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Paper short abstract

The Ruhr’s post/mining underground instantiates the subterranean Anthropocene, which I explore through visualizations across diverse media. I trace the implausibility of the extractivist progress narrative and make tangible alternative human-environment relationships in an industrial lifeworld.

Paper long abstract

Once a major center of heavy industries in Europe, Germany’s Ruhr Valley is transitioning into a postcarbon, climate-adjusted ecology and economy. This includes landscape restoration programs that became possible through the closure of hard coal mines. Scholars studying the Ruhr’s “great transformation” as well as key actors in this transformation readily acknowledge that the return of nature above ground depends on the high-tech management of the underground. Present technologies of knowing and managing urban-industrial infrastructures beneath the subsiding Ruhr terrain of 4,400 square kilometers (e.g. mine drainage, sewage system), continue the techno-scientific definition of the underground as “legible nature” that arose in the 1800s with the new science of geology and the onset of industrialization. Approaching the Ruhr’s mining and postmining ecology as an instantiation of “subterranean Anthropocene” (Melo Zorita, Munro and Houston 2017), I extend my study of miners’ narratives of the underground to explore visualizations of the Ruhr’s subterrain in museum exhibits, art, films, maps, and AR/VR applications. Highlighting the punctuations of linear histories of socio-technological development, my aim is to trace the implausibility of the modern narrative of extractivist progress and to make tangible alternative assemblages of meaningful human-environment relationships in an industrial Western cultural lifeworld.