Green Humanities | Mining Modernity: Technologies of Extraction in the Carbon Age

We inhabit a world that carbon made. The widespread harnessing of fossil fuel energy that began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries transformed the nature of work, heightened the circulation of people and goods, and irrevocably altered demographic geographies now centered on cities. Coal catalyzed a distinctive sociotechnical apparatus that presented itself as the epitome of modernity—universal and inevitable. As demand for this resource went up, so too did new technologies of extraction proliferate, reordering landscapes to get to the coal underfoot. Throughout, coal was implicated in its own exploitation: many of the machines deployed in such extractive efforts were themselves powered by this black rock. At the same time, the mining of coal also rested on the labors of a growing workforce subjected to an environment that often became more perilous as operations expanded. In this talk, I explore these dynamics through the case of the Fushun colliery in southern Manchuria, which once boasted the largest coal mine in Asia and the biggest open pit in the world.