resource extraction industrialisation
remediation topography affection
terrils as cultural artefacts
i industry | embedded by ruth oldham
that beautifies a set of ugly exploitations… that excuses industrialised extractive industries.’ I would suggest that it can create a sort of amnesia helping the public forget – or preventing us from ever realising, the extent of our actions, just how much we intervene in the earth to create and maintain our way of life. This debate goes back at least to the 1970s when public awareness of environmental issues exploded. Robert Morris’s essay, ‘Notes on Art as/and Land Reclamation’ 1 , outlines some of the principal debates surrounding the reclamation of mining landscapes. Observing how difficult it proved to establish and agree upon a workable definition of reclamation, he notes that in the USA the 1977 Surface Mining and Control Reclamation Act ultimately transferred the responsibility of reclamation to individual state governments to define and enforce, with wildly varying methods and means. Whilst this lack of definition opens up possibilities for the mining companies to carry out the minimum of reclamation, it also recognises that each site is unique (whether in scale, the nature of the disruption, or the surrounding environmental context) and that reclamation after exploitation should take into account these differences – there cannot be a universally adopted solution. Morris suggests that mines present enormous scope for artists to create site-specific works. Although such works might run the risk of serving as public relations exercises for the mining companies, they also have the potential to engage public attention on the subject of environmental exploitation by doing something other than simply evening out and greening over the landscape.
M ining and quarrying, whether for coal or copper, marble or potash, are activities that necessarily alter the land. A hole is made; a heap of waste is created, or the hole might be hidden underground, its presence only registered on the surface as areas of subsidence. In the case of quarrying and open cast or strip mining the hole is at ground level, perhaps shallow and wide, maybe deep and steeply sloped. The heaps of waste material can be amalgamated into a giant mountain, or dotted around as a series of smaller mounds, or spread as low and flat as possible. The original topography is modified; the original vegetation is lost. What should happen to the holes and the heaps once exploitation has finished? For centuries, across the world, they were just left in place, at most fenced off to prevent accidents. But over the past few decades scientific understanding and public awareness of the problems that mining and quarrying leave in their wake has increased. In the face of these problems – erosion, landslides, water pollution, disruption of water tables and local hydrology systems, loss of biodiversity, as well as the aesthetic impact of barren and carved up land – legislation has forced landowners and mining companies to reclaim the land and make it hospitable. This seems an entirely justified response, and it is vital that companies be held to account for the impact of their activities; they are not allowed to simply exploit the land and move on to the next site. But the debate is complex, and here I will borrow a phrase used in the original call for articles for this issue, as this greening-over can also serve as a ‘a screen or a mask
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SW: Some of the affection for terrils felt by their neighbours makes me realise that North America (and this is perhaps the beginning of a discussion on the cultural differences in attitude toward landscape, and why landscape is so divorced from urbanism here — see Matt Neville’s response to Dispossessing, Hector Abarca’s observation that there is a different vocabulary and syntax used in North America from Europe, and even Desiree Valadares’ original Dispossessing essay) sees the physical results of mining as ‘scars on the landscape’, as landscape
is understood to be some sort of primeval state of nature, ideally untouched by man. The division lines are clear: there is nature and there are cities and the idea that there can be such as thing as Landscape Urbanism is both exotic and incomprehensible. In the historically impacted landscape of Europe, mining has coexisted with settlement for centuries. As Ruth points out, mining pits and slag heaps were just left in place: the landscape had changed. There were consequent problems, but eventually through sheer pressure of settlement density
it seems as if the mining landscape was absorbed into some sort of understanding of the relationship between settlement and land. The Aberfan disaster comes to mind here. And how different, in effect, was Aberfan from the Frank Slide? Smithson’s attitude to land was very American: monumental acts are at the scale of Land, as opposed to, say, Richard Long walking a path across a small bit of small-L land in England, which happened at much the same time as Spiral Jetty. The conflation of mining landcapes with Land Art
defines art as action/ consequence physically indistinguishable from resource extraction/ remediation. What makes it art is the theoretical gloss that we shove land around to indicate that we and our dependence on mining exist — a memorialisation of our needs. If true, the manufactured landscape has been naturalised in all senses of the word. A mining landscape wouldn’t be left as is today for a host of reasons mostly to do with the scale of contemporary mining technology, but I wonder if one of the reasons isn’t the export,
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