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 nature,” (via Environmental Problems of the Greeks and Romans, J. Donald Hughes). Witnessing the environmental destruction of even pre-industrial mining in -400, Plato said, “What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left.” Describing the human cost of mining in Plato's time, J. Donald Hughes said,

The human cost during this period was horrendous. Thousands of slaves—men, women, and children owned by affluent citizens with contracts granted by city magistrates—did heavy work under hellish conditions including tight spaces, a lack of oxygen, danger of collapse, oppressive heat, poisons, long hours underground, and poor food. The silver produced annually was about 2.6 tons, but silver represented a tiny percentage of the ores, averaging one part silver to 429 parts lead. Humans were exposed to lead by breathing dust or the volatile lead vapor released by the smelting process. Lead poisoning helps explain the short lifespans of mine slaves—they typically died after working four to nine years.

Mining has always been gross, but it's always increased the Gross Domestic Product, so the greed virus possession our elites has always pursued it. In his own folksy way, M illustrates the ongoing wages of this deadly sin. Singing of the mines of Ebenezer, Kentucky, he said,

It's dark as a dungeon and damp as the dew
Where danger is double and pleasures are few
Where the rain never falls and the sun never shines
It's dark as a dungeon way down in the mines

Yet from these dark dungeons comes power, comes wealth, comes light. Though the methods were always toxic and dangerous, the results seemed to make it all right. However, all of these centuries of mining have been a deal with the devil, quite literally, as we're digging up his territory. And the first rule of devils is that the devil always gets his due. Ancient civilizations collapsed at least partly due to deforestation and environmental degradation, and now it's happening to us too. Just on an accelerated schedule and global scale, because we turbocharged the process with fossil fuels.

Today, people are trying to reverse this process with 'renewable' energy, but this misunderstands how deep the problem is, and where the 'solution' comes from (it's just more mining!). Both ancient civilizations and early colonialism were powered entirely by 'renewable' energy, and they did huge damage with just wood-burning and simple tools. As Plato said in -400, looking upon the wastelands they already created,

What now remains compared with what then existed is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left. But at that time the country was undamaged, and had much forest-land in its mountains, of which there is evidence even to this day; For there are some mountains which now have nothing but food for bees, but they had trees no long time ago, and rafters from those felled there to roof the largest buildings are still sound.

Cultivated trees grew tall and strong, and the soil produced plentiful pasturage for flocks. It was enriched by yearly rains from Zeus, and did not lose it, as now, by flowing from the bare ground into the sea; but the soil it had was deep, and it received the water, storing it up in the retentive loamy soil;

and let water flow down from high ground to the low ground of every district, providing abundant springs to feed streams and rivers.

Even now there are still shrines, left over from the old days at sites of former springs, as evidence of the truth of this account of the land.

As Shelley said about the kingdom of the apocryphal Ozymandias, “Nothing beside remains. Round the decay, Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.” As aboriginal philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta says, “It is no accident that the ruins of the world’s oldest civilisations are mostly in deserts now. It wasn’t desert before that.” Yunkaporta continues, saying,

A city is dependent on the importation of resources from interconnected systems beyond its borders. The city places itself at the centre of these systems and strips them to feed its growth, disrupting cycles of time and land and weather and water and ecological exchange between the systems. The exchange is now only going one way. Matter and energy are still neither created nor destroyed in this reaction; they are directed into static heaps rather than cycled back through and between systems.

Mining is simply an extension of that giant sucking sound underground, and it's a much deeper problem than modernity. Mining has always defined civilization, Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, etc. We are what we mine, but the problem is it's not ours. As Pliny the Elder (the best Pliny) said, “Mountains were made by nature herself to serve as a kind of framework for holding together the inner parts of the earth … We quarry them and haul them away for a mere whim.” Presaging Malcolm X, Pliny Sr also said, “But least of all do we search for means of healing [the wounds caused by mines in Mother Earth], for how few in their digging are inspired by the desire to cure!”

Pliny the Elder was speaking thousands of years ago, when they'd barely scratched the surface. We're in much deeper shit now! We have industrially strip mined the earth, and now we want to industrially strip mine it again for 'renewable energy.' This ignores the first rule of holes, which is stop digging. All of this greedy mine, mine, mine is part of the gift (curse) of Prometheus. Aeschylus portrayed Prometheus as the bringer of mining as well as fire, and you know how that worked out of him. That proverbial Prometheus said,

Next the treasures of the earth,
The bronze, iron, silver, gold hidden deep down—who else
But I can claim to have found them first?

What the proverbial Prometheus overcame was the deep animal fear of fire, including the forges hidden in the deep. But that fear was there for a reason, which we ignored at our peril. While the fruits of the labor are sweet, the people doing the mining have always known only bitterness. It has always been obvious—from Plato to Merle Travis—that the miner's lot is misery, ill-health, and early death, and these are also the societal consequences in the long term. Which is now. Hence I think of the wish/curse uttered by the apocryphal miner in Dark As A Dungeon. He says,

I hope when I'm gone and the ages shall roll
My body will blacken and turn into coal
Then I'll look from the door of my heavenly home
And pity the miner a-diggin' my bones

What we should remember is what every miner knows, a deep fear of the deep. This is something Pliny the Elder—as deep as his insight was—only learned at the last minute, by killing himself. When Mount Vesuvius erupted, Pliny the Younger “decided that reading about the past was more important to him than observing the present,” but the Pliny the Elder rushed towards the eruption, just as generations had flocked to the rich soil around the still active volcano. As the crazy and, I think, allegorical true story continues:

Demonstrating unwarranted calm in the face of danger, Pliny the Elder bathed, dined, and took a nap. By then the stones and ash had piled up so deep that they threatened to trap him in his room. He and his friends realized that if they remained there they would be buried, so they went down to the shore in total darkness with pillows tied on their heads as protection against falling rocks. Pliny, an obese man who had trouble breathing, died overcome by ash, gases, and overexertion. His companions had to abandon his body. It was found two days later, his nephew learned, clothed and looking more asleep than dead.

And so here we are today, looking more asleep than dead, and equally doomed. It has always been dangerous digging towards hell, and we were always fools to think such processes could be controlled. What we have unleashed with industrial civilization is, in fact, a giant man-made volcano, now flooding our sensors with all kinds of warnings. Yet, even in these obviously last days, we bathe, dine, and take naps, while stones and ash trap us in our stately rooms. Oh, how I pity the alien miner, digging our bones.