Scarred Earth

Mina de Pico, Itabarito

If it is a clear day when you fly into Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, you can’t help but notice the pockmarked landscape, a panorama of rolling green hills, mountains and forest splattered with red and orange wounds. Like gaping bloody sores, these massive holes in the earth are the result of the open cast extraction of iron-ore that is conducted on a scale which challenges the imagination. The mining companies do their best to hide and legitimise this rape of the earth that in lethal doses poisons rivers, flora, fauna, and the health of local populations. It is not that we don’t need metals, it is the way such mining operations are conducted. Beyond any meaningful democratic accountability, the international mining corporations are so economically and politically powerful that they  can act with virtual impunity. In effect, they are a state within a state with their own ‘ministries of propaganda’ and private armies. They highjack public infrastructure, such as railways and roads, and monopolise water supplies and energy systems. Deepening social and technological inequality and environmental devastation is either camouflaged or accepted as the price of economic progress, and whilst the Brasilian state is dependent on the revenues earnt from the selling of primary resources, the vast majority of the profits, leave the country. It is a vicious cycle that will not end, as long as the manufactured desires of the western world and its idea of progress measured by the maintenance of the rate of profit continues unchecked. It will not end, as long as scientific and technological progress is defined by the interests of capital. People are right to be worried about species’ survival. We confront an existential crisis that is fundamentally connected to how the development of capitalism altered our relationship to nature. As the mines deepened into the bowels of the earth, the coal seams burst open and the woodlands were felled, we were set adrift from the natural world. Nature became externalised, fetishised and objectified as something to be conquered and owned, bought and sold. I flew into the city a few months later. The pilot was utterly confused as he circled in panic trying to find the airport. The state of Minas Gerais, about the size of France had simply vanished. There was nothing but an immense void, a vast suppurating lesion that seemed to suck in the stars.