MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Robert Macfarland is among the most celebrated of working “nature writers,” and in his 2019 book Underland: A Deep Time Journey audaciously forces us to think about the complete inadequacy of our “entirely recent” Holocene assumptions in dealing with the Earth out-of-sight beneath us. Macfarlane visits sea caves, geological fissures, and mines, and notes wryly about lost creatures and human artifacts distressingly emerging from today’s melting glacier ice and eroding permafrost. The underland is an unfamiliar place from an incomprehensible span of time; our ignorance and inability to think about these spaces and places is part of our more general danger from environmental destruction. This paper picks up Macfarland’s work on mines, arguing that coal mines are an especially common but obscure bit of our living space, wide open for Anthropocenic research and disruption. We have too easily set aside coal mines as economic phenomena, mastered by applied science, and technology. It is time to shift our thought to confront our struggle with the meaning of these things that often lie beneath where we live, work, and play.

The data for this paper is largely artifactual: (1) the mining tools people generously contribute to coal mine museums to help others understand the risks and losses of the miners, who were usually members of the contributor’s family, and (2) the sometimes whimsical souvenirs people buy in the gift shops of the coal mining museums that they carry home with them to remember their visit to the museum and, perhaps, strengthen their relationship to coal mining history. Both kinds of artifacts are seen as inadequate entry points to life in the Anthropocene, useless in coming to terms with the realities of coal. The sentimental innocence of the miner is found to be alien to knowledge of the underland.