Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world. Orwell was rectifying this obliviousness when he went up north to meet the working class out of work and down in the mines and to bear witness to that foundational commodity, coal, and the conditions of its extraction. To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it’s changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere. You can tell this story as a labor story, but you can also tell it as an ecological story, and the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation.

That invisibility or that obliviousness is one of the defining conditions of the modern world. Orwell was rectifying this obliviousness when he went up north to meet the working class out of work and down in the mines and to bear witness to that foundational commodity, coal, and the conditions of its extraction. To go down into the earth is to travel back in time, and to excavate it is to drag the past into the present, a process mining has done on a scale so colossal it’s changed the earth all the way up to the upper atmosphere. You can tell this story as a labor story, but you can also tell it as an ecological story, and the two dovetail in the end, as a story of devastation.