Original sin on the landscape

The title of this post is from one of Philip Kerr’s fascinating novels about Bernie Gunther, a detective and jobbing policeman during and after the Third Reich.

Here is Gunther describing his return to the Saarland steel-making region in 1956.

From the top of the skull-like hill all that could be seen was a black-and-white engraving of the inferno that was industrial capitalism.

In many ways the Saarland was just as horrifying as I remembered it from before the war: slag heaps as big as Egyptian pyramids, a petrified forest of tall industrial chimneys belching so much grey smoke it looked as if the earth itself had caught fire, endless freight trains crawling along a venous system of rail tracks and sidings and double switches and signal boxes, pit wheels turning like the lazy cogs in a dirty clock, gasometers and warehouses and factory buildings and rusting sheds, canals so black they looked as if they were filled with oil, not water, and all of this under a sky thick with coal dust and bruised by the incessant noise of metalworks and smelters and pile drivers and locomotive engines and end-of-shift whistles. With eyes that were prickling because of the sulphurous air, you could even taste the iron and steel on the back of your tongue and feel a low Morlock hum in the poisoned earth beneath your feet….it was more than merely ugly; it was if a kind of original sin had been perpetrated against the very landscape…

For most of my life I have been fascinated by mining and the metal industries, and by the industrial archaeology that survives it. Metal mines like Tankerville, Snailbeach, Gwynfynydd and Rhandirmwyn have been part of my childhood explorations, as were Cornish mines: any chance to visit a mine that I am offered, I take, most recently the Waihi gold mine in New Zealand. Coal mines too, though it is the mineralogy of metal ores that I love and find endlessly fascinating. My favourite museum remains the wonderful Deutsches Bergbau-Museum in Bochum; my most interesting and challenging geological work was at Prieska Copper Mines (Pty.) in Copperton in the eighties, now set to be re-opened as zinc and copper prices (as well as the smaller amounts of gold present in the mine) make it economically viable again.

And yet there is a cost to the earth of this obsession to mine. Outside the mine at Copperton is a huge slimes dam, full of the toxic chemicals used in mineral separation. At Snailbeach, there are the remains of a large lead smelting operation, and outside every mine there are enormous spoil heaps of mined, but unwanted rock. Roman lead smelting tunnels still exist in the Mendips in Somerset. Waihi gold mine, and others nearby, were the site of early cyanide use in mineral separation, that has caused huge environmental damage across the Coromandel peninsula of North Island.

At an important level, and because mining is widely mentioned in early scriptures, such as in Job, we need to understand mining as an important handwork reflecting the creativity that comes from joining in the work of the creator, the acquisition of natural resources given by God for the acculturation of humankind.

But because of its scale, the investment required to get a mining enterprise to the status of a going concern, and the potential huge benefits of (particularly) precious metal extraction, it is an easy target, and has been from the 16th century, for speculators and capitalists with no interest in the mine except that to turn a profit. The use of slaves for mine work in the ancient world can be seen in the intricate models at the Deutsches Bergbau-Museum and companies with a good record of treating miners well are few and far between.

So issues of scale necessarily come into play in mining, and conflict with issues of greed and the desire for acquisition, and issues of danger. Africa, South America and India are covered with small scale mining operations, often unsafe and unregulated, and in places still using slave labour. The dangers have always led to early union organisation and the development of socialism, and most modern labour parties can point to miners as instrumental in positioning them as a national party. Miners strikes have been some of the most bitter and intense ever fought, on both sides of the Atlantic, and across the world. Organisations like Pinkertons were founded simply in order to crush mine strikes in the US. Nowhere is the divide between labour and capital more starkly seen. So mining is hugely problematic for the political life of a nation, for the health of the air, water and ground, and the humans and animals that depend on good quality air and water. It is massively destructive of mountains and forests and landscapes. I have written about this before, here. But whilst it is difficult not to regard the term ‘sustainable mining’ as anything else but an oxymoron, there has to be a better way, taking into account scale, reducing profit margins, seeing mining as first and foremost a service to the community around it, and above all, planning the costing in to any development of the money needed for restoration of the land, cleaning of the water effluent and air pollution, and in the case of strip mining, restoring the land to its original usage as soon as possible, whether forestry, agricultural land or heath. In most cases, and perhaps all, these costs would be prohibitive to mining in the first place. The fact that we have ignored them is simply a symptom of capitalism’s falsity: the costs of exploitation are not the only offsets to be made against profit. Any economic activity is situated in place and time, and costs of a business that do not take into account the long term health of the people in the community that live nearby, or who work for it, are simply false accounting – fraud, if you will.

