’s about history, I thought there was something really poignant about legacy, and justice for future generations. In Felipe’s presentation, the idea that the true cost of coal extraction is not visible raised questions over the distribution of impacts and benefits from the coal mining. Likewise, in Tom’s presentation, I was left wondering about everyday life in and around Hazelwood and the distributive impacts of the mining disaster, as well as the legacy for future generations. I’d love to hear the panel’s thoughts on this issue, and any of the justice aspects they have found in their work.
Dear all,
I am Roy Cobby, PhD candidate at King’s College London, taking part in Knowledge production and data extraction stream
Panel 2: Technology and infrastructure. Thanks a lot for your presentations.
I was quite fascinated by evident the short-termism of extractivism across sectors, but particularly in the fossil fuel industry, and the long-term negative impacts it has on the environment and livelihoods of people who live around its operations. As someone studying the development of digital farming apps, I am concerned with the acceleration and lock-in effects of algorithms.
Hi panelists!
I quite enjoyed this panel’s approach to coal, as the combination of all of the papers suggested both the incredibly long development of coal beds as well as the long-lasting effects of mining them, whether for health or policy. I love how Doig points out the ways that the emotional connection people feel towards coal often trend towards making it a fetishised object. Obviously, this same kind of emotional connection happens with other kinds of mined products, especially in the areas that mine them (don’t catch “gold fever,” for instance!). Since the combined sensory/emotional experience of fear seems almost as prominent in a couple of the presentations, especially those by Rohse, Day, and Doig, I was wondering about the kinds of emotions and sensory experiences that might push people away from coal, whether it’s the haze in the air or actual disasters from subsidence and fire. For instance, environmentalists’ attacks on coal often showcase billowing smokestacks. Have any of you seen senses and their related emotions as a factor in convincing people to reject mineral energy in your cases? Or is does the absence of these “atmospheres” more typically end up making people feel more attached to these places and mined products, especially after mines shut down? Is it an insiders (to these mining communities) versus outsiders phenomenon, where insiders feel more attached to mining town atmospheres, while outsiders feel disgust?
Hi Brian,
Interesting questions. I just wrote a comment in reply to an earlier post by Felipe where I mentioned how the experiences of anxiety and fear that women as the wives and mothers of miners experienced helped explain (according to our interpretation) their acceptance of the closure of local coal mines, despite the negative economic impacts on the locality. Perhaps surprisingly, this was less the case among the miners themselves, but they had other, equally intense, but more positive emotional experiences from working as miners.
A lot of (past) acceptance came through in the accounts of people we spoke to – people accept a lot when they have limited other experience. But having had some of those sensory experiences changed, such as the black rivers and the dust-covered landscape, a lot of people would not go back to that.
Your comment has also made me think about some quite different work I’m currently involved with in Mongolia, where Ulan Bataar has a big problem with winter air pollution as a result of coal burning, mostly by rural to urban migrants who have moved to the city but live in informal housing or gers (tents) and use traditional stoves. Last year the government banned the burning of raw coal and people are required instead to burn ‘improved’ briquettes. Our interviews with women living in these districts seem to indicate that they are really aware of the poor air quality, mostly through sensory experience, and worry about the health of their family, especially children. Rather than being attached to their traditional housing and stoves, they’d really prefer to live in apartments and use electricity. So I think this could be an example of where the sensory experience of pollution is a wake-up call, but also because it is combined with some experience of the health effects, some medical advice, and also the government campaign. Even so, I was surprised that there seemed to be little attachment to traditional stoves. Perhaps if we interviewed people after moving into apartments with electricity they would relate some nostalgia about the atmospheres of gers and stoves!
(PS Rosie, when I was in Mongolia, I accidentally cycled through the tailings of the largest copper mine in Asia! https://www.google.com/maps/place/Erdenet+Mining+Company+Open+Pit+Mine/@49.1084055,104.067222,2393m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x5d9f5186a2600beb:0xfe4221e84903a1e8!4b1!8m2!3d49.0207603!4d104.132625)
Hi everyone (panellists and virtual ‘audience’ members),
This is great stuff! So many threads to pick up on … Felipe, I love this idea of a ‘heuristic of fear’. I guess that doing disaster writing (as I have been) intuitively picks up on that kind of idea. And more generally – responding to your point, Delia, about trying to expand/explode the narratives about coal in Aus – I’ve been trying to show how messy / dirty / crazy / chaotic / out-of-control the whole Hazelwood mine situation was/is, as a counter-narrative to the mining industry’s projection of mastery, safety, cleanness – which comes through in Minerals Council PR, and reached its apotheosis with the lacquered (!!) piece of coal. (Also, Rosie, since you’re interested in the Mongolian situation: when GDF Suez rebranded themselves as Engie Group, their promo video included the priceless line, “black is now almost green”, with footage of Mongolian nomads installing solar panels https://youtu.be/AyPS14OXWhY?t=37)
It’s actually quite scary how little the mining ‘experts’ know about end-of-life, rehab stuff – which is a huge issue in Australia. It’s also, I think, a really important ‘political’ point to make vis-à-vis the Galilee Basin mines, which have the potential to contaminate the much of Queensland’s aquifers, and ruin drinking water / farming for hundreds of thousands of people. The future is scary enough (climate change, pandemics, populism), we don’t need to further load the dice by literally poisoning the well (surely?!)
In terms of questions of justice/nostalgia/‘attachment’ to mining practices, Rosie and Mel’s insights about Ynysybwl have strong parallels in Morwell and the Latrobe Valley. In Morwell, there’s also this cynical conflation/synecdoche (a part standing for the whole), where the mining community is meant to be THE community. And that hasn’t been true since the early 1990s; Hazelwood only employed 750 workers when it shut in 2017, in a community of 70,000; the region’s biggest employer is the unemployment office, followed by the hospital. And the mine workers were mostly 50- and 60-somethings, earning $150K plus, and receiving payouts averaging $330K – many of them were literally millionaires. But to read the Murdoch Press, you’d think they were Dickensian ‘battlers’, not blokes with multiple investment properties and stock portfolios. So that’s been a large part of the ‘unmasking’ work I’ve been doing in HAZELWOOD, as well.
TD