Going Deep
Learning what I do not know
I was about to go underground and had just had my safety briefing.
The mine manager looked at me and was not impressed. “You’d never make it,” he said. And he wasn’t wrong.
That was about 20 years ago, and I was there representing an environmental group. I understood then, and do today, that burning fossil fuels is driving us quickly toward climate calamity.
It took me a little while to hear the stories, because they were not the topic being told. I had already been an organizer for a while and considered myself an ally of labor. I never thought badly of working people earning good pay, doing an honest job.
But advocacy can also be anxious work, with deadlines and plotted outcomes. I did not yet realize that meaningful change happens most effectively at the speed of trust.
I was aware that three key indicators of an ‘extractive’ economy are that they are export-oriented with minimal local processing; they are marked by outside control of resources and key assets; and, they are plagued by dependent economic structure with limited diversification.
I also knew then that the history of many coal mining communities can be easily viewed through this ‘extractive’ frame. But my lessons are on-going and continue. Because it is not only coal that gets taken from the rural places where it is mined.
Coalmining is rooted in place, its workforce often multigenerational. In the North Fork the twin industries of coalmining and agriculture drove the economy for over a century. The valley today is still home to the largest operating coal-mine in the state.
Many people who mine here come from families that mined coal, maybe in the North Fork Valley decades ago. Perhaps before the longwalls came in and displaced dozens of miners and made the stripping of the coal, and its wealth, even more efficient.
North Fork coal is gassy. And the hundreds of miles of abandoned mines are conduits that release copious amounts of methane years, decades, after mining is done. The need to vent this methane during operations requires roads and vents on the surface, which is another cause for conflict when this involves National Forests or other cherished lands.
Last year I was standing with a small group of community-members, high above the valley, at a former coalmine. We were considering what rehabilitation to this site could bring.
The methane venting from abandoned coal mines in the North Fork Valley is one of the largest sources of climate pollution in Colorado. At the former mine, Chris Caskey’s flare destroys waste methane before it reaches the atmosphere - hundreds of cubic feet per minute that would otherwise warm the planet.
Chris was explaining how the project could capture the heat, the water, even the CO2 produced by destroying the methane.
“This is a methane capture system on this abandoned coal mine, which is Bowie #1. We’ve got horizontal pipes sitting on the ground with holes drilled in them, almost like, radon capture system and a tarp on top of that.”
“And that the mine breathes in and out as atmospheric pressure changes. The pipe comes down the hill. We’ve got some analytical equipment and then just a little blower fan to put some velocity on it when it hits the flame nozzle there. So at this exact moment, it’s probably equivalent to taking like 5,000 cars off the road. But after we drill into the mine, we’ll have a more effective capture system, and it’ll be more like taking 14,000 cars off the road.”
Our group included farmers, businessowners, outdoor educators, and climate scientists (who live in the valley and work remotely). The region itself is heating faster than many places, gripped by drought and facing aridification. Wildfire risk, extreme weather, climate disruption - these aren’t abstractions here.
We were all excited about the climate benefits. But we were really there to talk about what else the site’s restoration could serve. And I was revisiting ideas I thought I had put down decades before.
I didn’t get to the coal-mine rehabilitation project straightaway from my own visit underground. But then I did not yet know the many things I did not know. The mine manager saw something, and with his statement summing me up, really had asked a question.
Ten years earlier, in 1995 I was in graduate school, studying for a Masters in ethics. I was interested in standpoint theory and the ethic of care. Halfway through my thesis I decided it was too much theory with no real application to practice. ‘Professors writing for grad students writing for professors,’ I thought, and decided to be an activist again.
What drew me to certain philosophers writing about feminist ethics was its fundamental grounding in context and place. Care ethics insists we can’t reason from abstract principles down to particular situations. You can’t understand a place, or repair your relationship to it, from outside that relationship.
By 2005 or so I was established as an environmental advocate on the Western Slope with some notoriety as those positions bring. And now I was suited up in coveralls, helmet and light, with a self-rescue kit, in a crew car and headed deep underground.
The walls of the coal mine are unexpectedly bright white, sprayed with lime to keep down the dust, the driver explains. We take another bend down another steep grade to arrive where a couple of miners are operating the “continuous miner,” or longwall.
It is an impressive machine that is as loud as you might expect, even with protection. You walk inside it and a massive rotating drum with tungsten carbide teeth shears coal from the face while hydraulic shields protect the operators. As it advances, the roof behind it collapses in controlled subsidence, and the coal is dropped, chopped, onto a continuously moving conveyor belt.
One “continuous miner” can extract more coal in a shift than dozens of pick-and-shovel miners could in a week.
When longwalls replaced room and pillar mining dozens lost their jobs. But the amount of coal taken from the mountains remained mostly undiminished. In the U.S. the period from 1980 - 2015, coinciding with this shift to longwall mining, saw a loss of over 100,000 jobs — about half the national workforce — with a production decline of only 6%, by some estimates.