The Ffos-y-Fran mine, pictured above, is not far from one of my ancestral homes in Dowlais, where my paternal great-grandparents came from. It is by some distance the UK’s largest mine, producing 86% of the coal that this country mines. That figure in itself is a testimony to the long term decline of the coal industry. Today, the BBC reports that it is finally to close.

So I find myself split. I know the importance of coal to the historical identity and cultural growth of Merthyr Tydfil and can sense the disconnection between the industrial past and the town’s new identity. That is hard but am glad it’s closing, and even more pleased that the closure has come about because of the failure of the owners to find and set aside the money needed to effect the restoration of the site, estimated at between £120 and £175 million. The integration of restoration costs, or some of them, has led to the closure of Nant Helen in the Swansea valley too, and it is one successful measure of the Welsh government’s insistence on environmental justice in mining. But if the costs cannot be found by the mine owners, then the public purse will have to find the money. The BBC report states:

The Welsh government allowed the controversial project to happen close to homes and businesses in because it is a “land reclamation scheme” that requires the operator to return it to green hillside, with most of that work due to happen after mining had stopped. Today, a giant pit – about the size of 400 football pitches and some 656ft (200m) deep – remains.

The land reclamation scheme-by-mining was roundly criticised at the time of Ffos-y-Fran’s foundation but went ahead, apparently in good faith. Merthyr Tydfil, the town that lies to the west of the development, exists because of the outcropping of the coal measures on the north side of the South Wales coalfield, and nearby iron ores that led to Merthyr and Dowlais being part of the huge iron smelting enterprise that made the Crawshays fabulously wealthy, Richard Crawshay being one of ten British millionaires at the end of the 18th century. So to close a mine in a mining district is both an expectable outcome but also an emotional unhinging. The local authority was deeply involved in the land reclamation plan and its termination has thus had implications for local politics, muddying the trust that councils need to run effectively.

One of the most successful, and costly, reclamations of industrial land in modern times has been the cleaning up of the lower Swansea valley, with WDA funding and a huge amount of volunteer work, from the poisoning and dereliction left by 200 years of metallurgical processing, both copper and tin, by capitalists giving little thought to the health of those who worked there, the surrounding hillsides, on which sheep could not graze safely, or the people of Swansea. Certain hills behind St Thomas on the Tawe’s east bank, are still bare, where little can grow.

Yet, overall, the scenes I remember coming down the Swansea valley in the seventies, when much of the reclamation of the ground was well underway, could not be more different. This film by Franklin Cardy shows some of the ‘then and now’ differences that this reclamation has made. Today you can wander around White Rock park in Swansea and see the remains of the Hafod Morfa Copper Works over the Tawe, pretty much all that remains of the chimneys that once blighted this lovely valley.

Industrialism on the scale talked about here is a form of original sin on the landscape, but it is more than that. It is original sin on people, on the air and the watersheds. Industrial capitalism, to work effectively, has first of all to strip away the concept that people are made in the image of their creator, beloved and purposed, and to set them below the love of money, the desire for profit, the root of all evil, in the hierarchy of what truly matters.

In this way, both in its destruction of the earth and its negation of God’s purposes in creating people, industrial capitalism underpins and fosters sin on the earth.