AR Reading List 032: extraction

Khai Don writes in our October issue: ‘one part of the world collapses to build another’. Our continual desire to build bigger requires that we dig deeper. Petroleum, natural gas, sand, stone, even water are repeatedly pillaged from the lands and people – leaving ruination in its place. Creation necessitates destruction.

Greed keeps us bearing down on the jewels below our feet, as oil and gas developments fuel a climate crisis. Still, we steal from our Earth – devastating its landscapes and the communities who make their home on them. We take from beneath the Earth’s crust, until only hollow shell remains. Some rivers run dry as other waters rise, but precious resources are still taken, bought and sold. The seven selected pieces below look at the scars that we leave on people and places as we cut into the earth to extract its reserves.

Outrage: scars of sand mining, Khai Don, AR October 2020
‘Farmers’ persistent efforts have not yet triumphed against the desire for profit and the extraction of free natural resources’

Petropolis: Oil Urbanism, Steve Parnell, AR July 2014
‘The fact that ‘eighty-six fixed and forty-six floating rigs serve as workplace for over forty-five thousand people in Brazilian waters’ reinforces the notion that this is a neglected urban design problem, albeit fragmented and distributed over the ocean’

Photo essay: the lay of the land, Max L Zarzycki and Bas Princen, AR February 2020
‘By hand or hard flint we chip, wear into the cracks in the obdurate rock to hew out a home, to nuzzle down against the dusky hollows that have formed in the surface of this great mass’

Mine craft: Terrils du Martinet in Charleroi, Belgium by Dessin et Construction, Eleanor Beaumont, AR April 2018
‘The mine of Martinet is at once a ruined civilisation and the seed of a new town. There is possibility in this emptiness’

Allmannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in Norway by Peter Zumthor: ‘The progeny of an artist-architect’, Catherine Slessor, AR February 2017
‘The forensic precision of their making stands out against the wildness of nature, marking the return of human concern with the long-extinct lives of mineworkers in the harsh world of 19th-century industry’

Outrage: deep-sea mining poses an existential threat, Stephanie Hessler, AR April 2019
‘Long-term effects of deep-sea mining are devastating. Extractivist enterprises are likely to cause unprecedented damage to marine environments’

View from Genk, Andrew Mead, AR November 2012
‘Along with such generic features as pitted surfaces, peeling paint and truncated cables are traces of the block’s specific past - for instance, channels in the concrete floor where the miners’ shower stalls once stood’