on coal and devastation

Coal - as work, as dust, as fuel, as smog, as danger, as illness, as death, as the abundant stuff quite literally underneath everything - was everywhere. 

(...)

"Our civilzation ... is founded on coal, more completely than one realizes until one stops to think about it", he wrote afterward. "The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make the machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent on coal." And then he noted, "It is only very rarely, when I make definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines." (...) That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world. (...) To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a sclae so colossal it's changed the earth all the way ip to the upper atmosphere. You can tell this story as a labor story, but ou can also tell it as an ecological story, and the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation. 

- Orwell's Roses,  Rebecca Solnit (2021)