The Way Down In The Mines
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Years ago, Merle Travis sang, “seek not your fortune in the dark dreary mines, It will form as a habit and seep in your soul, ’Til the stream of your blood is as black as the coal.” And yet every fortune — from the silver of Athens to the black gold of Kentucky — has been sought in the mines, and every time it seemed to work. From digging into Hades and thinking we pulled a fast one on the devil. Every dim simulation of heaven has been purchased by digging towards hell as fast as possible, and getting there eventually. From the collapse of localized Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age civilizations to the globalized collapse of this fossil-fuelled one. As old Merle said,“Like a fiend with his dope and a drunkard his wine, A man will have lust for the lure of the mines.”
This observation is older than old Merle, and it’s deeper than Kentucky coal. Digging up the bowels of the earth has always been noxious and toxic, and people have been warning about it for millennia. As Pliny the Elder said in the first century, “The fractured mountain falls asunder in a wide gap, with a crash which it is impossible for human imagination to conceive, and likewise with an incredibly violent blast of air. The miners gaze as conquerors upon the collapse of…