More mine production can mean more money locally, even if there are fewer jobs, but that too is a type of misdirection. Most economic wealth follows the coal away. And the energy and its outputs mostly power urban industry and homes. Fewer miners means cheaper energy (the misdirection continues) so everyone is better off.
Like many places heavily reliant on extractive industries, for many decades the local fortunes of the North Fork Valley were tightly bound to the volatile global commodity of coal. When mines closed, foreclosures followed and populations crashed. When coal came back, so did jobs and home prices and kids in schools.
As mining has declined this time, new activity has shown up in its place. And the economy has diversified but remains challenging for many residents. Incomes still lag overall as they do in most rural, compared to urban, places.
So when even the most well-meaning environmentalist shows up and talks about potential for new jobs, for example in clean energy or remote work, many don’t hear ‘opportunity.’ They may just as likely hear ‘you’ve been doing it wrong and we won’t need you anymore.’
That sort of feedback I received pretty quickly and directly. But relationships take time. Talking to people, and again to some of the same, learning over time from people who worked, or had worked, had family in the mines. Learning that talking about the need to ‘transition’ without first listening was an impediment to me being a better climate activist.
During college I worked summers as a canvasser for a peace organization, my first paid job as an advocate. A good canvasser has to listen, because one has to pitch the sale to align with shared values at the door, if possible. I was finding some purpose, and discovering some skills, and it reaffirmed my sense that I wanted to be an activist.
Leaving graduate school, uncompleted, five years later I had a similar sense of commitment. I was done with theory, done with academics, and ready for activity, for application. A few years after that I was a staff member with a Colorado environmental organization.
I was working on public lands, fighting imprudent oil and gas projects, and more and more following and working on climate change. When I got invited to go underground, to tour the longwall, with a local conservation group, I was excited at the opportunity.
“You’d never make it.” The question the mine manager was really asking me was “do you even know what you don’t know?”
Going deeper, just as we were about to do, his question was a more fundamental challenge to me. It was also about how well I could do my job as an advocate.
Which of my assumptions, which positions that I felt sure of was I guarding from challenge?
What other perspectives would allow me to see my own standpoint more clearly, and thus let me step more fully into my role, shaping change as an activist?
What value was I hoping to extract from my coal mine visit?
I picked up on the manager’s slight, but did not know the other yet.
The coal miner knows, for instance, what it costs to power the grid in ways the distant consumer or C-Suite executive never will.
Standpoint theory argues that those in particular and marginalized positions—whose labor sustains systems but whose perspectives are dismissed—often see more clearly how those systems actually work.
And it is worth considering the other ways we extract value from systems, including from those things we want to transform. Taking from the front-line, from rural, from resource-rich communities to fuel distant wealth, faraway industry and others’ agendas is often ‘extractive’ whether it is coal, ideas, food, legitimacy or labor.
The mine manager was certainly just making the point he made: “Here is an interloper who thinks things but he could never really understand what it means to mine coal, which I can see clearly.”
In time I sat on boards, spoke up in the community. My own work became centered locally and I just had more time and need and opportunity to listen. I learned that rehabilitation is not only about repairing damaged places.
Standpoint theory in graduate school was about epistemology - whose knowledge counts, who gets heard. But in practice it means showing up not to validate my position but to be impacted by what I hear. Standpoint practice requires time and proximity.
Real engagement doesn’t serve to extract value from other people’s knowledge. It is to return to that question: “What am I not knowing?”
Building for enduring change requires that we become accountable to hearing other voices, to value the depth and richness of others’ perspectives. I am thankful for the power when I flip a switch, and aware of the cost. Listening, building systems that accommodate differences and grow stronger—that takes time. It is the accumulation of small exchanges, stories told in passing.
“Why are you all here? Well, because we invited you. And because we thought you had intelligent opinions. What we have is a pretty big chunk of property, and we have an enormous amount of energy. And we’re interested in how we can use those two things for the benefit of the community.”
We are standing at the former coal mine, at the site of the methane destruction project, and Chris asks us to share our thoughts in a round-robin fashion.
One by one people spoke up.
“What we need to be doing as a society is destroying this methane... So the bigger picture is we want to make something that’s really super cool. …public greenhouses or, an attraction or whatever that is, grabs people’s attention.”
“I’m kind of tired of just writing scientific papers that nobody reads. So I like to go out here and do real things. So this is a perfect project to engage with. As a climate scientist, I think the first priority here has to be methane destruction.”
The ideas and questions and conversations go like that. Ideas, challenges. One idea makes sense to some people, others find some possible problems. But the core theme is opportunity.
“I wish every person that owned 150 acres in Colorado thought about the community. And so thank you. And, yeah, for talking about youth, for the community benefit. Most people I know, whether that’s recreation for youth, or for artists.”
For years, even decades, after a mine is shuttered it continues to vent methane. By opening the conversation from climate harm to community benefit, we invite ideas and solutions that only come from standing among many points of views.
In a valley with many voices, I am listening.